'We Have To Solve The Problem:' Sen. Lankford On Border Negotiations

Oklahoma's senior senator is trying to help solve a problem in the United States that has gone unsolved for three decades: how to manage the nation's borders.

Sen. James Lankford is one of a handful of leaders at the center of these border negotiations. He took some time Monday to talk to News 9 / News On 6's political analyst Scott Mitchell.

Scott Mitchell: Border Security negotiations: It's three dimensional chess. I'm not sure what all the Democrats are for. I'm not sure what all the Republicans are for. It's the house versus Senate versus the executive branch. You're right in the middle of it. Have I got it? Have I set the playing field correctly?

Sen. Lankford: You are correct. It's right now it feels like three dimensional chess, Othello and battleship all simultaneously as well, because it's just every direction you go, it gets more complicated. There's a reason this hasn't been done in 30 years, because it's incredibly complicated. We have 10,000 people a day that are now illegally crossing our border day after day after day. The numbers are just so astronomical. And they're from places all over the world, we now have this Russia, people from Uzbekistan and from Russia and from Pakistan and China. And from West Africa, we're getting from places we've never received people before. And people with high tendencies in those regions towards terrorism and crime that we have no point of reference for. So this has shifted just in the last six months from Spanish speaking individuals from mostly Western Hemisphere, to a large number of people from all over the world that are coming those same networks, that we have no idea of a point of reference, who they are, where they're headed. So we have continued to be able to push this as a national security issue, and have reminded people this is only a political issue in the 202 area code. Everywhere else in the country, this is just a national security piece.

Scott Mitchell: Could I ask you to put your Professor Lankford hat on for just a moment. You'd said there's nothing like this in 30 years? Help us understand what it is? (What is) the problem? And everybody wants to know whose fault it is. I'm more interested in about what the problem is, and how we solve it.

Sen. Lankford: So let me take us back, let's say 30 years ago. We had very high numbers of people coming. There were almost all Mexican, single adult males, that were coming to work in ag jobs, construction, jobs, everything else. We had some visas out there and other folks that were just coming. So we knew how to handle that. Our facilities are set up for that. The numbers came way down in the early days of the Obama administration, as they were figuring out all the process. During the Bush administration, they solved that. Then in the second administration, in the Obama administration, the cartels and Mexico started experimenting with throwing large numbers of people simultaneously to ask for asylum. And that was new. Our systems were not built for that. Now we have asylum. But if I take you back to the first term of the of the Obama administration, typically we had about 21,000 people a year that ask for asylum. Asylum is really hard to get. To prove you qualify for asylum, you've got to prove that there's nowhere safe to go in your entire home country, that the federal government for that country is after you, and you're fleeing for your life and protection out of that country, and you're going to a safe place to be able to get protection. Well, it was very hard to be able to prove that, but that's what asylum is. So that's why we had so few up until the second term of the Obama administration and these cartels started throwing hundreds and then thousands of people at the border saying we want to request asylum and get a hearing. When they did that, we didn't have asylum officers. We didn't have enough judges because we didn't need it. And it was very rare to actually have those hearings. That has continued to accelerate in the last 10 years. So you go back to let's say 12 years ago, you may get 50 people in a day that are asking for asylum. Now we're getting 9,500 people a day that are asking for asylum. And our backlog for the courts for asylum is 2 million people. And so it may take 10 years to get your asylum hearing. In the meantime, the administration has given them a work permit. They can travel anywhere they want to go in the country, and the system is broken. So the first things first: there's been a shift in the last 10 years. We've got to fix the asylum process. Everyone's seen this. It's time to actually repair it so that when you ask for asylum, you get a hearing at the border. You get a prompt response. And when you don't qualify, which the vast majority of people will not qualify, we turn you around and head you back to your home country. Once the word is out (that) this is not a free ticket into the country, the numbers will drop dramatically.

Scott Mitchell: Let me ask you about how that fits in with another term people are starting to hear a lot about and that's 'parole.' How does this all work together?

Sen. Lankford: So, the parole we think about typically in a jail setting that you get, parole to be able to get out, that's not what this is. If you get to the border right now, this administration, because the numbers are so high, 10,000 people a day that are coming in, they can't process that many people. So what the administration is doing is they're granting them 'parole,' releasing them into the country and giving them literally a piece of paper that's called a notice to appear, and saying, "show up at a hearing, usually five or six years from now in the future."

