Ken Cuccinelli: Afghans flown to US ‘not being vetted’

Former deputy secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli said Thursday that the United States has flown in thousands of Afghan nationals that have not been properly vetted in the aftermath of the military withdrawal of Afghanistan.

According to data published by the Washington Post, 23,876 ‘at risk’ Afghans have already arrived in the US out of the more than 120,000 individuals that were evacuated from the Kabul airport. Cuccinelli explained during an interview on WMAL’s O’Connor & Company that these individuals are being ‘paroled in’ to the US because there has not been enough time to conduct a thorough security screening and confer them legal status.

‘They’re not being vetted. They’re being what’s called “paroled” in,’ Cuccinelli said. ‘The secretary of state or the secretary of Homeland Security paroles in an individual immigrant who has no legal basis to be here. The only way they can get in is with special permission.

‘The security vetting, when it takes place properly, has about 14 steps and typically takes a year and a half to two years. I’m sure that could be accelerated, but at the same time, we’ve lost access to a friendly government in Afghanistan…so getting information about people literally standing in front of us just got a whole lot harder.’

Cuccinelli estimated that only about 13,000 of the 120,000 evacuees thus far are American citizens or Afghan allies who may qualify for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) because they assisted in the war effort. The vast majority fall into the aforementioned ‘at risk’ category, which means they may be in danger from the Taliban. Still, the Biden administration’s chaotic exit means it’s difficult to know exactly how many would normally qualify for refugee status and if they would be admitted under standard vetting procedures.

‘They’ve made the decision that they’re willing to absorb the risk of taking in people that they can’t fully vet,’ Cuccinelli asserted.

As former White House policy adviser Stephen Miller told me recently, even a full security screening for refugees does not account for extremist or radical ideology among refugees. Americans must consider that although an individual may not have terrorist ties, they may still hold views that make it near impossible for them to assimilate in the US. A Pew Research poll from 2013 found that 99 percent of Afghan Muslims support Sharia law as the law of the land.

Cuccinelli argued, ‘Sharia law is completely and totally inconsistent with the western values on which the United States is founded and based and run as it could possibly be. It’s not tolerant of other people, et cetera. So the idea that you could just bring in a large number of intolerant people into the United States — and by intolerant, I mean of our visions and laws and constitutional values — and expect not to have problems is crazy. There’s a huge culture clash here.’

‘There’s only a small number that were actually helping US forces. The rest they will classify as refugees to the extent they bring them in so it’s important that people object now to large numbers of such folks,’ he concluded.