For some reason, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) did a little media tour this week trying to rehabilitate his image on immigration after President Donald Trump has conclusively shown that despite what Lankford said all last year, no new legislation was needed to secure the southern border, all we needed was a new president who had the courage to enforce existing immigration laws on the book.
As part of his little media campaign, Lankford sat for an interview with CBS News, during which he was asked if he thought we would be better off today if his border bill had passed or if we are better off now that it didn’t pass and we have a different president.
“It should have passed,” Lankford responded. “It would have fixed a lot of the loopholes that are in the law, and it would have been easier to be able to do enforcement now.”
This is all bunk. I still don’t think Lankford understands what his bill actually would have done.
First, let’s put aside the “emergency” border powers that would have been given to then-President Joe Biden in the legislation. Those were always temporary and were set to disappear after just two years. Furthermore, they never would have forced Biden to do anything because the law also made it clear Biden could ignore the border emergency whenever he wanted.
This does not mean that Lankford’s border bill was toothless. Quite the opposite. The Lankford border bill was the most radical, far-left, open-borders legislation ever. And here is why.
Under current law, when a migrant is arrested by Border Patrol for illegally crossing the southern border, the government is required to either detain that migrant or return the migrant across the border, where the migrant can wait until his or her asylum claim is heard by an immigration judge.
However, starting in 2014, migrant smugglers figured out that by surging migrants to the border in specific places, they could overwhelm the Border Patrol detention capacity, forcing Border Patrol to release migrants into the United States.
Trump solved this problem in 2019 by creating the Remain in Mexico program, which chose the latter option, forcing migrants to wait in Mexico until an immigration judge could hear their claims.
Biden, however, ended the Remain in Mexico program on his first day in office. Instead of detaining migrants or returning them to Mexico, Biden simply released them into the U.S. using his “parole” power. When Congress amended the parole statute in 1996, lawmakers were specifically limiting it to emergency situations, such as pregnant women, in which migrants would be granted entrance to the U.S. temporarily, for medical care, and then returned to detention in the country they came from after the emergency was over. The parole power was never meant to be a way for a president to just wave millions of illegal immigrants into the country, but that is how Biden used it.
Lankford’s bill would have essentially codified Biden’s use of parole. Instead of detaining migrants or returning them to Mexico like Trump did, Lankford’s bill created a brand new “noncustodial removal process.” Under this new system, migrants who even just slightly indicated they were afraid to be returned to their home country would be placed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “alternative to detention” program.
“Alternative to detention” is just a fancy way of saying “released into the country with an ankle bracelet.” It is the exact same program Jose Ibarra’s brother was enrolled in before he cut off his ankle bracelet somewhere in Colorado, before he moved to Georgia, where Jose Ibarra killed Laken Riley.
So not only would the Lankford bill have done nothing to stop the Biden border crisis or save Riley’s life, it would have legalized the very loophole Biden was using to let illegal immigrants into the country.
Instead of “closing loopholes” as Lankford says his bill does, it actually would give future Democratic presidents the legal authority to allow as many illegal immigrants into the country as they want through this new “noncustodial removal process.”
Lankford has never served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration, and hopefully, he never will. He is not experienced on the issue and doesn’t understand immigration law. The Biden White House took complete advantage of him on the issue last year. He should be embarrassed, and he should never talk about immigration ever again.