And in the meantime, you can work, you can be here, you can travel around. It is an abuse of that parole authority. The parole authority was designed to be like a humanitarian thing, that you're an individual that needs a kidney transplant you can't get in your home country. And so you're paroled into the United States to be able to get that kidney transplant and then to be able to go home, or maybe you're testifying against a cartel member in the United States, and they bring you in under parole to be able to do that. That's what it's designed for. This administration is using parole in a way it's never been used for. They're using it as their release valve to be able to open up space at the border. And we're trying to be able to say, No. 1, we've got to fix the chaos at the border to make sure we don't have that kind of chaos. And No. 2, we can't just release people en masse in the country and pretend they've got some kind of status when everyone knows this is not humanitarian.

This is convenience for the administration. So we got to be able to solve that.

Scott Mitchell: Alright, another term that's being talked about when we get to the negotiations... is Title 42. How does that play into this?

Sen. Lankford: You really are into professor mode on this! Let me let me walk you through what this really means. Title 42 is a health-exemption authority. It's what happened during the COVID pandemic. Title 42 engages a lot of things. Telehealth was not allowed, and a lot of our health care facilities until Title 42. And it gave special permissions to be able to do that. But one of the things that also did is it used that emergency status at the border where President Trump said, "Hey, we're under a pandemic here. We don't know what's happening with this COVID in the earliest days. If you're trying to cross our border and asking for asylum, you can't do that right now. We're going to turn you around, and to say, for health reasons, we can't process enough people right now."

And so it gave authority to basically say -- when we're at capacity -- we can turn people around. We've been in a long debate right now to be able to say, what's the capacity that we can actually process in a day? And the real decision is, if we do an authority like this that's long term, who runs our Southern border? Does the United States and Department of Homeland Security run our southern border? Or do Mexican criminal cartels? Do they run our border? Right now, the cartels run our border. They manage who comes across, the speed they come across, the number that comes across every day. I think the United States government should have authority over our own borders. And to be able to say, "Listen, we can't process that many people. You've got to be able to turn around until we have capacity to be able to process that many people. Have a big capacity. I don't want to block anyone from being able to ask for asylum that legitimately qualifies for it, knowing that the vast majority of people actually don't. But we don't want to block legitimate asylum folks. But we also don't want to say cartels can run our border. We need to be able to run our border.

Scott Mitchell: Alright, with all that behind us, we're tying this immigration policy to a couple of countries that people see in the news -- Our contributions to Ukraine, our contributions to Israel. You call that three-dimensional chess. So this is working in with all these terms that we're talking about right now. You're in the middle of this negotiation. I saw whatever this week, I think was Thursday, we said, "Well, we're swapping a lot of paper. So it's getting down to the last days of of this congress of this year, I should say. And I'm wondering, where are we at? And what do concern people citizens looking at this? What did they need to be doing? What do they need to be thinking as you work on this process? With the other chamber and with the Executive Branch.

Sen. Lankford: It is actually. So, you go back about two months ago, the Biden administration asked for national security funding. They wanted what's called a supplemental. This is above and beyond. They said, "We need to provide some additional help." And they asked for it for four things. They said they want help for Ukraine, for our Southern border, for Israel, and for Taiwan.

And they sent over a request for those four things in that order, by the way, where it was the request for the different funding levels. We responded back and said, "You don't need additional dollars on the Southern border. You'll use additional dollars just to be able to accelerate people coming in. In fact, even the administration admitted within two days, they use the term in a public setting, that the additional dollars for the Southern border would be a tourniquet on the problem. They really need additional law and authority. So we've tried to work with the administration for the last two months now to be able to negotiate what authorities would actually make a difference. And some of those they've said theyey, we want and some of those!" They've said, "Yes, that would solve the problem."

But we don't really want to do that. Our focus has been what actually will solve the problem. So, these four issues have been actually pulled together, actually, for the last two months trying to be able to figure out how do we resolve multiple issues that are happening globally right now. But we have said, we're not going to help other countries and their national security and ignore our own national security. If the President wants to help other countries national security, which I understand the real risk and the needs and the issues that are there with Russia and their invasion with what's happening in Israel, and the real threats of Taiwan faces, I understand completely the issue there. But we can't ignore our own. That's how these all got lumped together. We're working right now to actually get to resolution. We are swapping some paper, but we've got a lot more that still has got to be done. If we can do those things in the next couple of weeks, we could bring this up in early January, and to be able to have a vote and have plenty of time for people to be able to read it, review it and to be able to say does this actually solve the problem?

