Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax on Thursday that the United States has to make the asylum system "dramatically different" in order to improve border security.
Lankford, during an interview on "National Report," described the southern border as "one of the key areas of vulnerability for the United States," and ripped the Biden administration for not doing more to secure it.
"If we're talking about national security items, one of the key areas of vulnerability for the United States is our own southern border and how open it is," the senator said.
He added, "2.5 million people have crossed that we know of this year, a million and a half people that have crossed, what are called got-aways, in the last three years. We have no idea who they are and what they're doing. So this is an obvious area of vulnerability. Everybody sees it."
Lankford went on to say that the Biden administration has "asked for more money for the border to be able to process people faster in and we just said no. We will sit down with you and talk about what we're gonna do on actual border security and actually changing the direction of where we're going, not just trying to be able to patch a bad problem."
He later added, "It's actually not dollars that are going to secure the border, it's policy changes. We've got to handle the way we do asylum. That's got to be dramatically different."
Lankford noted that "10 years ago, 21,000 people a year … would cross our southern border asking for asylum. 21,000 a year. Now we have that every three days, so we've got to close the loophole, it's being exploited by cartels and it's being allowed by this administration."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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