Senator Lankford tells Newsmax: Biden’s border actions influenced by polls

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s recent rush to take action on the southern border has been prompted by polling showing that Americans are deeply concerned about illegal immigration five months ahead of Election Day.

“They’ve definitely noticed the polls,” Lankford said during an appearance on “Wake Up America.” “Obviously, everything’s related to politics at this point and whatever is happening around the presidency. They’re trying to be able to focus in on a particular thing — ‘This is a crisis we couldn’t have done anything about’ — except the American people know they created this crisis. If you go back to time under President Trump, we had very low numbers of people crossing, the exact same law. You even go back to President Obama, if you want to go back to that time period, you had half a million people that were illegally crossing a year, exact same law. Now we have 2.5 million people crossing a year.”

In a move widely seen as an attempt to minimize immigration as a political liability, Biden issued an executive order Tuesday significantly restricting asylum for migrants when officials determine that the U.S-Mexico border is overwhelmed.

Lankford said the immigration situation at the southern border is one of Biden’s own making, adding that it’s “amazing” that the president has finally caught on to something the American people have known for years.

“In the first days of his presidency, he took 94 executive actions to open the border up and now he’s taking one executive action to try to slow down the crisis that he has created a few months before the election,” he said. “The American people have been talking about this for years now, and it’s amazing that the president has just now figured out that this is apparently a big issue. It is frustrating, to say the least. There are executive actions he could take right now and could have taken three years ago to be able to dramatically slow this down, but he’s chosen not to do it and now we don’t even know if this is going to work, how long it will take to unfold, what it will mean, and how many they’ll actually implement this on.”

The Oklahoma senator also said that the Biden administration is trying to say that it can’t solve the problem of illegal immigration without Congress stepping in, which simply isn’t true.

“There’s a lot that they can do,” he said. “There is more that should be done by Congress, we can’t ignore this problem as well, but the White House clearly has created this, not just ignored it … Biden created the parole authorities that are letting Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans come in very high number. He created that. He can turn that off immediately. He created the CBP One app and the authority there, that’s 1,600 people a day that he could just turn off immediately. He turned that on, he could turn that off.”

“He could do Remain in Mexico,” he continued. “He could step up to recalcitrant countries through the State Department. He could change what happens with the Department of Justice — if you come a second time across the border, that’s a felony and they actually get prosecuted. All of those things don’t cost any money. Those are things that he could do today that would make a dramatic difference. He’s choosing not to do those.”

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