We're not going to be able to solve everything. I wish we could. But we've got to resolve the biggest issues on our border and to be able to resolve those issues right now.

Scott Mitchell: When you say swapping paper, you're not talking about how we did in fifth grade and wet the paper down?

Sen. Lankford: No, not not not one of those. This is dealing with fun legislative text. It's definitely not something we did in fifth grade.

Scott Mitchell: I'm wondering, the margin in which the Republican Speaker, the House Speaker is able to operate seems very thin at holding his group together and not so much in the Senate doesn't appear. Can you thread this needle with not only the administration, but the speaker has got so much so much constriction on what he can do over there? Is that perhaps as much an impediment to getting something done as is the other party, the Democrats, administration, and the minority in both chambers?

Sen. Lankford: Yes, Scott, it's a very real issue. But it is an interesting dynamic right now because we have a Democratic-controlled Senate. So we're not going to be able to move anything out of the Senate until we have 60 votes. So you've got to have a bipartisan vote coming out of the Senate. When it goes to the House, you've got almost exactly equal House. Republicans in January will have a two-vote majority when they come back in in January. So it's a very equally divided but Republican-controlled House, and then obviously a Democrat president. As we work through this process, it's going to be a challenge to be able to get it done because this can't be a Republican bill or we could never actually get it all the way through a Democrat-controlled Senate. It's not going to be a Democrat bill, or we're never going to be able to get it through a Republican House. This is going to end up being a bipartisan agreement for it. And the focus that I've had from the very beginning is: we have to solve the problem. If we're not solving the problem, then we're leaving our border exposed. So, take the politics out of that as much as you can in D.C. and ask the simple question, "What solves the problem?" And to focus in on that.

So yes, it's going to be a thin challenge, if I can talk to you, as you said, "threading the needle on this." I'm also going to have some folks that are Democrats that have been very outspoken and saying they won't vote for anything that has Israel funding unless you can conrol how Israel can fight the war? Well, we're not going to support that. There's also going to be quite a few Republicans are saying, Hey, we don't want to do funding for Ukraine. We feel like Europe should do all of that. So I've got some Democrats are going to drop off on Israel funding. I've got some Republicans that are going to drop off on Ukraine funding. And we still have got to thread the needle, dealing with border security issue, which has been a very contentious issue for 30 years. So, welcome to negotiating a bill right now.

Scott Mitchell: Toughest negotiations you've ever been involved in?

Sen. Lankford: By far. I have been a lot of tough negotiations. This was more complicated than the rest of them. And again, it's why it hasn't been done in 30 years, because it seems incredibly complex.

Scott Mitchell: My last question is, with all of these, with Ukraine, with Israel, with Taiwan, and with the border, what's the important thing Oklahomans need to take about what's going on up there? You're not a state senator representing our state. But in this case, you're really helping policy for the whole nation. What's the Oklahoma angle that we need to know about?

Sen. Lankford: Well, there's several, and we all know it and feel it. The pouring in of methamphetamine, and of fentanyl into our state is coming directly from our Southern border from these cartels. And they're often using migrants to be able to flood through one section while they put smugglers around in another section, when Border Patrol is busy rounding up migrants on it. So that's important for us to be able to resolve. Many of the illegal grow operations in our state are actually Chinese nationals that have come across our Southern border. This has to be addressed in it. A lot of what we're facing in petty crime and such, we're finding that people that are actually coming into the state that don't have access to the rest of things, and they're committing petty crime, or they had to pay a $5,000 or $6,000 fee to the cartels to be able to come in, and the cartels are having to work off their additional expense, doing criminal acts in our state.

This directly affects crime in our state, directly affects drugs in our state, directly affects business operations in our state. I don't find many people in our state that think that illegal immigration is not a problem right now. Everybody's saying, "What can we do to actually fix it?" There are a lot of folks that say, "You've got to do everything I want or it won't work." And there are other folks that are saying, "What can we get done so we can actually solve at least what we can solve while we work on the next one?" I'm with that group, to say let's solve as we can as much as we possibly can solve and then let's keep going because there's more to be able to get done at the end of it, but it directly affects our day to day life in Oklahoma.