This is Later with Lee Matthews The Lee Matthews Podcast more what you hear weekday
afternoons on the Drive. Senator James Lankort is joining me. Now, he
has been in this border battle since the beginning and it just keeps getting worse
and worse. Senator, Now, there is word that negotiations have begun,
but let's start with what exactly you are trying to negotiate. We're trying to
negotiate control at the border and to stop to be able to chaos. If
I can put it in a simple way, we've seen now ten thousand people
a day a crossing the border. We're approaching three hundred thousand people a month,
to give you just a perspective how crazy it's become. The last two
months, we've had more people across illegally than there were in any single year
during the Obama administration. So it is absolutely spiraling out of control. So
we're trying to be able to get this back into control. That's changing how
we do asylum. That's doing more people being detained, actually going through the
screenings and mandating that. It's allowing some ability to say we can handle any
more. Capacity wise, we've got to be able to turn people around.
It's whatever it takes to be able to regain control of our own border.
So the United States runs our border, not criminal cartels from Mexico. Well,
then what is the administration negotiating? I mean, you would think that
they would at least want some sort some sorts of border security. Yeah.
I don't get it either. On it. The only thing I can possibly
think of is they want to flood so many people across the border that at
some point Republicans will say, we'll trade you border security for amnesty for everybody
here, which is just not rational. We've been very focused on the border
security. It's not that Republicans or Conservatives are opposed immigration. We just want
legal immigration, not illegal immigration. That shouldn't be hard. Let's do legal
immigration. But anything that begins with the word I go. Why would we
not be opposed to that. Let's get an orderly process, it's not chaotic.
Well, even under the former administration, the Obama administration, the process
was a lot more orderly than this. Oh yeah, it definitely was.
It was moretally than this. But you remember, during the first term of
the Obama administration, we really didn't see the chaos of the border. It
started rising in the second term. What happened in the second term is a
lot of these cartels started experimenting with if we flood a lot of people over
the border at one time and all asked for asylum, what would happen.
And what they found is they can break the system. So prior to really
the first the second term of the Obama administration, most of the people that
came across the border were single adult males coming from Mexico that were coming in
to try to be able to work. That was largely what was happening,
and we started seeing more people from Honduras, Guatemala, l Salvador coming,
also mostly single adult males. But during the second term, we started seeing
the cartels actually bringing a lot of people with families and would ask for asylum.
When they ask for asylum, there weren't enough asylum judges, there weren't
enough enough asylum officers, there wasn't enough bedspace to be able to actually do
it, and so they started getting released into the country to say Okay,
we'll do your hearing later. Well, once the later happened, then we
started going from five hundred to one thousand to five thousand suddenly coming across the
border, all asking for asylum, and the hearing's got layer and layer later.
Now we have two million people that are in the backlog of waiting an
asylum hearing. These folks don't qualify for asylum. Everyone knows it. Everyone
knows their game in the system and trying to break it just to be able
to get across the border and to be able to get in. Many of
these individuals, the administration is giving a work permit to them, which incentivizes
even more people to be able to come. So we've got to address this
issue of what is asylum, what is not asylum, Who gets a work
permit and who does not, and how do we get back to an orderly
process in this You shouldn't get a work permit simply for walking across the border,
demanding something that everyone knows you don't actually qualify for. Senator James Langfort
is with us. So we're talking about the chaos at the border. So
what are the Democrats willing to negotiate, Well, they're talking about all of
it now because we've demanded it. The focus has been on national security.
If we're going to do funding for Israel, and for Ukraine and for Taiwan,
which are key international national security issues. We're not going to talk about
those things until we're talking about our own national security. And so I have
pressed very hard to say I'm not negotiating any of those other things until we
actually secure our border. That's been two months in the process to get to
that. Just in the last week the White House has joined in to be
able to say, Okay, we're here, We'll admit there's a national security
problem. It's actually worked to be able to resolve it. So we're making
some productive steps at this point to try to figure out how do we actually
get us back into something that's a manageable process at our border, and how
do we actually secure that. Well, then the conversation begins how long that
will take? I keep here, colleagues say at least in too next year.
