Dear Oklahoma friends and neighbors:
On Sunday, July 21, I had the opportunity to conduct an oversight visit of our immigration and border security facilities on the southern border with Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. I requested the tour in order to hear firsthand from the women and men serving on the ground, conduct oversight of facility conditions and operations, and further assess the areas Congress needs to address in our immigration laws.
CLICK HERE to watch a five-minute video summary of our southern border trip.
Locations of Oversight Tour
Near McAllen, TX, we visited the Hidalgo Port of Entry, a large pedestrian access and processing point on the border, where we assessed pedestrian processing, which includes the use of biometrics, vehicle and bus arrivals to the Port, and admissibility processing at the Port, where the Office of Field Operations can assess credible fear, determine a minor’s status as an unaccompanied alien child (known as UACs), process family units, and help determine guardianship for minors. We had the opportunity to see the Donna Holding facility, which is a "soft-sided" temporary facility used to process family units who cross the border between ports of entry.
At the MCS "bubble" and processing facility, I was grateful to be able to meet and thank our federal border law enforcement for their tireless work amid unprecedented migration to our southern border.
We toured the Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center, a hard-sided facility used to house and process migrant children and families when they are apprehended between ports.
After visiting the international bridge that carries thousands of people legally crossing into the US each day, it was ironic to see the makeshift processing center for 1,500 to 2,000 individuals crossing illegally on a daily basis. I walked the pedestrian and vehicle crossing area at McAllen and saw the security features and the constant legal movement of people from Mexico into the US.
Why Is There a Humanitarian Crisis at the Southern Border?
The US has the most open immigration system in the world. There are many different ways to cross our borders legally. In fact, 500,000 people cross the US-Mexico border legally every single day. Our border is not difficult to cross legally, but cartels in Mexico have created a multi-billion dollar business of moving people illegally across our border. The record number of men traveling with a child has created a massive influx of illegal migrants with nowhere to hold them. A facility in McAllen, which was built during the Obama Administration and designed to hold up to 1,500 people for a short time, is instead holding more than 1,500 people for days or weeks. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has also constructed a temporary soft-sided facility to hold thousands of family units, but the problem persists because individuals continue to illegally cross the border and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities are at capacity. As a result, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been forced to take on the mission to house these individuals.
I dropped in on multiple processing and housing facilities along the border; all of them had shelves full of food, water, clothing, and hygiene products. Each facility had medical care, showers, washers and dryers, and phones for migrants to contact their home countries' consulates.
I visited supply rooms at each facility, and they were well stocked. This supply room was at the Donna soft-sided facility.
I saw toothbrushes, toothpaste, and other hygiene products available at these facilities. I also saw people brushing and waiting to brush their teeth.
Our border facilities were designed for single individuals, mostly from Mexico, who could be processed and returned to their home countries quickly if they had no legal justification to be in the US. In just the Rio Grande Valley area, people from more than 63 countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Bangladesh, China, Yemen, Pakistan, Cuba, Venezuela, and many Asian and African countries have been apprehended this year. This is not just a Central America problem. The southern border has become a conduit for many other areas of the world—and the cartels in Mexico facilitate human trafficking as their business practice.
Now the border holding areas are filled with adults from all over the world, many of them having arrived with a child. Sometimes the child is traveling with his or her mom or dad; sometimes he or she is traveling with an adult family member or someone from his or her village. But sometimes small children are being "rented" by smugglers to help adult males cross the border more easily. Children continue to be abandoned or face severe conditions in the desert. This problem needs to be addressed by Congress. Only Congress can close the child migrant loopholes that encourage child smuggling.
When a person is apprehended by CBP, criminal background information is requested from his or her home country, but it often takes a long time to receive it. In cases involving a family unit, an adult could be released into our country before law enforcement learns he or she has a criminal record in his or her home country or that he or she is fleeing a criminal warrant for arrest. We must be able to hold individuals longer than 20 days, regardless of their age, because of the time it takes to get criminal information from other countries.
