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Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, three Senators started, about 8 months ago now, working to try to get some solutions on border security. It is for obvious reasons, because we have record high numbers over and over and over again at our southern border. We had a record high number in October, record high number in November, and record high number in December. In fact, December had the highest number of illegal crossings ever in the history of the country in a single day.
As of yesterday, we had about 5,200 people that illegally crossed yesterday. In fact, almost every day this year, we have had more than 5,000 illegally crossing day after day after day.
This is a very big issue that the American people want solved. It is a frustrating issue that we have not been able to get to a resolution on. It is an issue that people have been frustrated with President Biden because President Biden has not enforced the border the same way President Trump did or the same way President Obama did.
To be clear, this year we will have 2\1/2\ million people illegally cross the border. With the same law in place under President Obama, we had half a million people that illegally crossed that year.
And as I have raised over and over again with this administration, if they would just enforce the border the same way President Obama did, things would be very different. But they have chosen not to. They have chosen not to enforce it the same way President Trump did.
Instead, we have absolutely been overrun with people from literally all over the world. To put this in perspective, in the last 3 months, we have had more people illegally cross than any full year under President Obama.
They need to do what they can do. But Congress needs to do what we can do. We have got to change the definition of asylum. We have to change the appeals process. We have got to be able to speed up the process. We have got to provide more clarity so that we don't have people waiting around 8 years for a hearing. We can't just release people at the border, as what has happened day after day after day for years now. We can't have a brandnew parole program that the Biden administration literally invented that no President has ever used to release thousands of people a day. We can't have that.
We need to solve this in the administration. We need to solve this in Congress. I wish that is what we were doing today, but we are not.
When Senator Murphy and Senator Sinema and I started working on this months ago, we were working to solve it. We were not able to get that done.
But today is not a bill. Today is a prop. Today is a political messaging exercise. Today is an opportunity to be able to have a vote that is sitting out there so people can send fundraising emails out later tonight and say, ``Look, I tried to do something,'' when no work was actually done to try to get something done and completed and passed today.
In fact, I anticipate there will be fewer votes today than there were 2 months ago when this came up--on both sides of the aisle--because everyone sees this for what it is. It is not an effort to actually make law. It is an effort to do political messaging.
That doesn't help us as a country. We still have people that are illegally present here that need attention, and we are not getting it.
Now, we can say--Democrats can bring this bill up and say: Look, we tried to do something.
Well, so what. Republicans can do the same thing. We brought H.R. 2 twice. That has passed the House with a broad, sweeping piece of approval in the House to come over here to be able to change the way that actually asylum is done, the entire process. That has been voted down twice on a strictly partisan vote.
So we can have this vote today, and people can say: Well, Republicans voted against this; so it didn't pass.
Republicans can say: Democrats didn't vote for H.R. 2; so it didn't pass.
That still doesn't solve the problem. At the end of the day, the people in my State say: There is another 5,000 people that illegally crossed the border. Why aren't we sitting down and resolving this?
So, today, I am going to vote no on a bill that I think should pass, but there has been no effort to really get this to pass. Let's get us back to the table. Let's actually resolve this issue as we need to get done.
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