Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today spoke on the Senate floor about the Biden Administration’s latest press release saying their border plan is working as intended, when in reality they have changed how they report the numbers of illegal crossings so the numbers sound better, even though they’re the basically the same as a few months ago.
Lankford remains the leading voice in the Senate to secure our southern border, end catch-and-release, and fix the broken asylum process. Lankford got Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to admit that our asylum process is broken and being abused and that our entire immigration process is broken.
Lankford recently visited the US-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, after Title 42 authority was lifted, and he saw first-hand the ways our asylum process is being abused to let more and more people into the interior of the country with the promise of a hearing in as many as 10 years. Lankford also learned how the criminal cartels are using the new CBP One app to manipulate Border Patrol locations to scatter groups along the border so they can’t possibly all be interdicted.
Transcript
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security released a press release yesterday to talk about what’s happening on the border currently, especially on our southwest land border. I wanted to read just one line from the press release that was put out by Homeland Security yesterday where they state in their press release, ‘The Administration’s plan is working as intended.’
The Administration’s plan is working as intended. Now, what they were referencing was what’s happening on the southwest border and the number of people that are crossing our border that are ‘being encountered’ at the border. That’s the new term from Homeland Security, the number of people that cross our border illegally. They’re ‘encountered’.
In the past those individuals—and what I mean in the past, I mean in the past two years—those individuals crossed our southern border, asked for asylum because they were told by the cartels what to say. The cartels would say to each individual as they crossed and pay the fee to the cartel, ‘Tell them you’re afraid in your country.’ They would cross the border. They would say the words, ‘I’m afraid in my country.’ They would be given an asylum hearing date in the future. That date is anywhere depending on where they go in the country between three years and seven years in the future. And they’re told they can go anywhere in the United States they want to travel during that time period.
Now, that’s what it used to be. The Administration came forward and said, ‘We have a whole new plan. ‘Our new plan’—post Title 42, that’s the end of the pandemic restrictions—’Our new plan is that we’re going to tell people there’s a rebuttal presumption that you don’t qualify, so don’t come.’
So here’s what’s happened. Now you cross the border and there’s two ways you can cross the border. This is the new plan: you can either fill out the paperwork before you come or when you cross, we’ll fill out the paperwork for you. If we fill out the paperwork for you, it will take longer for you to come into the country and cross the border, or you can fill out the paperwork before. What is that called? It’s called CBP One. It’s an app that now you can download from anywhere in the world, fill out your paperwork ahead of time, and when you cross, they’ll quickly expedite you into the country for your asylum hearing anywhere between three and seven years in the future. Or if you cross between ports of entry, then it’s going to take you probably another eight hours or so for them to get all the paperwork filled out for you and then you’ll still be released into the country and have a hearing three to seven years in the future.
What does the Administration mean when they said, ‘The Administration’s plan is working as intended’? They’ve now split up the numbers, and they’ve announced, ‘Look, our numbers are less than 4,000 people now that are crossing the border illegally. It was just 10,000 people two weeks ago.’ Of course what they didn’t say was the week before that, it walls right at 5,000. But what they’re not saying is they’ve actually taken, if you fill out on the app ahead of time, they don’t count those numbers anymore.
Here’s what’s happening. We have the same number of people illegally crossing our border this week that we had three weeks ago, and we had three weeks before that. The Administration now has just split up the numbers how they’re counted. If you fill out the app in advance, that we fill it out for you when you cross the border, those are now two sets of numbers, but they’re the same, exact people that are crossing into the country except when I was at the border just two weeks ago and asked how well all of this is working,
I asked a very simple question: what are you noticing that’s different now than what’s different before? The response from CBP was, ‘Well, it’s the same.’ People are still moving in. They’re allowed to be able to come into the country. Between ports of entry or at ports of entry. That’s the same. But what’s changed is a dramatic increase in the number of non-Spanish speakers that are coming. And the first words I had from several different individuals that I spoke with, both from nongovernmental organizations and from our federal law enforcement when I was there last was, ‘We are worried for our national security.’
In fact, federal law enforcement used the exact term. We have ‘military-age, single adult men’ coming into our country from non-Spanish speaking nations in the Middle East, in west Africa, from Russia, and from China now in much higher numbers than we had before.
