Border Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, I have been on this floor many times to speak to this body about the issue of immigration on our southwest border. It is an issue. It has been an issue for the past couple of years, and, unfortunately, it continues to get worse.

As I talk to people in Oklahoma, they are very open to immigration. They just want legal immigration, and they want our system set up in such a way to incentivize legal immigration. But that is not what is happening right now.

Seven of us, 2 weeks ago, in a bipartisan codel, went to the southwest border, and we spent a couple of days there in the El Paso area and then over into Yuma, AZ, just to be able to visit with the folks on the line, with the folks in the communities, to be able to talk to those individuals who are taking care of human needs, to say: What is going on on the ground? What do we need to know?

I have been to the border many times. So I have had the opportunity to be able to hear some of the other reports, but it is always interesting just to be able to get the perspective of what is happening right now, because, as they say along the border, if you have been to one spot on the border, you have been to one spot on the border because it is different in each area, what they are facing.

Let me give you just one story from this. When we visited with the sheriff and with the city manager and with the mayor of a small town in Arizona named Yuma, AZ--Yuma, AZ, is right on the border. It is an ag community. If you have eaten a salad in the past year, you have eaten something from Yuma, AZ, because they grow the vast majority of the lettuce for our country. Yuma, AZ, 3 years ago, in that area, had 8,100 people illegally cross in that year. For that one small town, they were trying to manage 8,100 people crossing 3 years ago. This past year, Yuma, AZ, had 310,000 people illegally cross the area.

So in 3 years, they went from 8,000 people illegally crossing to 310,000 people illegally crossing in a year. They are overwhelmed.

May I remind you, the mayor of New York is worried about an additional 40 to 50,000 people in New York City and having a difficult time absorbing that. Yuma, AZ, is trying to figure out how to absorb 310,000 people coming through their community.

The issues are complicated and they are difficult, but they are not unachievable. It is an issue of how are we going to enforce the law.

Now, I would tell you that I have met with the Border Patrol many times over the years, and one of the things they will often talk to me about is that they finally get a break each December because, typically, of Christmas, quite frankly, not as many people cross illegally during Christmastime. They stay home with families. And so December is usually a down month for illegal crossings, and it is year after year after year, until this year.

This year, there was a record number of people illegally crossing in December. So instead of going down, it actually went up when a quarter million people illegally crossed our southwest border in 1 month. That was last month, in December, a quarter million people.

This is a growing issue that requires attention, and it is not just the people this year. It is also all the other complications that come with it, because the Border Patrol is very clear: While we are managing this massive number of people coming from all over the world across that border, we can't go interdict drugs, we can't go interdict other things because we don't have the manpower to be able to do both.

So, again, last month, drug seizures in the United States increased 17.5 percent. In 1 month, it went up. This is an issue that requires real focus, and my concern is that the numbers are so large and it is so out of control that people are just saying: It is too big. I am not going to deal with it.

But the chaos along our border is continuing.

Now, the administration has made some bold statements of late. They said we are going to dramatically increase the number of people who are going to have expedited removal attached to them. Now, that sounds really severe--``expedited removal.'' They are going to have extradited removal when they get there. Except, when we ran the numbers to be able to look at it, at how many people are actually removed who get expedited removal, the number came back 7 percent.

So expedited removal doesn't actually mean removal. It is just a title that is being placed on individuals. So nothing is really changing there.

And as I mentioned before, these are not just individuals from Central America or from Mexico. These are individuals coming from all over the world.

When our bipartisan codel was down on the border a few weeks ago, we watched two individuals who had just been picked up by mounted patrol as they were running across the border. But they were not running faster than the mounted patrol, which was able to catch up with them, and they were able to arrest them. Those two individuals were Chinese nationals who were making their way across the border illegally at night, running from the Border Patrol.

People from all over the world are coming because there is an invitation to illegally cross the border. People are coming right now because it is actually easier to get a job in America. If you are living in another country and you want to work in America, it is easier to get a job in America if you illegally cross.

That is not just me saying that. That is the data saying that. If you are outside the United States and you apply for a work visa and want to be able to come in in a legal, normal process, to be able to go through, currently it is 6\1/2\ months to be able to get that work visa--6\1/2\ months. But if you illegally cross our border and you are labeled with ``parole''--and the mass number of people are labeled with ``parole'' when they illegally cross our border--you get a work permit within 3 to 4 weeks. So you could legally do this and wait 6\1/2\ months or you could illegally do this and you get it in 3 to 4 weeks. Literally, this administration is incentivizing illegal activity with how they are setting up the work permits.

Listen, there are a lot of things this Congress needs to do to be able to deal with illegal immigration. I have stated over and over and over again that the asylum laws need to change. We have got to do a real fix. This is the issue, and it has been multiple administrations that have said that this is the problem. In fact, this administration, just in the last month, has floated the idea of changing the regulation on how they actually handle asylum, and I have affirmed them for that. That has got to change in the way it is being implemented. It also needs to change in law in the way we handle it here.

But there is also the legal process of actually enforcing our laws on the southern border that will make a significant difference not incentivizing individuals to be able to illegally cross our border. There are things the administration can do, and they are not doing currently. There are things that this body needs to do that we have not taken up.

Two hundred and fifty thousand people illegally crossed our southwest border last month. When are we going to act on this problem? It needs to be now.

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