Afghans legally in U.S. worry about their future amid Trump immigration crackdown

The U.S. has stopped processing all immigration requests related to Afghan nationals and is reexamining legal residents’ cases.

Fear, stress and worry have gripped the lives of thousands of Afghans living in the United States since an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members near the White House last week — leading the Trump administration to aggressively expand its efforts to crack down on legal immigration from Afghanistan.

In Florida, a former Afghan military member who fought alongside U.S. armed forces in his homeland worries about people in his community being unfairly targeted by immigration officials. An Afghan father working as a ride-share service driver in Portland, Oregon, stopped having conversations with his passengers fearing possible hateful retribution, and an Afghan scholar in Washington, D.C., is warning against “turning this incident into a broad judgment about Afghan migrants.”

Across the nation, Afghans have condemned the shooting that killed Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounded Andrew Wolfe, 24, and expressed their condolences to the families of both National Guard members. But they also criticized the shift in immigration policy based on the actions of one person. Among those critics is Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Maulvi Amir Khan Muttaqi, who on Wednesday called the shooting “an individual act” that “has nothing to do with Afghanistan and its respectable people.”

“There’s no question that what was done was horrible,” said Yahya Haqiqi, president and chief executive officer of the Afghan Support Network, a nonprofit in Oregon. “The problem is, why is it coming back to the larger community?”

“It’s like, somebody on your street commits a crime, and you take the whole neighborhood to jail,” Haqiqi told NBC News.