On 3/16/2022, Senator Lankford said “The policies that have been put in place on our southern border were put in place to encourage people… to cross the border, knowing full well that when you get inside, you won’t actually be deported.”

I don’t want us to forget about because the media seems to have pushed it all to the back burner. I’ve even had people recently catch me and say, ‘Apparently things are going much better on our southern border because I don’t hear about it anymore.’ Well, it’s not gotten better.

This chart walks through the last 10 years of crossings … right there, that spot is when President Biden was elected… instead of seeing a big drop-off, just in the last couple of months, we’ve only seen it go down but not even close to the highest peaks in the past… since Jan 2021, we’ve had 2.3 million that we have ‘encountered’ on the southwest border… These are not just record numbers. These are all-time high numbers, nothing even close to the number of people that are crossing the border.

.. The ICE removals that have been done every year, during the Obama Administration, during the Trump Administration, and then during the first year of the Biden Administration. So not only do we have 2.3 million people .. but it’s an all-time low of actual deportations that are happening right now as well. So not only on our southern border are we seeing record numbers of high coming in, inside the country; it’s record low numbers actually being deported out.

This is by design. This is not accidental. The policies that have been put in place on our southern border were put in place to encourage people, quite frankly, to be able to cross the border, knowing full well that when you get inside, you won’t actually be deported.

There is only one policy that has been in the middle of this that’s changed the dynamic at all. And It’s a policy that most Americans have never heard of at all, and it’s called Title 42 . Quite frankly, most of the folks in this room have not heard of Title 42. In March of 2020, the Trump Administration said, ‘We’ve got a concern dealing with individuals crossing our border ..’ and the President agreed that we’re going to turn people around at the border immediately.

I want you to remember all the news reports from last year; all of the overcrowding in the Donna, Texas, facility, that we saw; all the people crammed underneath the bridge in the Rio Grande Valley; all of the folks that piled across the border in massive numbers that we saw coming into the United States, that represented only 44% of the people … I bring this up because, as of right now, we have heard that DHS, the President, and HHS is considering canceling Title 42. If that occurs, we won’t have 1 million people … Within months, we’ll have 2 million, and all that you saw last summer of the flood of people, that 44%, imagine what that looks like more than doubled this summer.

This is a map from all the countries in the past year … If you want to squint at that map, let me just give you shorthand for it: it’s every country in the world. … Yeah, that includes China, that includes North Korea, that includes Iran .. in those last four months that we have those records, we’ve 6,400 Russian citizens …

When Title 42 goes away, this accelerates even more. It’s an open invitation, because 56% of the people were turned around. 44% of the people were released into the country. By the way, that’s over a million so far. That goes away. Then they all get in.

What happens at that point? Those individuals are told that they can make a request for asylum, even though our statistics show 91% of the people that request asylum are actually coming for economic reasons, not actual true asylum—91% … And they’re given a hearing date currently six years in the future—six years.

What can be done about this? First thing’s first, don’t end Title 42 … Second thing, the Remain in Mexico policy.

The Remain in Mexico policy that actually started under President Trump that President Biden set aside and federal courts stepped back in and told this Administration, ‘You have to put back in place the Remain in Mexico policy,’ so they chose to do it… the Biden Administration is spending millions and millions of taxpayer dollars that the court has required them to do, but they’ve made so many exceptions to it no one actually qualifies. So they’re trying to please the Court by saying, ‘We’re following your order,’ waste American tax dollars while we continue to see record numbers of people crossing the border. That’s a waste.

The previous Administration had actually created a relationship with multiple other countries, … The law is very clear and the international standards on this. If you’re going to request asylum, you go to the next safe country and request asylum. If they’re traveling through five countries or they’re traveling literally across the globe to get to the US, that’s not asylum. That’s economic opportunity.