Staff Reports
On November 26, 2025, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were ambushed and shot just blocks from the White House while on high-visibility patrol, a brazen assault that has left the nation reeling and grieving. This was not a random mugging or a tragic accident — officials have described it as a deliberately targeted attack on our men in uniform who were there to keep citizens safe.
Investigators have identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who entered the United States in 2021 on a special visa for those who assisted U.S. forces and appears to have overstayed his legal status, according to federal sources. Authorities say the shooter ambushed the guardsmen and was wounded in the exchange before being taken into custody; the FBI and other agencies are treating the incident as a targeted attack and are investigating possible terrorism links.
Make no mistake: this is the bitter fruit of years of reckless immigration and resettlement policies that prioritized political optics over the safety of Americans and honest vetting. We opened the door wide and too often trusted paperwork and bureaucratic promises instead of hard, effective vetting — and today two of our uniformed citizens paid the price for that failure.
When seconds count, it’s our troops who answered — other National Guard members on patrol pinned the shooter and helped secure the scene, actions that likely prevented an even greater atrocity. The same critics who denounced the presence of federal troops in our cities for months now have to explain how leaving those men and women exposed would have helped anyone. Americans owe these soldiers our respect and our demand for honest answers about how this individual slipped through the cracks.
Federal and local leaders must stop the political theater and produce results: full transparency from the FBI, Justice Department, Pentagon, and Homeland Security about the suspect’s entry, vetting, travel and residence history is nonnegotiable. Families and citizens deserve a straight accounting — not spin — about whether intelligence failures, bureaucratic negligence, or policy choices made by previous administrations enabled this threat to live and operate inside our communities.
President Trump ordered additional National Guard forces to Washington in response, and rightly promised that the shooter will pay a steep price, but rhetoric without real fixes is not enough. We must secure our borders, reform visa and resettlement programs, and give law enforcement the tools and resources they need to prevent would-be killers from reaching our streets and our capital.
Today, hardworking Americans — the families who send sons and daughters into harm’s way — are looking for leadership that defends them, not excuses that bow to woke politics or open-borders ideology. We grieve for the victims, demand accountability, and will not rest until those responsible for this targeted ambush are brought to justice and the policies that made it possible are fixed once and for all.
