Administration freezes all asylum decisions; the freeze covers everyone from everywhere.

The director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, signed an order on Thursday afternoon halting all asylum decisions, of every kind, from every country, full stop, until what the order called “vetting and screening to the maximum degree possible” can be conducted on every individual in the queue. There are roughly six hundred thousand pending asylum applications in the United States. The order does not have an expiration date.

Buddy. Six hundred thousand cases. That is the size of the population of Wyoming. The order says: every one of those people gets to wait, indefinitely, while the country figures out how to vet them more than the three times we already vetted them.

The trigger is one specific case. The shooter at the Farragut Square attack on Wednesday is an Afghan national who came to this country in 2021 under a program for U.S. military allies. He was vetted by the CIA, who had hired him under contract. He was vetted by DOD when DOD took the contract over. He was vetted by DHS when he flew in. His asylum was approved earlier this year. He apparently became radicalized inside this country, in 2024 or 2025, several years after his last vetting interview.

The freeze does not address the timeline of his radicalization. The freeze addresses the application. The application part of his story was actually fine. The vetting part of his story was actually fine. The thing that went wrong went wrong after he was already here, with green papers, working a job, paying taxes, and not, until recently, on any list.

I have run a casino floor. There is a thing where, after a robbery, the management announces that, going forward, no more guests will be allowed inside, ever, of any kind, until further notice. The robbery is real. The remedy is wrong. The casino has an empty floor. The robber, by the way, was already gone.

The President, on Sunday, said the freeze would last “a long time.” He did not say what would unfreeze it. He did not say whether the same multi-layered vetting that had already been done three times on Mr. Lakanwal would now suffice for the half million people in the queue. He did not say what would happen to the families who had been separated by their asylum dates. He did not say what cost would be acceptable to him to make the queue clear again.

What he said was: a long time. A long time means as long as the man at the podium feels like saying so.

I’m arguing with the television again. The television is at full volume. The neighbors will be by.