Oh yeah, there's no texts that we're looking at. We've had folks
they are you're going to vote later this week, and I've just laughed and
said, I vote on what there's no agreed upon text. You actual act
have text in front of you to actually vote on something. Says no way
to do that. Also, immigration law is incredibly technical, so it's not
something that you can just right overnight. It takes a long time to be
able to pull the details of that together. So we're still negotiating through a
lot of the big issues. Once we get resolution on the big issues,
then we've got to be able to get text that we can all agree on
and say that actually works and lines up of what we're trying to do,
and then to be able to inform everybody of what's actually in it. And
in the meantime, Senator laying for the border just stays open. The last
three days, we've had more than ten thousand people a day that have illegally
across our border. That is somewhere between six to eight thousand people a day
that are just being released in the country, basically unscreened, that they're just
told go show up at some future hearing date and we'll screen you at that
point when you qualify for asylum. But it's just thousands every day, and
they're not just from the Western Hemisphere. We're getting now thousands and thousands of
people from Africa, from the Middle East, from Pakistan, from Russia,
from China. We're having tens of thousands of people this administration is calling national
security risk. The official designation is special interest migrants, with tens of thousands
of those that have crossed in the past year that the administration has said there's
just no room to hold them, and so they're being released into the country.
That has got to stop. And so my focus now is how do
we get to an agreement, how do we make this stop so that we
can stop having this kind of national security crisis on our border. Day of
to day, Senator James Langford with US in Washington, we're talking about the
chaos at the border. What are some of the solutions, some of the
proposals, some of the ideas well. First things first, you got to
actually if somebody's going to request asylum, they've got to actually do that request
at the border. They've got to get a hearing at the border, and
that's got to be rapid. And when a decision is made they don't qualify
for asylum, they've got to get turned around and head right back to their
home country again. As soon as you do that, people stop coming.
Because right now people are coming paying a cartel knowing that if I pay the
cartel, I'm going to get in As soon as you find out I pay
the cartel, I don't get in, people will stop paying cartels in coming
to be able to do that again. Asylum is really a high bar.
People think asylum you can just come in and say I'm afraid and that gets
you asylum. That's actually not true. You've got to show there is no
safe place in my home country that I could go. That's a safe place
for me to be. Literally, the federal government in that country is after
me, and there's nowhere else I could go to receive a protection other than
here. Well, it's a pretty high bar. Very few people actually qualify
for that. But the problem is the hearing for that is not for years,
and so people are willing to take the risk. If you put that
hearing right at the border as soon as you cross and determine you actually don't
qualify, then fly them back to their home country. The message we'll get
out and hurry Well, Senator James Langford, I know this is a stretch,
but it seems to me that if we don't do something soon, we're
going to be faced with a situation not unlike Israel and Gaza. Yeah,
I would tell you that just on October the seventh. I had a lot
of people that were just overwhelmingly grieved by that terrorist attack in Israel for good
reason. It is absolutely terrible, but also had a lot of folks that
said, we have a porous border, what are we doing about that?
So you're not the first to be able to attach the two on that to
say there is a real threat there. We forget sometimes that the nine to
eleven terrasts were people that were not legally present in the country. They didn't
come across our southern border, but they had oversetateed a visa and they were
currently not legally present. We have also picked up over two hundred people in
the past few months that are on our terror watch lists that came across our
southern border that we were able to interdict. So this is not some conspiracy
out there that there could be folks coming after us. There are because we've
arrested some of them and picked them up as they're coming across the border of
folks that have terror connections, and we know full well that Hesbalah and Hamas
is continuing to be able to activate people, and with a very poorest border,
it's an easy route to be able to get in Senator James Langford.
This isn't a very pleasant topic or of a pleasant conversation, but I do
wish you and your family a very pleasant Christmas. Well, Merry Christmas.
Everybody working, continue work. There's a lot that's got to get done on
this and my focus is best thing we can do for Christmas for the nation
is a secure nations border in the start of the new year, so let's
get it done. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee
Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five
to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation