Lawmakers call for stronger vetting of Afghan migrants after alleged Montana sex crime

WASHINGTON (TND) — The surging number of Afghans relocating to the U.S. has coincided with reports of alleged sex crimes perpetrated by Afghan migrants on American soil, raising concerns about whether Afghan migrants are being properly vetted.

This week, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte called for a pause to the relocation of Afghan migrants into his state after a male Afghan migrant was charged with felony rape of an 18-year-old who was leaving a bar, according to NBC Montana.

"The simple fact that we just saw an assault -- a rape -- take place in Missoula this past weekend, and now we are getting reports that it was from a humanitarian parolee stresses the necessity that we have a better accounting of who is coming into our country," Congressman Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., told NBC Montana.

Two Afghan migrants were charged by authorities last month in Wisconsin -- one for allegedly choking his wife, which caused her to lose her vision temporarily, and the other for allegedly engaging in sex acts with a minor, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. The second suspect was allegedly abusing two young boys, ages 12 and 14, in a bathroom.

The FBI also confirmed to Fox News that an assault of a female service member at Ft. Bliss in Texas occurred last month, by "a small group of male evacuees.”

Four years ago, one prominent diplomat’s wife said much of the world’s media has been reluctant to cover a pattern of sex crimes allegedly perpetrated by Afghan migrants across the globe.

Cheryl Benard is the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, the Biden administration’s former special envoy to Afghanistan who resigned last week. In 2017, she called the surging pattern of sex crimes being perpetrated by Afghan migrants in Europe “mind boggling.”

Since her 2017 report, sex crimes from Afghan migrants in non-U.S. countries have continued. In her 2017 article, Benard said it took a while for the pattern of these crimes across Europe to be recognized “because, until recently, western European media deliberately refrained from identifying an assailant’s refugee or asylum status, or his country of origin.”

Countries like Sweden reportedly still don’t record ethnicity data on criminal suspects.

“Only when the correlation became so dramatic that it was itself newsworthy did this policy change,” Benard wrote in her article. “At that point, it became clear that the authorities had known about, and for political reasons had deliberately covered up, large-scale incidences of sexual assault by migrants.”

Some have criticized those calling attention to the trend of sex crimes committed by certain Afghan migrants. President Trump received backlash when he raised a red flag about "unvetted" Afghans entering the U.S. in September.

Republican lawmakers have fixated on the issue to evidence a botched Afghanistan pullout by the Biden administration. The latest alleged incident in Montana precipitated a flurry of responses from the GOP, including Senator Ted Cruz who tweeted Thursday, "Joe Biden’s Afghanistan disaster continues."