Senator Lankford Challenges Biden Administration Policies After Trip To Southern Border

Oklahoma Senator James Lankford (R-OK) said a trip to the Rio Grande Valley sector of the southern border last week shows him that the Biden administration “has no intention of changing direction” on the border policies.

Senator Lankford said those border policies led to a record number of illegal border crossers in 2021.

“Biden’s open-door policy has encouraged more than 2 million illegal border crossers to walk across our southern border just last year. I am taking this national security threat very seriously,” said Sen. Lankford in a statement. “President Biden is handcuffing federal law enforcement while releasing people who are illegally crossing our southern border.”

Lankford and other Republicans have strongly criticized the administration for reversing many of former President Trump’s border policies, which Biden and Democrats said were inhumane and un-American.

A major spike in illegal crossings, however, damaged Biden’s approval ratings and toward the end of 2021, both because of court rulings and apparent political pressure.

ThePpresident reinstated some of his predecessor’s policies — deciding to complete portions of the border wall and forcing asylum-seekers to ‘remain in Mexico’ while their cases made their way through the system.

Senator Lankford said it’s all show.

“The new border fence that the Biden Administration built is a fraction of the height of the previous wall built by several administrations,” said Lankford. “This is a waste of taxpayer dollars and an insult to the men and women of law enforcement along the border.”

Lankford said the administration’s enforcement of the Migrant Protection Protocols (aka, Remain in Mexico) is half-hearted, at best.

“The ‘Remain in Mexico’ hearings are designed to release people into the country, rather than provide a real deterrent to illegal entry,” said Lankford.

As Ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Government Operations and Border Management subcommittee, Senator Lankford has been paying particularly close attention to what he said is the ‘chaos’ at the southern border.

He said these administration concessions have not made it any better.

"The Biden administration continues to be able to step back and to say, 'It’s fine.' Americans don’t like chaos," said Sen. Lankford in a Facebook post Friday, "We don’t like all this. We want legal immigration, not illegal immigration and this is the wrong way to be able to go."

Recent polling shows close to sixty percent of the population disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration.