Oklahoma's senior senator spoke at the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce's annual D.C. Spotlight event on Friday, focusing on goals, priorities and what he sees on the horizon for Oklahomans from his vantage point in Washington, D.C.
Following that, Lankford answered questions from reporters.
Lankford says his plan involves a “reconciliation bill,” which don’t deal with the letter of the law. They primarily deal with money. More precisely, they are mandates to state agencies in need of cash to figure out how much they need to ask from Congress to accomplish a given goal, in this case, improved border security and immigration enforcement.
“So it will be focused on what we are doing to increase the border wall itself and the infrastructure around the border wall, increasing the number of border agents, increasing deportation flights, increasing detention space, increasing an area that no one is talking about called the National Vetting Center,” Lankford said.
The National Vetting Center is the small agency within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection that screens people’s eligibility to enter or remain in the country, and that the Biden administration has kept understaffed, Lankford said.
He explained the measure he has in mind could push the essential border security components of a failed bill he championed with bipartisan support in February, but without attaching them to urgent aid packages for Ukraine and Israel.
“That bill really had two big parts on it,” Lankford said. “One was fixing the broken aspects that we’ve got to be able to fix in the law, and the other one was withholding money from the administration until they actually used the authority they already had. We obviously don't need that part.”
There’s no question president-elect Trump will enforce the border, he said, so appropriating the money federal immigration authorities need to tackle their lack of intake and processing capacity at the southern border, should, ideally, relieve backlogs downstream in the legal process.
The specifics of the posited reconciliation bill are pending introduction and debate in Congress, he said.
He also said it won’t be an end-all-be-all solution to the state of immigration in the U.S. It’s not lost on him that resources are only half of the problem, U.S. immigration policy itself still needs an overhaul, he said.
“The asylum loophole is still a problem,” Lankford said. “A lot of the technical aspects that we are trying to fix in immigration are still a problem. So those things we hope to be able to bring in to say, let's actually finish out the negotiation, let's find 60 people again in the Senate that are willing to talk about this and see if we can actually get this resolved.”
On state-level immigration enforcement
States are not constitutionally charged with carrying out federal policy enforcement, Lankford said.
“States do state policy,” he said. And the federal government does federal policy. Border security is federal policy.”
When states and local law enforcement jurisdictions don’t cooperate with federal authorities, it complicates immigration enforcement at a scale larger than any local area.
He gave the example of someone arrested by local law enforcement for driving while intoxicated, and is identified to be without legal immigration status and a repeat offender:
“Traditionally, ICE would contact local law enforcement and say, ‘Hey, don't release them, hold them until we get there, because they also have a federal charge,’” Lankford said. “When communities say, we're not going to do that, it actually puts Immigration and Customs Enforcement at greater danger and it puts the community at greater danger.”
Whether federal authorities decide they want to hold an individual because of their immigration status is dependent on the president's prosecutorial discretion — or list of people prioritized for deportation.
Under Biden, people with relatively minor local charges like DUIs — that is, compared to murder, extortion and trafficking — are generally let go after bailing out or serving their sentence if held in custody. Lankford said every president outlines their own prosecutorial discretion and that Trump is sure to be more harsh on people posing a danger to public safety.
He said that means states and local law enforcement agencies should focus on expanding their pre-existing collaboration with federal immigration authorities, not replacing them.
It’s a sentiment already mentioned by top law enforcement officials in the state who’ve opposed the state legislature's passage of House Bill 4156, a currently paused law criminalizing all immigrants without legal status in the state. The measure remains stuck in federal court.
