Oklahoma GOP Censures Sen. Lankford Over Border Deal With Democrats
Lankford claims the details of the bill floating around the internet are not true: “It would be absolutely absurd for me to agree” to release 5,000 illegal immigrants every day.
The Oklahoma Republican Party censured Sen. James Lankford over his border deal with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“Whereas, Senator Lankford playing fast and loose with Democrats on our border policy not only disenfranchises legal immigrants seeking citizenship but it also puts the safety and security of Americans in great danger,” wrote the Oklahoma GOP Party.
The Oklahoma GOP won’t support Lankford until he “ceases from these actions.”
“Resolution Condemning & Censoring Senator Lankford’s Open Border Deal” as approved by the OKGOP State Committee members on January 27, 2024. pic.twitter.com/peVqHAfIpt
— Dusty Deevers (@DustyDeevers) January 27, 2024
Melody Huckaby Rowlett, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma (or, as I call it…that school in Norman), told KOCO the resolution didn’t have support from everyone in the party.
“It may have been a faction of the Republican Party in the state of Oklahoma,” Rowlett explained.
Oklahoma Young Republicans Chairwoman Taylor Broyles said no one notified the committee of the meeting to censure Lankford:
“When you all found out about it is the same time when I found out about it. It’s something that caught us as an organization off guard,” Broyles said.
Broyles’ organization has a voting seat on the State Committee.
“To me, it’s disappointing we are attacking someone like that. He has done so much for Oklahoma in general,” Broyles said. “We have to work bipartisan deals. That’s just part of it.”
OKGOP Vice Chairman Wayne Hill claimed everyone on the State Committee attended the meeting: “Today’s meeting was attended by 172 active Republicans from all across Oklahoma. The 124 voting members of the State Committee resoundingly approved this resolution and others as their first official act of the 2024 election year.”
The details of the bill have outraged conservatives because it would allow 35,000 illegal immigrants into the country every week.
The Title 42 authority in the bill would only happen at the southern border if agents encountered over 5,000 migrants a day:
Daily encounters between 4,000 and 5,000 would allow for discretionary expulsions, and any single day where there were over 8,000 encounters, expulsions would be mandated even if the 7-day average was lower. Those expulsions would also be exempted from judicial review.
The use of humanitarian parole at the border by the administration would also be restricted, but migrants could still be paroled in if they cite humanitarian reasons. Those restrictions are not expected to include parole programs in which migrants are flown in, such as those for Afghans and Ukrainians, as well as the Cuban Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan (CHNV) parole program — which allows 30,000 migrants to fly in to be paroled each month, as part of the administration’s “expanded lawful pathways.”
One source familiar with the proposal said that the time asylum seekers would need to wait for a work permit would be cut from 180 days to 90 in some cases. Also expected to be in the bill is a proposal to grant work permits to children of legal temporary visa holders, including H-1B workers, who turn 21 while in the country. Those foreign nationals have been dubbed “Documented Dreamers” by activists, and it could affect up to a quarter of a million people.
Other additions include an increase in ICE detention beds to 55,000, as well as funding for facilities and additional border officers — something the Biden administration has requested — as well as legal assistance to unaccompanied children in the country.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the bill. A handful of Republican senators said they won’t support the bill.
Sen. Ted Cruz described it as “a kamikaze plane in a box canyon with no exits headed for a train wreck” and a “stinking pile of bull crap.”
“This bill is not designed to fix the problem. This bill normalizes 5,000 people a day coming in,” stated Cruz. “5,000 people a day is over 1.8 million a year. That’s called an invasion by the way. Under Joe Biden we’ve had 9.6 million. So the great Republican compromise is we’re for two thirds of Joe Biden’s open borders. We’ll let in 6 million instead of 9 million.”
Lankford told Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday that the bill does not allow 5,000 people in every day:
“The challenge that Sen. Cruz has and a bunch of other folks is they’re still waiting to be able to read the bill on this. And this has been our great challenge of being able to fight through the final words, to be able to get the bill text out so people can hear it. Right now there’s internet rumors is all that people are running on. It would be absolutely absurd for me to agree to 5,000 people a day,” Lankford told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream. “This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day. There’s no amnesty.”
Lankford argued the bill increases the number of Border Patrol agents, increases asylum officers, and increases detention beds “so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.”
“It ends catch and release. It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so that people get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard and then get returned back to their home country. This is not about letting 5,000 people in a day,” he said. “This is the most misunderstood section of this proposal.”
House Republicans already said the bill is dead on arrival:
[House Majority Leader Steve] Scalise’s chief of staff, Brett Horton, emphasized that if the Senate bill includes some of the details that have leaked to the public, such as expedited work permits or enhanced expulsion authority that would only kick in after migrant border crossings exceed 5,000 people a day, it won’t have any chance of passing the House.
A person familiar with his comments noted that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Scalise have said publicly in recent days that if some of the proposals being publicly reported end up in the final Senate bill, then it’s dead on arrival.
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Comments
There is no need for a new “border security deal”. All we need is for the federal government to actually do its job and seal the borders, repelling all invaders.
We also need governments at all levels to close the Welfare State for the illegal aliens. They should receive no benefits of any kind, including food, housing, healthcare, education, work permits, driver’s licenses, etc.
Yep. All the tools are already available to enforce that fact that the USA has an actual border and laws and rules and other such things.
Lankford and post turtle Mitch McConnell in “The Gang of Eight Rides Again”!! You can never hold cowardly traitors down.
I don’t even know what to say about the dirtbags and treasonous scum in the Senate GOP … and the fact that the slightly animated corpse of Mitch McConnell is still the GOP leader … It makes my blood boil.
Well they have to
Compete with the skeleton of Biden
There should be no ‘deals’ with Democrats until the pedophile retard grifter enforces existing law.
Wow, the spin from Langford is actually comical. The fact that he’s trying to lie about a bill, WITHOUT RELEASING THE TEXT, tells you everything you need to know about this scumbag RINO.
You know how you counter ‘misinformation’ about a bill? You release the full text and let people read it.
Any number other than 0 is crap, Langford.
What, exactly makes you think that they will accurately report the numbers?
The Democrats will just lie about how many there are. There would be an awful lot of days with 4,9XX illegals, then months later they would ‘revise’ the numbers just like the labor numbers.
And this crap of ‘shutting it down’ after a certain number is ADMITTING that they could shut it down whenever they wanted.
Langford is complete RINO scum, and anybody that supports this bill needs to be thrown out immediately.
Exactly. Release the bullet point highlights if nothing else. This episode w/ Lankford is a prime example of how repeal of the 17th amendment would be useful. Senator misbehaved and/or PO the State Legislature? Oops you get replaced. It eliminates the overwhelming advantages of incumbency and works to foil the ability of the DC establishment to game Senate primary elections to produce their favored candidate in Red States.
Brandon doesn’t need more laws to rein in illegal immigration. He has plenty of existing laws to do do. Furthermore, even if this misbegotten law is passed, what assurance do we have that it will be enforced by this demented excuse for a President? What the law would do is hamstring a future President from declaring an emergency at the border, and that might be its real aim. McConnell and Co., should hang their heads in shame for pushing this, but they won’t.
Phases of the Overton window (Dem style)
-Dems do something to break immigration by breaking the law
-Dems run around broadcasting panic with demand to ‘do something’
-Responsible Republicans propose actually propose enforcing the law
-Backstabbing Republicans get together with happy Dems to pass legislation that allows even more illegal immigration
-Responsible Republicans block it. <- We are here
-Dems bemoan that the evil Responsible Republicans have broken the system, and only more Dems in Congress can fix the issue they broke.
Pig meet lipstick. That Okie Boy can’t hunt.
The bill is just designed to allow the Democrats to say they acted on the border in a bipartisan manner thus taking away the issue for the elections.
After passing then the media can tell the great unwashed to shut up that their betters agree that mass migration from everywhere by anyone is fine and noble.
