Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) spoke at a Congressional forum on Wednesday about the bipartisan border security bill.
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00:00Okay, so you play a key role in crafting a bipartisan border security and immigration reform bill that included provisions like building the wall, increasing border patrol agents, and enhancing asylum processes.
00:15Given that Republicans now hold a trifecta in government, do you believe a version of this bill has a better chance of passing, and what adjustments would you make to secure its passage in the current political landscape?
00:26Yeah, interesting question on that. Thanks for bringing up the traumatic moment.
00:32I have to tell you, that bill, I still stand by. When people have actually read the bill, most people that have read it and gone through it go, oh, that's not what social media says was.
00:44And that's not what it says. Occasionally social media is wrong, just occasionally.
00:48The bill actually reshapes how we actually process folks coming across the border and enclose some of the loopholes that are in the asylum system that are a real problem, that have been a problem for it in decades, and everyone knows it.
01:02And it really changed the system of how we do it.
01:06When you get to the end, if you make an asylum request to come across the border, 97% of the people do not qualify for it.
01:13But they don't find that out until the very end. So they're here sometimes for years until they actually find out at the end, oh, I don't qualify for asylum.
01:22Now, 3% do, but 97% don't. So this is how radical that bill was.
01:27We took the information at the end and moved it to the beginning.
01:31And so you'd find out within days or weeks, no, you don't qualify, and you'd be turned around, rather than five years later, find out you don't qualify.
01:42That didn't seem that radical to me, to be able to just shift the rules of the in to the rules of the beginning.
01:47Second thing we did was said, if the cartels flood the border with, let's say, 5,000 people, they flood the border, which they do often because they can break the system,
01:57when that occurs, we don't even screen on those days. If you get overwhelmed with people, then we just turn everyone around, all 100%.
02:06No one gets in during those days at all.
02:10I love that. It's a pretty common sense. We call it the break last moment, because we knew if we turned people around without that, the courts would say,
02:17no, you've got to screen people, so we're actually going to make law on it and say, if the system is overwhelmed, no one gets in until we can actually do an orderly process on it.
02:26Now, that turned into, we're letting 5,000 people in a day every single day, which was totally false.
02:33But it didn't matter. It got repeated enough that everyone just bought it.
02:37So here's what I think is going to happen.
02:39I think in the next two years, the president's going to use every bit of executive authority he could possibly use to be able to dramatically reduce the numbers.
02:46And let me just tell you, the numbers have dramatically reduced, dramatically.
02:50When I was arguing out through the border bill and the Biden administration, we had 12,000 people a day that were illegally crossing the border.
02:59Now we have less than 200 a day even attempting.
03:04From 12,000 to less than 200.
03:08Dramatic difference.
03:10Here's what I think will occur.
03:11I think the courts will do some rulings and will say to the president, you can't do that.
03:18You can't do this, but you can't do that.
03:20And as soon as they can't do that comes out with the courts, the cartels will start doing that.
03:27They will train people coming across the border and they'll make sure they say a certain phrase, go to a certain place, do a certain thing,
03:33and will start to be able to penetrate that loophole.
03:35It's the exact same thing that happened under the first Trump administration.
03:38Under the first Trump administration, they clamped down very strongly on the border the first two years.
03:43By year three, almost a million people that year illegally crossed the border.
03:47Almost a million.
03:49That's when they created Romania and Mexico.
03:51They created a lot of new policies trying to be able to test out how can they manage this.
03:55I think by year three, we'll start to see some of the numbers come up again.
03:58I'm not gearing for that.
04:00I'm just telling you the cartels are losing billions of dollars in trafficking people right now,
04:04and they're business people as well, in illegal activity.
04:07But they're business people.
04:09And they will find a way that they will exploit those loopholes.
04:12And so we will need it.
04:13So my anticipation is, by year three, we're going to sit down in a bipartisan way,
04:18and we're going to start working through how to be able to close some of these loopholes
04:21that exist no matter who is president.
04:24Also, I think a lot of people have been surprised.
04:26President Trump, in his very first interview that he came out with,
04:29when he sat down with Kristen Welker right after he was elected,
04:32in that very first interview, he came out and said,
04:35I want to legalize DACA recipients.
04:37I want to make them citizens.
04:39And I think a lot of people were shocked by that in that very first interview.
04:43I was not.
04:44I've heard him say it privately multiple times.
04:47But legalizing the DACA recipients and getting them citizenship requires an act of Congress to do that.
04:53What he's really saying is, I want to do a bill.
04:57So come and talk to me.
04:58Let's negotiate this out.
05:00So that was a pretty clear signal to my Democratic colleagues that I've reminded them of often.
05:04This is going to require both sides sitting down to be able to work this out.
05:07So it's coming, but it's not today.