Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro warned Monday that the deadly shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., reveals a deeper and far more dangerous national security threat — one that cannot be solved solely by halting immigration from Afghanistan or reexamining green card holders. According to Shapiro, the real problem is radical Islamic ideology taking root inside the United States.
On his podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, Shapiro pointed to remarks from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who said the alleged shooter, Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, appeared to have been “radicalized since he’s been here” and had ties to Washington’s Muslim community. Lakanwal entered the United States in 2021 under Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome program and was approved for asylum in April by the Trump administration after undergoing what officials described as extensive screening.
Shapiro argued that Noem’s comments highlight a growing threat the political class has been unwilling to confront.
“Radicalization in the United States is a massive problem,” he said. “And it requires the FBI and DoJ to actually do the thing they are supposed to do — track down the groups doing the radicalizing.”
Stopping illegal immigration and shutting down dangerous refugee pipelines is the easy part, Shapiro said. The harder challenge — and the one Trump now faces — is rooting out extremist networks already operating on American soil.
“[This is] significantly harder… a much harder law enforcement problem to solve than just shutting the borders,” Shapiro continued. He emphasized that border restrictions and internal counter-radicalization efforts are not mutually exclusive. Trump, he said, is right to halt immigration from high-risk countries, but Americans should be even more alarmed if individuals who were once friendly to the U.S. — even those who worked with American intelligence — are being radicalized after arriving here.
Shapiro noted that Lakanwal previously served in one of the CIA-backed “Zero Units,” meaning he underwent extensive vetting. That he could be radicalized afterward is “especially concerning,” Shapiro said.
The commentator compared the D.C. shooting to past Islamist attacks on American soil, including the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, and a terrorist vehicle attack in New Orleans earlier this year. Shapiro argued that Lakanwal’s alleged killing of Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and critical wounding of Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe fits this same pattern — not merely a border problem but an “Islamization” problem happening domestically.
After the attack, Trump called Lakanwal an “animal” and vowed he would “pay a very steep price.” The administration immediately froze “all immigration requests” from Afghanistan and ordered a sweeping re-examination of green card holders from 19 “countries of concern,” including Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, and Venezuela.
But Shapiro believes that while these moves are justified, they do not address the heart of the issue.
“If people are being brought in who were initially friendly to the United States — or who worked with the United States — and are then being radicalized in the United States,” he warned, “you have to start asking some pretty serious questions about which organizations in the United States are actually radicalizing people.”
Shapiro’s message was clear: Trump’s immigration crackdown is necessary, but the country must confront the unsettling reality that terrorist ideology is being cultivated within America itself — and federal agencies must finally take that threat seriously.
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