The Biden Admin Said Afghan Refugees Were Vetted. Then Came The Audit.

A Department of Homeland Security watchdog found a 40% error rate in a review of asylum files for Afghan evacuees resettled in the United States following the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, raising concerns that immigration officials may have missed opportunities to identify potentially derogatory information.

The DHS Office of Inspector General (USCIS) reviewed a statistically random sample of 678 asylum applications out of 13,682 applications adjudicated for Afghans who entered the country through Operation Allies Welcome (OAW). Investigators found errors in 269 of the 678 files examined.

The errors included 303 missed aliases across 169 files, 23 missing security checks, 45 unresolved records, and 115 other documentation issues.

“The prevalence and type of errors suggest U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may have missed opportunities to potentially link names provided by applicants to derogatory information,” the inspector general found. Such errors could compromise the integrity of the immigration files later used for immigration administration and enforcement.

The report emphasized that most of the problems involved missed aliases or incomplete documentation. In some cases, investigators found that an asylum officer failed to recognize a spelling variation of an applicant’s name, potentially preventing that name from being matched against information in subsequent security checks.

The watchdog also identified two cases involving potential terrorism-related inadmissibility concerns.

In one case, paperwork concerning a potentially inadmissible applicant was not included in the file, preventing a required second-level authority from approving the analysis. In another, the necessary paperwork was included and signed by higher-level officials, but a box indicating whether the analysis was approved or rejected was left blank.

The inspector general’s office cautioned that it did not determine whether any of the errors actually affected an applicant’s eligibility for asylum or resulted in a security threat. The consequences of individual errors can range from being essentially administrative to potentially affecting national security, depending on the circumstances and whether other safeguards catch the problem.

The findings come amid longstanding scrutiny of Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden administration program created to resettle Afghans evacuated during the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The review was also prompted in part by concerns surrounding a September 2023 settlement in Ahmed v. DHS, which required USCIS to adjudicate 90% of OAW asylum applications filed after February 2, 2024, within 150 days. Investigators, however, found no statistically significant increase in the error rate after the settlement took effect.

USCIS agreed with all of the inspector general’s recommendations. Joseph Edlow, the agency’s director, nevertheless argued that the report should be viewed in the context of the broader screening and security systems used by the agency. Edlow said the administrative errors occurred alongside “broader, established, and robust screening, vetting and security checks safeguards already in place that minimize the impact of these errors.”

“The USCIS Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate’s Asylum Division’s screen[ing], vetting and security check procedures are well-established and thorough,” Edlow concluded, despite the report’s findings.

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