Out of 678 Afghan asylum applications the DHS Inspector General sampled from Operation Allies Welcome, 303 had missed aliases — names that were never cross-checked against terrorism and criminal databases. Twenty-three were missing security checks entirely. Two of the flagged cases involved individuals who may have been inadmissible on terrorism-related grounds.
That's the "rigorous vetting" the Biden administration promised while airlifting 75,000 Afghans into American communities in 2021.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin didn't sugarcoat the findings. "Our asylum system should be as strict as possible," Mullin said in the September 29 press release accompanying the report. "If even one dangerous criminal or terrorist slips through and enters our country, it endangers countless American lives. The Biden Administration dangerously mismanaged the Operation Allies Welcome program, disregarding all the thorough and well-established procedures of our asylum system and putting our nation at risk."
The Office of Inspector General, led by Joseph Cuffari, conducted the evaluation between March 2024 and January 2025, reviewing a sample drawn from 13,682 total adjudicated OAW applications. Beyond the 303 missed aliases and 23 missing security checks, investigators found 45 unresolved records and 115 additional documentation issues. The report's own language was blunt: the prevalence and type of errors suggested U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may have systematically failed to follow its own protocols.
The backstory makes it worse. In April 2023, a lawsuit — Ahmed vs. DHS — forced USCIS to adjudicate 90% of OAW applications within 150 days. The case settled by September 2023. So the agency was already under a court order to move fast when the errors were piling up. Speed over safety wasn't an accident. It was the operating model.
The consequences weren't theoretical. In November 2025, an Afghan national admitted through OAW was charged with threatening to kill Americans. In December 2025, an ISIS-K member who entered through the program was arrested. In March 2026, another OAW beneficiary — previously convicted of indecent exposure to a minor — was picked up again. DHS listed additional OAW recipients convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor, sexual battery, hit-and-run, drug possession, and kidnapping.
The standard defense from the usual corners is that 75,000 people were processed under emergency conditions and some errors were inevitable. But the Inspector General didn't review the program during the emergency. The evaluation period started in March 2024 — more than two years after the withdrawal. The errors weren't the fog of war. They were baked into the system that kept running long after the last plane left Kabul.
Four hundred Afghans admitted through OAW were listed as "potential threats." Fifty were flagged for "significant security concerns." As early as September 17, 2021 — weeks after the fall of Kabul — officials had located only 3 of 31 individuals with "derogatory information" in their files.
The Afghanistan Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2022 funded the program. Congress wrote the check. The Biden administration cashed it without reading the background reports.