Lankford Calls Out Biden Administration Doublespeak on Emergency at Southern Border

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WASHINGTON, DC – Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today addressed the media at a press conference with senators who are drawing attention to the obvious crisis and emergency at our southern border despite President Biden’s announcement on January 20, 2021, that the emergency at our southern border had ended, calling on a halt of border wall construction and technology installation.

Lankford took a trip to the Arizona border earlier this month during which he visited the unfinished border wall system on the southern border that was halted by the Biden Administration. Lankford spoke about the situation at the southern border on the Senate floor and sent a letter to GAO Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro highlighting President Biden’s suspension of border wall funding and construction without lawful justification. Lankford serves as Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management.

Lankford will travel to Texas on Friday with a delegation of Senators to tour the Rio Grande Valley area of the southern border as part of his ongoing work to provide necessary oversight of the crisis.

Excerpts

…So, I’m going down to the Texas border to take a look because I can’t look on any media and be able to tell what’s going on because not a single member of the media is allowed to be able to go to take a look at this facility. That’s not true of any of the four previous administrations. Any time media wanted to be able to visit any one of these facilities, they were allowed to go. This Administration in the last 24 hours said, ‘We’ll show you what’s going on.’ So they sent a government camera reporter to take government photos and send it out to the media and say, ‘Here’s your video that you can run with it.’ I would hope that the media doesn’t just say, ‘Okay, now we know what’s going on because someone on the Biden team took pictures and sent it to us’—that you would actually anticipate having the ability to go cover the story yourself…

…The odd thing was on the very first day of the Biden presidency, he declared the emergency was over on the border. That was the stoppage of the construction on the border wall. In that order he said there is no more emergency on the border. In that declaration he also started the process of announcing a large-scale amnesty bill across the United States for individuals who are also here already, and then announced individuals 17 years old and younger would not be stopped at the border as they were in the past…

…Go back to February of last year—before COVID—we had less than 40,000 apprehended at the border that month. February of this year with nothing changing between the two, February of this year, over 100,000 people apprehended at that same border…

…On January the 20^th, they turned off all the technology installations that were there, and my Democrat colleagues have said, ‘We just need to do technology, not a wall, not a fence.’ That day on January the 20^th they were doing preparation to be able to lay down the ground sensors, install cameras, and install lights across the border. All of that stopped on January the 20^th. What is remaining in Arizona right now is a fence without gates—literally the gates were the only thing left to install. So we have miles and miles and miles of fence on our southern border right next to a town of 450,000 people in Mexico with a wall with no gates. There is no reason—except one—why you would install a wall with open gates and no technology, that is if you wanted an open border…

…This is a humanitarian crisis, an emergency that has been created. And though the Biden team said, ‘there is no emergency,’ oddly enough, two weeks ago they sent the Federal Emergency Management agency to go help out. So you can’t say there’s no emergency and then send FEMA down to the border to take care of an emergency…

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