Lankford On ABC: Republicans Will Not Move on Foreign Aid Without Real Changes to Secure the Border  

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 Senator James Lankford (R-OK), lead Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management, joined ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulous to discuss the latest with Republicans’ national security priorities in sending aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan but also passing policy that will secure the US-Mexico border, which has become the greatest risk to national security since 9/11. 

Excerpts

Lankford Says Negotiators are Making Progress on Securing the Border: We are making progress on this. This is exceptionally important. When the Administration put out their request on this supplemental package they asked for funding for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, and for the border. And then literally two days later after they put that proposal in the request they also put out a piece saying the border funding element, would be quote-un-quote (this is their term) ‘a torniquet.’ What they really need is a change in policy… Secretary Mayorkas… has said we need to reform the asylum system in his words, ‘from top to bottom,’…and he has said over and over again, ‘if you delay consequences for individuals that come across the border, there’s no consequence.’ If you actually listen to Secretary Mayorkas he has made it very, very clear they are looking for actual changes in policy to secure the border…and we are not just mass releasing people into the country. Last week, George, we had 9,000 people a day—last week—9,000 a day. Those are epically high numbers that continue to accelerate…this continues to spiral out of control.

Lankford Outlines Republicans Will Not Move on Aid Without Real Border Policy: No. We’re going to do this all together. That’s been the agreement, that again, from the White House originally. It asked for all these things to be together. We have agreed for this. We can get this done by end of the year. There is a reason this hasn’t been done in decades, because it’s hard. It’s technical work and there’s a lot of challenges that are in it, and any time you deal with this, it’s complicated. We’re going through detailed work, very detailed law, but the most important thing is to get this right. The American people, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, or Independent, just want a secure border. I don’t run into many people that want no immigration. They just want legal immigration. They want an orderly process, not the chaos we currently have on our southern border. That shouldn’t be too tall an order to fill.

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