Lankford Joins Newsmax, Calls Border Crisis a “Crisis of Biden’s Own Creation”

View the interview here.

WASHINGTON, DC – Senator James Lankford (R-OK) joined Newsmax’s Wake Up America to call out the Biden Administration’s failure at the southern border and President Biden’s refusal to useexecutive authority to address the national security crisis he created. Lankford serves as lead Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management, and he pushed back on President Biden for his sudden attempt to change the narrative on the border just six months before an election.

Excerpts

Lankford Calls Out Biden’s Failure to Secure the Border… Our focus from the beginning on this package was, if we’re going to fund some of the things that are happening in Israel, and we want to be able to jump in to be able to help, many folks want to be able to also help push back Putin out of Ukraine. If we were going to do any of those things, we had to work on border security as well. So Biden, in a rare moment, was correct in the things that he was actually laying out in that clip from the State of the Union address—it would have increased the number of border agents, would increase the number of asylum officers, it would have radically changed the way that we did actually the processing. The problem was it all got drawn into the national politics because Biden wouldn’t do the most basic thing that he could do. All the Executive Orders that he did from the very earliest days of his presidency caused the crisis that we have right now. He refused to be able to actually implement the executive authority already had. So Republicans were frustrated, saying, ‘there are things Biden can do right now. We don’t want to do our part until he does his part.’ And so the whole thing began to fall apart on it. And end of the day, Biden does have authority that he can do right now that he’s choosing not to.

The Border Crisis is a Crisis of Biden’s Own Making…There’s a tremendous amount of chaos in the southern border. Americans of all political backgrounds on this hate the chaos at the border. Rightfully so. And so they want to just be able to see basic immigration policy run the way that it should. Where you’ve got people that can legally request to be able to work in the United States, go through that process, but you don’t illegally incentivize people. Right now, President Biden is literally taking people away from the legal process and moving them over to the illegal process. So the legal immigration system is getting slower and slower in the illegal process is getting faster and faster. So we’re getting more and more of this. Again, this is a crisis of Biden’s own creation, and now it’s just grown out of what he thought it would ever be. He thought he could manage it. But the cartels in Mexico are just seeing his weakness and just overrunning him. And now they’re trying to figure out how to be able to manage his own mistakes.

Lankford on Likelihood of Border Bill Moving Through Senate…I don’t actually, so it’s been funny that Schumer and others are floating, hey, we’re going to bring back this bipartisan border proposal. And all the reporters here in DC are catching me and saying, are you part of this? And I said, no, no one’s talked to me about trying to be able to solve this, because this is not a serious work to be able to solve it. [What] we were trying to do in the past, several months ago was do a serious bipartisan sit down conversation saying, where do we have common ground? What can we get fixed? Biden’s not going to do his job. What can we actually get done to be able to solve the problem? No one sitting down to actually do that kind of work at this point. At this point, the presidential election is going to resolve this, and then we’ll continue to be able to push in the days ahead.

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