Republican complains about Afghans in town: “Thought I was back in Kabul”

Matt Strickland, a Republican Virginia state Senate candidate in 2023, recently posted on X about finding his son’s allegedly stolen phone in a Fredericksburg neighborhood with “at least 50 Afghan kids running around playing.”

Strickland, a veteran, who describes himself as “trying to save my country from corrupt Democrats & Republicans,” is stringent on immigration policy and has been critical of the Afghan resettlement efforts following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

In 2021, nearly 50,000 evacuees were housed temporarily on eight military installations, including Virginia’s Marine Corps Base Quantico and Fort Barfoot, formerly Pickett. In his X post, Strickland says the neighborhood where he tracked his son’s missing phone is made up of “refugees that were being housed at Quantico.”

In a phone interview with Newsweek, Strickland said he believes the Afghans he saw were housed at Quantico because it seems “convenient to move” refugees there. The Department of Defense reported that 3,755 refugees were temporarily housed in Quantico until the end of 2021. The neighborhood in reference is at the end of Princess Anne Street in Fredericksburg, nearly 25 miles from Quantico. Newsweek could not confirm any of the people Strickland saw had been housed at Quantico.

“Afghanistan does not have a vital record system like the U.S. does,” he told Newsweek, adding, “These people can literally make up a name.”

Strickland also raised concerns about the immigrant vetting process in his X post, which has been viewed over 2.2 million times. In it, he described entering the neighborhood, saying, “I thought I was back in Kabul.” Strickland told Newsweek he spent time in Afghanistan while working for Blackwater, a military contractor. “Unvetted illegal immigrants are in your neighborhood. There’s a reason our government is importing them by the millions,” he wrote in his viral post.

In 2021, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a White House press briefing that the United States was running biometric and biographic background checks on evacuees from Afghanistan before bringing them to the United States.

President Joe Biden’s administration has facilitated the resettlement of Afghans across the U.S. through several initiatives, including the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program and Operation Allies Welcome, which evacuated 76,000 Afghans. The Afghan P-2 Program provided resettlement support for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government, certain media organizations and nongovernmental organizations. Afghans were evacuated within weeks of the Taliban’s takeover and U.S. military exit. Many were granted temporary humanitarian parole.

Immigration has become one of the top issues in the United States and is expected to be a major factor in the 2024 presidential election. A June 2022 Gallup poll revealed that 41 percent of Americans want immigration to the U.S. to decrease. However, Americans largely supported evacuating and aiding Afghans who helped the United States. An initial September 2021 National Public Radio and Ipsos poll of 1,299 people found that 73 percent of Americans support resettling Afghans who collaborated with the U.S., and a more recent 2023 With Honor Action and Ipsos poll showed that 80 percent believe the U.S. should help Afghans resettle here.

“The results of the national poll are striking,” Rye Barcott, CEO and Co-Founder of With Honor Action and U.S. Marine Corps veteran, said at the time. “Rarely do we see such unified support across party lines.”

Strickland said that while he believes there are “a lot of people [immigrants] who want to come and make a better life for themselves,” he is concerned that “there are people in our country that want to do us harm, that want to change the values that America was built on.”