The Department of Homeland Security arrested Basir Ahmad Safi, an Afghan national in his 30s, on March 11 following a conviction for indecent exposure to a minor. Safi had been admitted to the United States in 2021 under former President Joe Biden's "Operation Allies Welcome," a program that DHS says relied on "unvetted referrals" and ushered nearly 190,000 Afghan nationals into the country.
By the time DHS picked him up, Safi's immigration status had already been revoked. He was unlawfully residing in the United States.
He is now in ICE custody pending removal.
Safi's criminal history in the U.S. didn't start last week. According to Fox News, in September 2023, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office arrested him in Florida on a slate of charges:
That's not a misunderstanding. That's not a cultural gap. That is a man who allegedly used digital communications to target a child and then committed a sex crime against a minor. He was convicted of indecent exposure to a minor, and DHS moved to arrest him as part of a joint investigation by Homeland Security Investigations Jacksonville and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis did not mince words in a statement to Fox News Digital:
"He should NEVER have been allowed into our country or given the opportunity to prey on innocent children."
Bis described Safi as "this unvetted Afghan pedophile" and made clear where her agency's priorities now stand:
"Under President Trump's leadership, DHS has been focused on identifying, arresting, and removing public safety threats like Basir Ahmad Safi from our country."
The Biden administration sold Operation Allies Welcome as a moral obligation, the humanitarian cost of ending the war in Afghanistan. Nearly 190,000 Afghan nationals entered the country through the program. What Americans were not told, at least not loudly enough, was what "unvetted referrals" actually meant in practice.
DHS now says the program's pipeline included terrorists, sexual predators, pedophiles, domestic abusers, and kidnappers. Safi is one case. He is not the only one.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, another Afghan national admitted under the same program, shot two U.S. National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C. Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of the West Virginia National Guard, died from her injuries. Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, was critically wounded but survived.
A 20-year-old American soldier, serving her country in her country's capital, was killed by someone that same country invited in without adequate screening. The people responsible for that invitation have offered no public accounting. A spokesperson for former President Biden did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
President Trump halted Biden's Afghan refugee resettlement program almost immediately after returning to the Oval Office. Months later, he suspended the entry of all Afghan nationals into the United States.
These were not symbolic gestures. They were responses to what DHS described as "this massive threat to American national security." When the vetting system is broken, the responsible move is to shut it down until it is fixed. That is what happened.
The current administration's posture is straightforward: find the people who should never have been here, arrest them, and remove them. Safi is now in custody. The process is working as it should have worked years ago.
There is nothing compassionate about importing danger. The left frames every immigration enforcement action as cruelty, but the actual cruelty was the policy that put a convicted child sex offender in proximity to American children in the first place. The cruelty was waving nearly 190,000 people through a program built on unvetted referrals and calling it humanitarianism.
Compassion without competence is negligence. And when the victims are children and soldiers, it is something worse.
