Lankford Travels to Southern Border to Meet with Law Enforcement, Assess the Damage of Biden’s Wide Open Border Policies

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford’s Facebook Live from his night border tour on YouTube.

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford’s Facebook Live from his night border tour on Rumble.

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford’s Facebook Live from near the Rio Grande river on YouTube.

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford’s Facebook Live from near the Rio Grande river on Rumble.

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford’s remarks the southern border wall on YouTube.

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford’s remarks the southern border wall on Rumble.

MCALLEN,TX – Senator James Lankford (R-OK), the lead Republican on the Border Management Subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee with jurisdiction over the southern border, toured the Rio Grande Valley sector with Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Joni Ernst (R-IA), John Barrasso (R-WY), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and John Hoeven (R-ND) to see first-hand the current national security and humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border.

Lankford and his colleagues participated in a night tour of the border with law enforcement, took an aerial border tour with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and met with local landowners to discuss the impact of the Biden Administration’s open border policies on local communities. Lankford received briefings from the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) and CBP as well as the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to discuss federal and state efforts to secure the US-Mexico border. He also met with local elected officials.

Lankford continues to lead in the Senate to stand up against Biden’s open border policies and lack of law enforcement leadership, which he has discussed directly with border law enforcement agents and officers. Lankford recently spoke on the Senate floor in support of a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to dissolve a proposed Biden Administration rule that would illegally upend the process by which the US government grants asylum claims to migrants. Lankford joined Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and 29 Senators to introduce the resolution in April. The resolution failed to pass in the Senate in a vote of 46 to 48. Lankford shared his disappointment after the Supreme Court decided to allow the Biden Administration to start rolling back the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), otherwise known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

Lankford sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on his concerns about efforts to re-implement the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers. Lankford has repeatedly asked for information and raised significant questions about whether DHS followed the District Court’s order to resume the program in “good faith.”

Lankford is leading the charge to push back on the Biden Administration’s plans to revoke temporary, pandemic-related Title 42 authority and to stop the ongoing chaos at the southern border amid Biden’s hypocrisy about COVID. After the highest year on record for illegal crossings this past year, Lankford introduced the Public Health and Border Security Act to require all COVID-19 related national states of emergency to be lifted before Title 42 is officially terminated until a workable plan to replace it is put in place. 

Transcript of Lankford’s Facebook Live remarks from the border night tour

Hey, Senator James Lankford here. I’m on the border in south Texas tonight; been down here for the last couple of hours. Left out from DC this afternoon to be able to get down here and spend some time with the Border Patrol and National Guard to see what’s going on.

Out at one particular spot here at the border, you can see there is a whole group of folks that have just recently been apprehended that they are going through the processing. This particular group is from Honduras and Nicaragua and they are coming through. Met other groups from other places tonight, and folks that are actually coming across the border. It’s still a constant stream of people coming across the border every day, all day, in each area of the border. It is literally by the thousands that are still coming in.

I still have folks that catch me and say, ‘Things on the border must be much better because we don’t hear anything about it anymore.’ That is just absolutely not true. Actually, what is happening now is the Biden Administration has made it much more efficient to cross the border. So the folks that are actually apprehended will be released in the country within the next hour-and-a-half. They will get an asylum hearing that is eight years from now in the future, and they are allowed to be able to stay in the country for the next eight years while they await that hearing. They will contact family. All these folks know where they are headed. They have family that’s already here. Several folks that are in this particular group are headed to New Jersey because they’ve already got family that are here who are also illegally present in all likelihood, and they will just join that family there in New Jersey and to be able to keep going.

This is why I keep coming back, to be able to visit with the Border Patrol that’s here, see the trend, see what is going on. It allows me to be able to go back to DC to be able to meet with the Administration to be able to confront them on that they still aren’t shutting down the border. They keep saying ‘We don’t have an open border.’ We absolutely still have open borders all the way across the southwest border of the United States. So this is the frustration.

I’ll try to keep you informed as I’m spending quite a bit of time here. Tomorrow, I am also meeting with the leadership to talk about solutions, the things they can turn around and there are some very obvious answers to be able to shift this. So we will stay on this and will continue to be able to push as we have got to have a stop to this constant flow on the border. We’ve almost, last month, we’ve reached a quarter-million people that were crossing the border; that has been the month before, the month before, the month before. So this has been record numbers every single month for the last four months. 

Transcript of Lankford’s remarks at the southern border wall

We’ve been up in helicopters today going over the border area again getting a chance to track meetings with land owners now. We’re about 100 yards from the border itself. The river is right there. The fence is right here. We’re in this kind of gap in between at this point, and meeting with land owners in the area, all they could say over and over again is how dangerous this is, how lawless this is, how they have to be armed all the time, how people shoot around them. There always afraid to be able to move anytime. They’ve found dead bodies. One of the ranchers was telling me how on a large ranch just on the last several years they’ve found over 100 dead bodies on the ranch. This is life along the river. And what they describe is just lawlessness in this area. And all they’re asking for is for the federal government to do its job to actually enforce the border.

And for many of them, they’ve said they’ve lived here for decades, and it’s never been like this before, but it is now. And their fear is, this will never get better because we’re just allowing a criminal element to be able to come in for some folks saying, ‘Hey we want to migrants to be able to move.’ Well when migrants are moving, the criminal element’s moving as well. And they’re just wreaking havoc along this area of the border.

Transcript of Lankford’s Facebook Live remarks from near the Rio Grande river

So, I’m here on the border area. In fact, we just had one of the helicopters come across. You can probably still hear. This is literally on the river between the border between Mexico and the United States. It’s area I’ve been at before on it, but what is interesting is to be able to see some of the new tech that’s actually happening here where there is an air boat that they are now using to be able to move people across the river at this point. Waiting for gaps in times when the Border Patrol is not here and they can quickly move across the river.

You can also see debris along here from the former rafts that were being used at different times. Some of those rafts sank along the rocks here, and so now they have stepped it up and actually brought in an air boat to be able to move people across the border in this area. It is an area that is completely lawless.

I have met with some of the owners of some of the farm land in this area that do watermelons, that do sugarcane, do cabbage, that do cilantro, as well as some of the folks in this area that do ranching. They are incredibly frustrated with the number of criminal elements that are coming across the border. Many of these folks have lived here for fifty years plus, and they are very aware of what this area used to be like and now they know what it is like now. And their frustration is this used to be a peaceful place where people would play around the river and there was not a lot of crime.

Now there is lots of crime in the area, and a very high criminal element that is happening and they just don’t feel safe at all anymore and all they are asking for is the most logical things: would the federal government actually do its job to be able to enforce this border rather than just leave it open? So that is what we are dealing with right now is trying to be able to get the information out and to be able to note the changes that are actually happening here.

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