Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin charged Thursday that the Biden administration "put us in danger" by failing to properly vet individuals brought into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome.
Appearing on Newsmax's "Wake Up America," McLaughlin argued that the Trump administration is now doing the work the Biden team neglected, saying the U.S. is "cleaning up the mess" left by the chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.
McLaughlin said the Biden administration's vetting failures have allowed dangerous individuals to obtain entry to the country through parole and related programs.
"I don't think it can be overstated, the position that [former President] Joe Biden put us in, the danger he brought to this country through this botched Afghanistan withdrawal," she said, adding that millions of "unvetted illegal aliens" have entered through various pathways.
She highlighted a recent arrest as an alarming example of a person with links to terrorism who came into the U.S. under Biden's program.
"We just arrested an individual out of Virginia just yesterday," McLaughlin said. "He also came in under Biden, under the parole program Operation Allies Welcome. He was an ISIS terrorist. He was giving material support to ISIS."
According to the DHS official, the man's father was a commander in a militant group in Afghanistan, and the man had been living inside the United States for five years.
"That is absolutely horrifying," she said.
McLaughlin also emphasized that hostile or failed regimes make effective screening of people seeking entry to the United States nearly impossible.
"When you have these governments who hate the United States of America and wish to do it harm, it's incredibly difficult to get information from them," she said.
When asked what "vetting" even means in a country like Afghanistan, McLaughlin said the prior administration's process relied on inadequate or nonexistent records.
"With Operation Allies Welcome, what we were seeing, they were doing very little biometric screening," she said. "They weren't doing any social media vetting. They weren't doing criminal background checks ... They were taking statements from people who knew these individuals ... as fact."
She contrasted the prior administration's approach with what she described as the Trump team's overhaul.
"We're doing biometric screening, criminal background checks," she said. "We're doing social media screening."
McLaughlin added that the administration is expanding its list of 19 "countries of concern" precisely because many governments won't provide reliable identity or security information.
"We do recognize that these failed states ... are not going to give us the proper information," she said. "We need to know who's in this country."
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