Senator Lankford: Illegal Crossings Down, But Challenges Remain At The U.S.-Mexico Border

Illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border are down to levels not seen since the last months of the Trump presidency. The Biden administration is touting that as a win, but Oklahoma's congressional delegation doesn't necessarily agree.

Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma delegation's authority on the border — and one of the leading authorities in all of Congress — was back at the border this month in a remote part of Arizona.

"They are still seeing a lot of people crossing," said Senator Lankford (R-OK) in a phone interview Thursday.

But Lankford admitted they’re also seeing something else — the use of 'expedited removal' to send many of the migrants right back home. The White House says more than 160,000 people were returned to 145 countries in the last four months.

"The Biden administration is finally enforcing some of the authorities that they've had all along, [but] refused to use," Lankford said. "Now they're using those things, and it is bringing some of the numbers down, which is what we thought it would do."

According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there were just under 54,000 migrant encounters between ports of entry in the month of September. That’s the lowest number since August 2020 and a 55 percent decline since May, just before President Biden used his executive authority to restrict immigration. At the time, Biden pointed to the failure of the hard-fought, bipartisan border security bill at the beginning of the year.

"Republicans in Congress — not all, but [most] — walked away from it," Biden told reporters. "Why? Because Donald Trump told them to."

Of course, it was Lankford who helped negotiate that bill. He says one of his goals all along was to get Biden to use the executive authorities available to him, which has now happened but also to make what he says are needed statutory changes, something only Congress can do.

"We have a problem that there's a loophole built into the asylum law that is being exploited by the cartels," Lankford explained, "and that has to be fixed, no matter who's president."