Afghan evacuees made it to U.S. soil without being checked through all the government’s security databases, an inspector general reported Thursday in a devastating investigation that confirms critics’ worst fears about the program.
After rerunning some of the names, officials spotted at least 50 Afghans with “potentially significant security concerns” who made it the U.S. despite the Biden administration’s assurances to the contrary.
Making matters worse, the government appears to have lost track of most of them inside the U.S., the Defense Department’s inspector general said. It looked at a sampling of 31 security risk evacuees identified as of Sept. 17 and found only three could be located.
Tens of thousands more names remain to be checked, the inspector general said.
“Not being able to locate Afghan evacuees with derogatory information quickly and accurately could pose a security risk to the United States,” the audit concluded.
Investigators said a key set of Defense Department databases was off-limits to the vetting team in the early months of the evacuation effort, because of agreements the Pentagon had with other countries. Eventually, officials developed a workaround.
But the lapse confirmed what critics had warned.
“I expressed concern about the administration’s lackluster efforts to screen evacuees flooding from the terrorist safe haven. According to a new report by the Pentagon watchdog, the situation is far worse than we thought,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He said the report should put a halt to talk of speeding up citizenship or other permanent legal opportunities for the evacuees.
Fears of what may be lurking among the 76,000 evacuees who made it to the U.S. have been lurking since the chaotic days of the airlift.
Billed as a chance to save people who worked with the U.S. military, the majority of the airlift evacuees actually lacked those ties. Some assisted other U.S. agencies or American media organizations, but others were, according to one evacuation advocacy group, shopkeepers and businesspeople from Kabul who were lucky enough to make it to the airport on time.
Thousands of actual U.S. military allies, meanwhile, were stranded.
Most of the evacuees were also brought to the U.S. without facing an in-person interview — a key step that they would have had to face had they come as refugees or under the Special Immigrant Visa program. Experts say the interview is critical to weeding out potential bad actors.
Instead, the evacuees were brought to third countries and subjected to database checks, based on their fingerprints and whatever biographic information they chose to share.
“We screen and vet individuals before they board planes to travel to the United States and that screening and vetting process is an ongoing one and multi-layered,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in September, defending the process.
But the inspector general’s report punctures those claims, saying that while Homeland Security, which took the lead in vetting, was checking its own databases, it didn’t initially have access to the Defense Department’s Automated Biometric Identification System or some intelligence databases located on the Secret Internet Protocol network.
The Defense Department played only a supporting role in vetting, but had a bigger role in housing the evacuees once on U.S. soil, stuffing them into camps at eight military bases across the country.
The inspector general confirmed reporting by The Washington Times and others that Afghans were free to leave, disappearing into the U.S., without completing full Homeland Security processing. According to the report, as of a month after the end of the airlift, more than 1,200 had left without finishing processing.
The audit suggested two changes.
First, it urged that the workaround to allow access to secret Defense Department files be extended until all vetting is done. The Pentagon agreed with that recommendation.
Second, the inspector general said the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security should come up with firm procedures for sharing “derogatory information” on Afghan evacuees with the rest of the Defense Department and elsewhere in the federal government. The under secretary’s office agreed with that proposal.