Source: United States Senator for Oklahoma James Lankford
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – Senator James Lankford (R-OK) offered the following statement after US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released its report on illegal crossings and counterfeit drugs and materials smuggled across or southern border as of December 2021:
“CBP encountered over two million migrants at the southwest border in 2021. That is a staggering number,” said Lankford. “The daily and monthly numbers remain overwhelming for our border law enforcement whose hands they’ve told me ‘are tied’ by this Administration. I exposed the Biden Administration’s billions in waste not finishing the wall, and after months of alarmingly high border crossings, they finally decided maybe it’s a good idea to close the gaps in the wall. We must reinstate President Trump’s ‘remain in Mexico’ policy immediately, finish the wall, and enforce our laws if we ever hope to effectively manage illegal activity at our southern border.”
The report highlighted that a staggering $3.31 billion in counterfeit goods were seized last fiscal year, up 153 percent from the previous year. Heroin seizures were up 113 percent in December as the cartels continue to send drugs across our southern border. CBP encountered 178,840 individuals along the southern border in December 2021 and over two million individuals total during 2021. Almost 12,000 unaccompanied minors were encountered at the southern border in December, and CBP encountered more than 51,000 family units.
Lankford traveled to the Arizona border last year to see first-hand the unfinished construction of border wall. He was the first to expose the crisis at the border through Facebook so Oklahomans could see firsthand the crisis at the southern border in Texas.
After months of holding the Biden Administration accountable for its failures to enforce the law and preserve national security at the southern border, Lankford announced right before Christmas that the Department of Homeland Security would close multiple gaps in the border wall located in San Diego, El Centro, Yuma, Tucson, El Paso, and Del Rio. This announcement came after Lankford released a report that exposed billions in waste to pay contractors to babysit the border wall materials at these sites while the Biden Administration “studied” it, even though Congress already allocated the money to build the wall.
Lankford grilled DHS Secretary Mayorkas on his ongoing delay to finish the wall and participated in a press conference in November to discuss the ongoing crisis at the southern border that Biden continues to ignore. Lankford successfully blocked President Biden’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office from opening a “surge overflow temporary facility” at the Great Plains Correctional Institution in Hinton, Oklahoma, that would have been used to process migrants who crossed the border illegally and release them into Western Oklahoma.
###