US Halts Asylum After DC Shooting, Forgetting Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan
Deutsche Welle reports the U.S. has paused all asylum decisions following a single shooting incident in D.C. involving a Sudanese asylum seeker. This swift, sweeping policy shift, implemented by DHS Secretary Mayorkas, conveniently distracts from the ongoing humanitarian crises—many exacerbated by U.S. foreign policy—that funnel refugees to our borders. Odd how the "national security threat"
narrative only activates when it's politically expedient, not during the constant, devastating violence in places like Yemen, which the US has directly supported through arms sales to Saudi Arabia for years, displacing millions. (Amnesty International has documented US-made weapons in Yemen since 2015.) One might wonder if the concern for 'national security' extends to the millions displaced by
the 2003 Iraq invasion or the chaos in Afghanistan, both direct products of US intervention. Or perhaps asylum processing only becomes a problem when it serves to shut the door completely, ignoring the historical patterns of intervention-then-rejection. The message is clear: an isolated incident allows the tightening of borders, while decades of U.S. involvement creating global instability are
simply ignored.