Story highlights According to authorities, the suspect began radicalization three years after he came to the US

The administration has pointed to his green card as evidence of the need to restrict those immigration avenues

Washington (CNN) As the Trump administration presses the notion that recent terrorist attacks justify significant changes in the legal immigration system, critics say the facts of those attacks undercut their own argument.

President Donald Trump and administration officials have explicitly pointed to how Akayed Ullah, the suspect in Monday's attempted terrorist attack in New York City, was granted a green card in the US as evidence for their push to restrict those immigration avenues.

But according to charging documents for Ullah, federal authorities traced the beginning of his radicalization to "at least approximately 2014" -- three years after he came to the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday confirmed that Ullah came with his parents to the US as the child of a sibling of a US citizen, on a so-called nephew visa, in 2011. They noted that his uncle, now a US citizen, originally came on a diversity lottery visa, a program that benefits up to 50,000 people per year from countries with lower levels of immigration to the US and is the same program that brought the suspect in a Halloween New York terrorist attack to the US.

The administration has used those connections to argue that Congress should drastically cut family-based immigration, also called "chain migration," and the diversity lottery program.

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