During an appearance on this week’s “Fox News Sunday” broadcast, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) pushed back against critics of his efforts to secure a deal on a border security package.
The Oklahoma Senator said the language of the bill had not been finalized and attributed speculation to “Internet rumors.”
“The challenge that Senator Cruz has and a bunch of other folks is they’re so waiting to be able to read the bill on this and this has been our great challenge of being able to fight through the final words to be able to get the bill text out so people can hear it,” Lankford said. “Right now, there’s Internet rumors. It’s all that people are running. It would be absolutely absurd for me to agree to 5,000 people a day. This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day. There’s no amnesty. It increases a number of Border Patrol agents and it increases asylum officers. It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.”
“It ends catch-and-release,” he continued. “It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so that people can get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard and then get returned back to their home country. This is not about letting 5,000 people in a day. This is the most misunderstood section of this proposal. And let me tell you briefly what it is. You know, last four months, we’ve had seven days — in four months, we’ve had seven days that we had less than 5,000 people. This is set up if you have a rush of people coming at the border, the border closes down, no one gets in.”
“This is not — this is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker and saying, I’m going to let one more in, we’re at 4,999, and then it has to stop,” Lankford added. “It is a shutdown of the border and everyone actually gets turned around. That’s the focus that we have right now, is how do we actually intervene in this administration and turn people around and not let people in?”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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