Lankford Speaks on Biden Administration’s Lack of Law Enforcement at the Border, IRS leaks, Keystone Pipeline, And More

06.10.21

CLICK HERE to watch Lankford's remarks on YouTube.

WASHINGTON, DC - Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today spoke on the Senate floor to give an update on what's happening at the southern border and to provide his perspective on the recently reported apparent leak from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of sensitive taxpayer information. Lankford also discussed President Biden's affinity for Russian pipelines over Canadian-American ones and Ukrainian President Zelensky's outspoken requests to meet with President Biden that have gone unanswered. Additionally, Lankford discussed the hearing he attended this morning in the Senate Finance Committee to discuss the President's Budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, during which Lankford highlighted that the request refers to moms as 'birthing people.'

Excerpts

On the uptick in border crossings and the Biden Administration releasing individuals into the country

Days ago President Biden and his team released out what's the current status of what they call the border challenge. This comes from the White House itself and their update. They stated this. 'There's improved processing of unaccompanied children.' The second thing they list is the Administration has reduced the average amount of time children are in Customs and Border Protection facilities. The third thing they list is the Administration has reduced the number of unaccompanied children in the care of health and human services. Then they move and say they've removed barriers to unifying children with parents and sponsors in the United States. And they give the details on how much better they are at unifying parents and children in the United States. When you read through this and look at the language, you say, gosh, the numbers are going down. What they're really saying in this report is, 'We're moving people across the border faster than they used to. They don't spend as much time at the border as they used to. They're now in the interior of the country…

On the mixed messages being sent to Central Americans because of Vice President Harris's visit

For the Vice President to come to Guatemala and say, 'Don't come, don't come,' but then for the Administration to say, 'But if you do come, we're a lot faster at getting you into the country than we used to be.' This is the mixed signal problem. And it's why coyotes continue to be able to move record numbers of people through central America into the interior of the country, and it's not just from central America. We've had this year a more than 400 percent increase in migration from nations outside of the northern triangle and Mexico because the coyotes are learning, we know how to move people and the world is seeing, if you want to be able to come to America illegally, now is the time to do it. So if you go back to March, we had all these individuals that were coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Now there is a 400 percent increase of people from outside those areas that are coming in those same trafficking networks moving into the United States.

On the Biden Administration's decision to not enforce the law at our southern border

What are we doing? 3,000 people have been deported in our country in a month, and individuals literally selling heroin and attacking our police officers. ICE is not allowed to deport individuals in this country that are currently pending charges on sexual abuse of a child are not being deported, not even a detainer to be able to hold them. Is this what America wanted? It's certainly not what the people of Oklahoma want. It certainly does not strengthen the morale of our ICE agents who currently cannot make an arrest or a Border Patrol, and our Customs and Border Patrol individuals that function more like hotel check-in staff than they are law enforcement. This is not creating a stable environment in America. It is unstable. This has got to stop. This is not a radical request of the administration. It is a simple statement. Follow the law.

On the recently reported apparent IRS information leak

There's a new leaked document that came out, that was released by the press, of tax documents that have been leaked out of the IRS that somehow miraculously got to individuals in the press who ran the extensive story about tax documents. We can all have our different perspectives on how people pay taxes and how much taxes they pay, but one thing should be clear for every person in this body. It is against the law to release tax documents. It's against the law to do that. But somehow mysteriously tax documents start getting released in the last couple of weeks. This reminds me so much of a few years ago when the IRS was weaponized for political purposes, and Lois Lerner was shutting down conservative nonprofits getting access to nonprofit status but left-leaning nonprofits were expedited through, and we all expressed our frustration that the IRS was being politicized. The IRS should not be politicized.

On the Biden Administration's disdain for American-Canadian pipelines but support for Russian pipelines

We saw that during the Obama-Biden Administration as well and now we're seeing it in the Biden-Harris administration that suddenly pipelines are bad news. When the Colonial Pipeline went down for a couple of days, the east coast panicked because they couldn't get fuel, when one pipeline went down. We shouldn't be talking about how to not build pipelines. We should be talking about how to build pipeline redundancy to make sure if a pipeline goes down we're not trapped as Americans with no fuel, in the situation that we're in right now. But in the middle of this to be able to please the environmental left, the President of the United States shut down the Keystone Pipeline, and the company finally gave up and said, 'We're not going to invest any more money in something we can't finish.' Will that change? America's use of oil by one drop? No, it won't. America will use the exact same amount of oil that it used before. But what it will do is make it more expensive to be able to move oil from the northern part of the United States to the southern part of the United States to raise prices on all consumers. We'll still have a use of oil. It just raised prices….I was fascinated this week to be able to see President Zelensky of Ukraine find out about this pipeline shift which, by the way, dramatically affects Ukraine, when he read about it in the press, because the State Department and the administration didn't notify him that the pipeline that skips Ukraine and cuts them off, our administration, the Biden Administration, approved. President Zelensky stated to the press, he has reached out over and over to President Biden to get a meeting with him and can't get a meeting with him. When I read that, I had to laugh. I sat in this seat during an impeachment proceeding on President Trump because he wouldn't give a meeting to President Zelensky. President Zelensky is screaming in the media, 'I'm trying to get a hold of President Biden, and he won't meet with me, and he's benefiting Russia and cutting off Ukraine,' and everybody just yawns. It's quite remarkable to see the difference in how our media and how individuals treat everyone.

On HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra's strange avoidance of calling a mom a mom

Today I had the opportunity to be able to meet with our Secretary of HHS, Xavier Becerra. We were talking about the budget that he's presented out for HHS, which Is enormous. In fact, the President's budget is larger than any budget any president's ever given, not even close, In the overspending. The deficit total In It Is epic, almost $2 trillion In deficit just from the budget, not Including everything else this year. But In my conversation with Xavier Becerra, I asked him a simple question, 'I notice in your budget proposal you've changed a term that I'm not familiar with. You've added a term, and the term that you put In your budget is you refer to some people as a birthing person.' I said, 'I have to tell you, I don't know that term birthing person. What does that mean?' And he said, 'Well, I think it describes itself,' is what he said. I said 'What Is that? Is that a mom?' And he said, 'Well, yeah, that describes itself. It describes the function.' I thought the function? That's a woman that's a mom. That's not a birthing person. My simple question was, 'It sounds like you're trying to be politically correct here to be able to appease someone, but do you think it might possibly be offensive to some women and some moms to not be referred to as a woman or as a mom, to be referred to as a birthing person Instead?' And he just said, 'I'll look Into It.' Just when I think it can't get weirder around this town, and that terms can't get stranger, that's a new one on me.

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