When insufficient funding was provided for ICE detention beds, thousands of people quickly backed up in CBP temporary holding areas. The snowball effect of refusing to properly fund ICE, coupled with the flood of migrants gaming the immigration law that forces border personnel to release within 20 days adults who cross the border with a child, has created a serious humanitarian crisis. CBP is now essentially conducting the mission of ICE to hold migrants while their next step is evaluated. Border Patrol agents are doing everything they can to manage a humanitarian crisis they are neither designed nor equipped to handle.
Ride-Along with Border Patrol
Since the cartels often wait until the sun sets to smuggle people and drugs into the country, one of our most eye-opening experiences was a night-time ride-along on the southern border to assess security protocols for monitoring the border in the dark. As I rode along with our border law enforcement at night, I personally watched a group of adults traveling with children move across the border. Then moments later, while law enforcement was processing the family units, a different group of single adult males unsuccessfully tried to slip past border patrol a mile away. Later in the evening, the border patrol agents were simultaneously interdicting family units on the road, a group of single men working through the swampy cane fields, and a raft of narcotics crossing the river. The helicopter that was providing critical information to the agents on the ground as they pursued those illegally crossing was called away to help with drug interdiction. The lack of manpower to holistically address what is happening at the border is hindering our ability to successfully secure the border and care for those in need.
Actually seeing our border law enforcement in action was very helpful in enabling us to assess the scope of the security threats we face daily on our southern border. This was taken at the border wall near McAllen, TX.
After spending all day and part of the night at the busiest illegal border crossing area in America (accounting for 40 percent of all illegal crossings), I am grateful again for the career law enforcement professionals that serve our nation every day. The women and men who work to protect our nation from illegal drug smuggling and human trafficking, also facilitate billions of dollars of legal trade. Our federal immigration and border security officials have a dangerous, difficult—and at this time of year hot—job. The only complaint I heard from any federal agent protecting our country was their consistent frustration that some in Washington and the national media continue to tell a false story about them and their work.
None of them claimed that law enforcement was always above reproach, but all of them could tell stories about lives they have saved, drugs they have interdicted, and ways they have personally served poor families as they illegally cross into the US. I do not understand why some of my colleagues have chosen to demonize our federal law enforcement, instead of helping them with the legal tools they need to protect our country.
How Do We Solve Our Border Security and Immigration Issues?
We can either ignore the problem and assist the cartels or we can address the problem and stop child smuggling and human trafficking. It is time to address the serious legal and funding problems at our southern border.
I remain a vocal advocate for fixing our broken immigration system, including issues within the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), our inefficient and lengthy asylum process, and issues arising from the Flores settlement. Recently, I joined a letter to President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan, and Attorney General William Barr to urge the implementation of Operation Safe Return—a pilot program using existing law and authorities to rapidly, accurately, and fairly determine and process credible fear claims.
In a June Homeland Security hearing, I questioned DHS and ICE officials and shared his frustration that Congress clearly knows what the issues are and yet is inactive to fix them at this point. I supported supplemental humanitarian aid to provide funding to DHS and the Departments of Defense and Justice to address the humanitarian crisis at the southern border.
I previously questioned Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan on the agency’s plan to address the rapidly growing humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. I will continue to push Congress to address issues with the legal loopholes for the immigration system. In April, I helped reintroduce the bipartisan Responsibility for Unaccompanied Minors Act, which requires the Department of Health and Human Services to keep better track of and care for unaccompanied minors.
I will continue to press for a legislative solution to the issues we face now and in the long term at our borders and in our broken immigration processes. We should continue to facilitate legal immigration, but we must stop incentivizing human smugglers and drug cartels to exploit vulnerable people through loopholes in our laws.
In God We Trust,
James Lankford
United States Senator for Oklahoma
Stay Connected!
If you would like more information on these topics, please do not hesitate to call my D.C. office at (202) 224-5754. My Oklahoma City office can be reached at (405) 231-4941 and my Tulsa office at (918) 581-7651. You can also follow me on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram for updates on my work in Congress.
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