One of the Afghan nationals waved into the country under Joe Biden's Operation Allies Welcome was arrested in Oklahoma for allegedly planning a terrorist attack on Election Day. He made it through the vetting process. So did thousands of others with incomplete or incorrect background checks — including people convicted of sexual battery, kidnapping, and lewd acts with minors.
Forty percent. That was the error rate.
A DHS Office of the Inspector General report found that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services botched four out of every ten asylum adjudications under Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden-era Afghan refugee resettlement program established in 2022. The failures weren't clerical typos. Investigators found missed opportunities to link applicant alias names to existing ineligibility information — meaning the system had the data to flag dangerous individuals and nobody bothered to check.
The program was supposed to operate under strict timelines: a 45-day window for interviews with no exceptions, and 90% of applications adjudicated within 150 days. Those guardrails existed on paper. In practice, USCIS pushed cases through so fast that criminal records, terror watchlist connections, and identity discrepancies fell through the cracks.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin didn't sugarcoat the findings. "Our asylum system should be as strict as possible," Mullin said. "If even one dangerous criminal or terrorist slips through and enters our country, it endangers countless American lives."
One slipped through and allegedly planned to kill Americans on Election Day. Others who made it past the 40% failure window had been convicted of hit-and-run, drug possession, and crimes against children. These weren't hypothetical risks in a policy paper. They were people living in American communities after a vetting system waved them forward.
Mullin went further: "The Biden Administration dangerously mismanaged the Operation Allies Welcome program, disregarding all the thorough and well-established procedures of our asylum system."
The defenders of this program will point to the chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal and argue the government had to move fast. The inspector general's own report answers that objection — the 45-day interview requirement and 150-day adjudication timeline were the administration's own rules. They wrote the standards. Then they failed to meet them 40% of the time.
What makes this more than a historical footnote is what the report reveals about how the system actually functions when political pressure overrides process. Operation Allies Welcome wasn't some rogue operation. It had formal timelines, oversight structures, and an entire federal agency dedicated to running it. Every safeguard was in place. The error rate was still 40%.
In any private-sector job, a 40% failure rate gets you a termination letter. In federal immigration processing under the Biden administration, it got you a program expansion. The inspector general counted the mistakes. USCIS had the alias data and the criminal records in its own systems.
They just didn't look.