Senator James Lankford (R-OK) delivered remarks on the Senate Floor calling out the rewrite of history on the border bill negotiations and stressed the national security crisis at the southern border. Lankford serves as the lead Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Government Operations and Border Management.

Vice President Harris made a comment publicly just a few weeks ago when she said, ‘Let me be clear: after decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.’ I mean no disrespect to the Vice President, but we had four months of negotiations, and she neither initiated those negotiations nor participated in a single second of those negotiations—not one second.

The Vice President’s staff was never involved in any of the negotiations. The negotiations took four months because the people that sat down at the table all determined we’re in a very bad place. We need to resolve the chaos that’s happening at our southern border.

For the first six weeks of those negotiations, the White House refused to participate at all in the negotiation, either from the President’s staff, the President or the Vice President, or Vice President’s Staff.

So for the first six weeks of the four months of negotiations, the White House didn’t want to discuss it. After six weeks, the White House then got involved in the negotiations. So it was three Senators and the White House to be able to walk through that and then again, for the next three months of our negotiations, it was a constant fight to get anything agreed to, to secure our southern border.

What we came up with and was the final agreement wasn’t everything that I wanted, but it was enough to at least begin to make a change in what was happening at our southern border. It was a pretty straightforward process. Asylum is very difficult to achieve. Only about three percent of the people that actually go through the hearings actually achieve asylum. But you don’t find out that until usually six or eight years after you’ve already been here and have already gone through this long process. So now we have thousands of people crossing our border asking for asylum. Not because they believe they qualify, but because they know they’ll stay here somewhere between six and ten years while they wait for the hearing. And they at least get a decade in America. And then many of them then disappear.

So what we could get to agreement was, when you cross the border, you would cross the border, first person each day, they would have a much faster screening that would take hours or days and they’d be screened at the standard that was at the end. So instead of waiting six or eight years or ten years to get that final decision, you would get it rapidly.

So the first person that would cross each day would cross, would be quickly screened under a brand new process, and then 97 percent of them would be deported immediately because they don’t qualify for asylum and everyone knows the joke. So first day, first person, you cross, quickly screened under a new process, deported immediately. But if we got 5,000 people crossing, we don’t have enough staff to screen that many people. So we created a Border Emergency Authority that if you cross the border and you’ve got 5,000 people flooding the border and we don’t have the staffing to do it, no one gets screened. You just get arrested and deported. So first person cross, screened, deported. If we’re overwhelmed by the cartels with high numbers, you just are deported immediately and no one is screened.

That’s what we could finally come up with an agreement But there were a lot of issues I couldn’t get agreement on that quite frankly, many of my colleagues on the Republican side were very frustrated that we couldn’t make progress on. Some of those very common sense things. For instance, if you’re going to request asylum, you have to request asylum at a port of entry.

You can’t come across the border between the ports of entry in the open desert, or swim in the river, and then say, when you get caught, ‘Oh, I want asylum’. It was obvious you were trying to sneak into the country. And you’re saying, if you’re a true asylum seeker and you believe you’re requesting asylum, come to a port of entry. We thought that was a pretty common sense thing to say. We’ll expedite your process to asylum, if you come to a port, not if we have to chase you in the desert. I couldn’t get that agreement. My Democratic colleagues would not agree to that. That was a great frustration on the Republican side.

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