Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax Friday “there’s no way” the Biden administration is watching all 70,000 illegal immigrants that it’s released into the United States, cautioning that some of them could be terrorists.
“The 9/11 terrorists were all illegally present in the United States,” Lankford said during an appearance on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “This is not like they're disconnected; they are connected. Seventy thousand people in the last two years have come across the border that this White House designated as what they call special interest aliens. These are individuals that were coming from Pakistan, they were coming from Iran, they were coming from Iraq, they were coming from China or Russia, where we have no criminal history on them.
“We know there's known terrorist links around where they're from, but they were all released into the country,” he continued. “All of those, all 70,000 of those. And they're saying they're ‘watching them?’ There's no way they're watching 70,000 people. They don't know where they are, there's no tracking for their location. This is what's happening day after day on the border. If even 1% of those are a risk, that's 700 terrorists that are in the country right now.”
Lankford said he will not support a foreign aid bill that allocates money for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel that does not include provisions for securing the southern U.S. border. The Oklahoma senator also called for policy and legislative changes to resolve what’s going on at the U.S. border with Mexico.
“There's an easier way to be able to fix this, and the administration's just got to decide if they want to be able to fix it,” he said. “There's two basic principles here. Right now they're releasing people at the border, saying you can check yourself in at some location, years ahead, and we'll give you an asylum screening. Do that screening at the border. The vast majority of these individuals don't qualify. Turn them around immediately. If you release people into the country, then they never show up again. The second thing is you can't just mass-release folks, period, and be unscreened entirely. So, screen all those folks at the border, turn around those folks [and] people will not come anymore.”
Lankford said that some people have speculated that President Joe Biden is failing to secure the border because he hopes illegal immigrants will become Democrat voters somewhere down the line.
“Other folks, on the far progressive left, they just feel like borders are mean, we should allow people to travel anywhere they want to at any time,” he said. “I just think go try that in other countries, go travel around the rest of the world and see how that philosophy works. That doesn't work. But at the end of the day, we have to be able to have a clearly defined border. I don't mind immigration. Legal immigration is a great thing. I just want to have tall fences and wide gates, where we're clear on legal immigration and we stop illegal immigration.”
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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