Lankford Pushes Back Against False Claims that VP Harris Wants to Secure the Southern Border

View the video here.

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – Senator James Lankford (R-OK) joined NewsNation’s The Hill with Blake Burman to challenge the notion that Vice President Kamala Harris wants to secure the southern border. Lankford serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is the lead Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management. 

Earlier this year, Lankford delivered a floor speech bringing attention to the deliberate actions the Biden Administration is taking to open the southern border. Lankford was a vocal critic of the Biden Administration’s policy to use border wall funding on environmental projects instead of securing the border, and he has continued to sound the alarm on the human trafficking and national security crises at the border. 

Excerpt

Burman:So you helped put this bill together. Kamala Harris now says she supports this bill. As a Republican, do you give her credit for supporting what you put together?

Lankford: Well, it’s hard for me to give her credit on it in that she was never a part of any of the negotiations. When in negotiations for four months on that, she or her staff never appeared. Not one phone call, not one zoom meeting, not one live meeting. So it’s interesting that they are now embracing it, when for four months, we had to fight to be able to get this bill actually pulled together….

Burman: …Would you put it forward again, then?

Lankford: Well, every bill has a life expectancy. There are aspects of this bill, including that border wall funding, that actually expires by the end of the year. And she’s very keenly aware of that. There’s $650 million in border funding that’s still left unallocated from that time period when President Trump was president. The Biden Administration has used much of that money—to the tune of billions of dollars on it—they’ve used that dollars to do ‘environmental remediation’ along the border rather than border wall construction. What I was trying to do in February was to get this bill passed, to be able to stop the hemorrhaging at the border, but also to be able to make sure that funding was no longer used for environmental remediation, but it was actually used for it was intended for—building the border barrier itself. That’s the wall. That’s the road next to the wall. That’s the fiber optics. That’s the cameras. That’s what it was intended for. They’ve not been spending it for that. That money, in all likelihood, that $650 million they will spend on everything else but wall. So by the time we get to next year, we could pass this bill. But the border wall funding would probably already been spent by this Administration for things not border wall related.

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