EXCLUSIVE: How Sen. Tom Cotton stopped Biden from giving citizenship to Afghan migrants
Sens. Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley played a key role in averting potential catastrophes, according to one of the people who saw it all go down. Here's the story.
Following President Joe Biden’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan, his administration sought to remedy the problems that it created, in part by trying to fly Afghans — many unvetted — into America, and a constellation of Democratic politicians, “liberal Republicans, and misguided security hawks” wanted to grant them a pathway to citizenship, former Senate Chief Counsel Mike Fragoso explained to the Washington Reporter.
Fragoso explained how Sens. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) used every tool at their disposal to prevent legislation, namely the Afghan Adjustment Act (AAA), from becoming law.
“The bill had enough support that it would have passed if put to a vote, and then we’d probably be unable to deport any Afghan security threat,” Fragoso said. “Schumer didn’t put it to a vote though, which meant that Cotton and Grassley had the ability to stop it — and luckily they did, for over three years. They were under endless pressure from liberal Republicans and misguided security hawks to give in and they didn’t.”
The extensive role of these two senators, previously unreported, gained renewed significance following the tragic shooting of National Guardsmen by an Afghan national admitted into the United States by the Biden administration following the Taliban’s takeover in 2021.
“The Afghanistan withdrawal was, of course, a disaster,” Fragoso noted, setting the scene for how the problem started. “Thanks to the Biden administration’s incompetence, tens of thousands of Afghans were brought to the United States. Biden was Commander-in-Chief, so there really wasn’t a lot that could be done about bringing them in to begin with.”
However, right off the bat, Grassley and Cotton used both legislative tools and their reputations as lawmakers to prevent as much fallout as possible. “Grassley prevented them from getting any kind of change in immigration status in the fall of 2021,” Fragoso said. “Democrats wanted that as part of the emergency supplemental that rode with the CR, but Grassley refused to agree to that and because it required sign of from chair and ranking of Judiciary, they couldn’t get it done.”
Following Grassley’s move, Democrats began “pushing Senator [Amy] Klobuchar’s Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have put them on a path to citizenship. It was supported by the Democrats and then a lot of the liberal veterans groups and Bush-era Republicans. The argument went that they’d be vetted to change their status so it would be good for security.”
But, Fragoso noted, “Cotton and Grassley weren’t having it. They were very concerned about improper vetting especially because it was not clear that Biden would send Afghans home if they failed vetting.”
As these debates were raging, the Biden administration insisted that “100 percent” of the Afghans were screened and vetted, as then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress in response to questions from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).
Cotton, along with Graham and Sens. John Cornyn (R., Texas), Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), Mike Lee (R., Utah), Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), and Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) wrote to Mayorkas in 2024 following, as they wrote, the arrest of “an Afghan national…in connection with a plot to commit a violent attack on behalf of ISIS in the United States on Election Day, was not vetted for a special immigrant visa as the Biden-Harris Justice Department originally claimed.”
“The fact is,” Fragoso said, “that once you’ve put them on a path to citizenship it would make it virtually impossible for a future president to remove security threats from the Afghan population.
Democrats tried to attach the AAA to anything that moved, but Cotton and Grassley objected to it.”
Cotton, who is now the Senate GOP Chairman, repeatedly leveraged his vote to keep Senate leadership in line with his position. “In part because Cotton was often perceived to be a necessary vote to get to 60 on spending bills, Republican leadership always enforced his objections,” Fragoso said. “Cotton shrewdly used his reputation as a pragmatic conservative to stop the Afghan amnesty.”
He also worked behind the scenes to expose the Democrats’ “illegal amnesty program.”
“Cotton also insisted that he’d only agree to AAA if it were amended to ban categorical parole, which was Biden’s main, illegal amnesty program,” Fragoso added. “On one hand, Democrats would never agree to that. On the other, if they did, it would have ended the Biden border crisis. Again, it was a shrewd move.”