Anything to stop
President Trump
Even giving the country away to 3rd world thugs
It’s all about protecting the graft and theft of the US Treasury. As always, ITS ALL ANOUT THE MONEY.
gonzotx,
The reach of this effort goes far beyond Trump and the 2024 election. This is primarily intended to codify the current amnesty policies of the Biden WH, replace current provisions of law and in essence lock in larger amounts of legal immigration (by increasing total # and by decriminalization). It locks in a future funding requirement to support all these new ‘immigrants’ son of which flows through various d/prog, lefty NGO who just coincidentally happen to support Biden.
It is also intended in 2024 election to remove or least mitigate the issue of ‘border security’. While that obviously applies to DJT it isn’t limited to him. It also works eliminate or mitigate the objections of every candidate for Senate, HoR, Gov, Legislature, DA, Judge, Sheriff, Mayor County Commissioner or dog catcher who opposes open borders.
The border is the shiny squirrel. What is important to our Overlords is the billions of funding for Ukraine that is entangled in that bill.
I’m not sure that’s correct. If that were correct, they’d simply cave on Immigration. But, you’ll notice that they haven’t caved on immigration…far from it. I think both issues are very important to the ruling class.
It’s an election year, the plebs are watching.
IMO what’s happening here is the Biden Admin using Ukraine and increased military spending to trigger the Pavlovian response among some on the center right gain either direct support or to offer the fig leaf excuse of DC sausage making by rinos. ‘Hey we don’t have a Senate majority so we gotta make a compromise and this turd is the best we can get’.
The uni party establishment uses this tactic all the time. See the linkage between farm subsidies and welfare spending as one example.
Unfortunately a large number of folks still believe in the neocon vision or allow themselves to be hoodwinked by it. ‘Hey we gotta defend the rules based international order by protecting the sea lanes’. aka globalization that sent US manufacturing jobs overseas so the products being traded globally ain’t generally made in the USA.
Don’t believe me? Look at US GDP and subtract services and govt spending. What’s left, and it isn’t much, are the products we actually export. Basically what’s left is wheat, corn, soybeans, other AG products along with Oil + Nat Gas. Not for nothing but the Biden admin just halted permits for construction of the terminals and pipelines required to ramp up LNG exports.
McConnell supports this? AUTOMATIC REJECTION!
Whatever the bill says, Biden won’t enforce any limits. His policy and that of his party is Open Borders.
Some of the worst, least reliably conservative legislatures are produced by the most reliably conservative states. It’s insane. From Tim Scott and Lindsay Graham to Capito in WV and now obviously Lankford in OK, we produced some horrible representation. Lankford had a couple primary challengers in 2022…who went absolutely nowhere. Maybe the Republicans in OK will finally wake up and throw this bum out in a few years (I think he’s up again in 2026).
The fact that he grew up in Dallas and graduated from leftist UT Austin should have been clues he was not conservative.
It’s an amnesty deal, expands handouts to illegals and codifies 1.8 million a year into some weird legal status.
End all benefits, deport on contact
We never needed anything new. Just enforce the goddamn laws we already have.
If they can clamp down on the influx after over 5,000 a day for a while, why can’t they clamp down on the influx immediately.
If clamping down on the folks over the threshold is legal, moral, and necessary, why is clamping down on folks under that headcount not legal, moral, and necessary?
So many questions.
And that’s only IF you believe they would actually report factual numbers.
What would ACTUALLY happen is they’d keep doing the same thing, report a whole host of days with ~4900, and then a month or two later ‘revise’ the numbers just like they do with the labor statistic lies.
This is like the negotiation between John Kerry and Arafat. Arafat said “Death to all Jews” and Kerry replied, “Can’t we meet in the middle?” That’s how Republicans negotiate!
Lankford has really made his voters look like complete fools.
“a kamikaze plane in a box canyon with no exits headed for a train wreck”
Good grief. Ted “mixed metaphors” Cruz. He throws in the tautology for free.
even if the “let” trump win in 2024
they have torn this country up so bad andddd the swamp continues to operate with impunity
that we will still be 4 paces to the left of biden