This editorial by the La Jornada editorial board originally appeared in the November 29, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media*, or the Mexico Solidarity Project.*
Last Wednesday, a man opened fire on two members of the U.S. National Guard stationed near the White House. Both were seriously wounded, and one of them, 20-year-old Sarah Backstrom, died yesterday. After the attacker was arrested, it was revealed that he was Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who worked for several U.S. government agencies while stationed in Afghanistan, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lakanwal was part of the Afghan army’s Zero Units, a CIA-backed unit that oversaw the withdrawal of occupying troops during the chaotic evacuation in August 2021. He came to the United States through a Biden administration program to relocate locals who had collaborated with the colonial regime.
In response to the attack, President Donald Trump announced a “permanent pause” (an oxymoron, since a pause is a brief interruption) on immigration from all people from the “Third World,” as well as a xenophobic offensive that includes denaturalizing migrants who “undermine domestic peace” and deporting any foreign national “who is a public charge, a security risk, or incompatible with Western civilization,” defining “public charge” as the receipt of social assistance. According to Trump, 53 million foreigners reside in the country, most of whom represent a public charge—both claims refuted by official figures: the number of foreign-born individuals is estimated at 46 million (of whom approximately 45 percent already hold U.S. citizenship), and immigration regulations severely limit their access to assistance. For example, nearly nine out of ten recipients of food stamps are U.S.-born citizens.
Beyond the tycoon’s lies and the paradox that his government program is a frontal assault against “Western civilization”—if by that we mean the system of universal human rights and multilateralism built after World War II—it is revealing to what extent he, his followers, and the right wing in both wealthy nations and the so-called Third World are incapable of drawing true lessons from the deplorable attack that occurred in the capital of the superpower. The fact that the aggressor was trained by the CIA to assist Washington in its two decades of colonial occupation of Afghanistan, just as in the 1980s the Taliban’s predecessors were financed, armed, and glorified by the same agency to weaken the Soviet Union, should teach all practitioners of imperialism that violence only begets more violence and that violations of other countries’ sovereignty sooner or later backfire.
Far from heeding the lessons offered to him at his doorstep, Trump persists in escalating his naval blockade to a ground incursion against Venezuela, under the implausible pretext of combating drug trafficking and with the support of subservient Latin American and Caribbean leaders. The farce of the “war on drugs” has been exhaustively reviewed in this space, and just yesterday the gangster reaffirmed how little he cares about controlling the flow of narcotics by announcing a “full and complete pardon” for drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president sentenced to 45 years in prison by a New York court. In that Central American nation, he is also applying the formula that has already yielded results for him in Argentina: conditioning economic and humanitarian aid on the electoral victory of the candidate aligned with his neo-fascist project. In short, it repeats the neocolonial adventures that cause the rise of extremist movements, shelters criminals while violating international laws in the name of fighting crime, and closes the doors to migration, while supporting oligarchic politicians who generate the conditions of poverty and exclusion that force millions of people to migrate.
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