Just to set the context of what’s happening now while the administration is saying the plan is working as intended, here’s what’s happened. In the first two weeks of the end of Title 42, we’ve had 1,000 men from Mauritania, west Africa, come across our border, a thousand. Exactly none of them we have criminal background information on. None of them. So far this year—let me just compare two years ago to this year. So far this year, this year is not over, if I look at Mauritania, we had 90 people two years ago from Mauritania. So far this year, 4,300. So far this year. And, by the way, that doesn’t include the main number that I was just saying that’s a thousand more. So we’re well in excess of 5,000 in year so far from Mauritania. And from Iran, it’s gone from 62 to almost 300. If i want to see from Syria, where we have no background information, we have had 2,000 people come so far from Syria. From Pakistan we’ve had over 500. From Somalia, we’ve had over 1,600.
From China, we’ve had right at 10,000 people in year. If I go back two years from China, it was 450, yet there is a huge shift that’s actually occurring of Middle Eastern men, from Russia and China that are accelerating across our southern border because right now apparently, the Administration’s plan is working as intended, and we have thousands of people that are still crossing our border.
I’ve heard even some recent reporting in the news on this that the numbers are way down, the numbers are way down, but apparently the press doesn’t take the time to look and see that the numbers have been split out into two different categories. The numbers are not down. In fact, the numbers right now would average somewhere around 450,000 a month right now.
The highest, the highest month during the peak of the immigration surge under the Obama Administration, the highest month that happened during that time period when there was chaos and cameras that were focused on the southwest border, the highest month was 69,000.
The Administration is now saying, ‘Our plan is working,’ when there is 150,000 a month coming across the border.
It’s not working. It’s fudging the numbers.
It’s trying to tell the American people, ‘Look away.’ It’s trying to say, ‘We’re doing a whole new set of enforcement on the border,’ when really what’s happening is people are being released into the country, same as they’ve always been released in the country for the last two years. The difference is they’re told, ‘Hey, if you show up for your hearing three years from now, we may be more strict to you.’ But at the border they’re moving through just the same, being waved through.
Now, I bring this up to this body to ask a simple question: have we learned nothing from 9/11? Thousands of Americans died because a group of individuals overstayed their visas here in the United States, no one went to check on them, no one went to track on it, and just ignored the realities of what could be there.
We have a huge national security risk. God forbid we have a huge terrorist attack again, just because we want to tell everyone, ‘The plan is working as intended. Look away. The numbers are down,’ when we literally have people coming in from all over the world that may be coming to work here or may be coming in for nefarious reasons. We don’t know. We don’t know if these folks are fleeing poverty or fleeing justice because we have no criminal history on these individuals coming in from around the world, none. In fact, as frightening as it may seem, right now the current policy happening at the southwest border is if someone shows up without any identification or with a photocopy of an ID that they say is theirs, it’s being accepted as real.
They can literally come in and say, ‘I’m from Mauritania or Somalia or Syria or Iron or China or Russia, and this is my name.’ And they have no ID. We’re writing down, creating for them a new ID card that’s an American ID card and handing them a new identity and saying, ‘Show up at your hearing three years from now in the future, travel anywhere you want in the country. You can use this card to fly or to travel or to show as ID,’ when we literally have no idea if that’s what their name is or that’s the country they’re from—that is the plan that is working as intended right now on our southwest border.
I think it’s a huge national security vulnerability.
We need to talk about asylum. We need to talk about how to define the national security risk for the United States. This body needs to have a real conversation about what legal immigration looks like and what we’re going to say to the world about illegal immigration.
If any of these individuals were to travel into Canada right now, the Canadians already have a clear law dealing with asylum. These folks would not be accepted into Canada because it would violate their basic asylum rules and how they handle it. But they’re being literally waved into our country with no ID, with no criminal background check and released into the country under the promise that they’ll show up for a hearing three years in the future. Can someone explain to me why that’s logical?
If these same folks moved into Germany and said they want to claim asylum, Germany would put them in a humanitarian center where they would stay. They wouldn’t be released into Germany. Germany would never do that. They would stay in in that one humanitarian area while they were processed through their asylum claim, and if they didn’t qualify for asylum, they would be sent back to their original country. And that’s usually within two to three months.
We are instead handing them a brand-new ID, which we have no idea is their real name, releasing them into the country, and saying, ‘We hope you show up three to seven years from now at your hearing.’ Can somebody tell me that’s wise? I’m not asking for something crazy or for something that quite frankly the rest of the world doesn’t already do. But for some reason this body has locked up to talk about what everyone sees as obvious, and we refuse to even debate the issues of asylum and national security.
This is not caustic and hard. This is reasonable, where most Americans are. But we’re not even talking about it on the floor right now. But we should—because it matters. The national security of our country is counting on us having adult conversations. I encourage us to get started on this sooner rather than later for the sake of our future as a nation.
