U.S. Senator James Lankford spent time on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Rio Grande Valley to see facility conditions and operations for himself. Oklahoma’s junior Senator has been working on immigration and asylum issues in his role on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Lankford took the opportunity to tour the Hidalgo Port of Entry and monitored the processing as people moved back and forth across the border. The area also is used to determine a minor’s status as an unaccompanied alien child (UAC), process family units and determine guardianship for minors. He also toured the Donna Holding facility which is temporarily being used to process family units who cross between ports of entry.
Other stops for Lankford included the McAllen Border Patrol Station and the Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center.
Lankford also rode along with Border Patrol Agents during nighttime patrols to see how they deal with families, individual males and drug smugglers crossing the border illegally.
“After spending all day and part of the night at the busiest illegal border crossing area in America, I am grateful again for the career law enforcement professionals that serve our nation every day,” said Lankford. “The women and men who work to protect our nation from illegal drug smuggling and human trafficking, also facilitate billions of dollars of legal trade. When the funding was not provided for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds, thousands of people quickly backed up in CBP temporary holding areas. The snowball effect of refusing to properly fund ICE, along with the flood of migrants gaming the immigration law that forces adults who cross the border with a child to be released within 20 days, has created a serious humanitarian crisis. CBP is now essentially conducting the mission of ICE to hold migrants while their next step is evaluated. The Border Patrol agents are doing everything they can to manage a humanitarian crisis that they are not designed, nor equipped to handle. Now, a record number of men traveling with a child has created a massive influx of illegal migration with nowhere to hold them. A temporary holding facility in McAllen, designed to hold 1,500 people for a short time, is instead holding more than 1,500 people for days or weeks. DHS has constructed an enormous ‘soft-sided’ facility to hold thousands of family units, but the problem persists due to a lack of space in ICE facilities. I dropped in on multiple processing and housing facilities along the border; all of them had shelves full of food, water, clothing, and hygiene products. Each facility had medical care, showers, washers and dryers, and phones for migrants to contact their home country’s consulates.
“Our border facilities were designed for single individuals, mostly from Mexico, who could be processed and returned to their home country quickly if they had no legal justification to be in the US. Now the border holding areas are filled with adults from all over the world, many of them with a child. Sometimes the child is traveling with their mom or dad; sometimes they are traveling with another adult in their family or from their village. But sometimes small children are being ‘rented’ by smugglers to help adult males cross the border more easily. Children continue to be abandoned or face severe conditions in the desert. This problem needs to be addressed by Congress. Only Congress can close the child migrant loopholes that encourages child smuggling. When a person is arrested by CBP, criminal background information is requested from their home country, but it often takes longer than 20 days from many countries. In those cases, the person is released into our country before law enforcement learns that the adult has a criminal record in his or her home country or that he or she is fleeing a criminal warrant for their arrest. We also must be able to hold individuals longer than 20 days, regardless of their age, because of the time it takes to get criminal information from other countries. In just the Rio Grande Valley area, people from more than 63 countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Bangladesh, China, Yemen, Pakistan, Cuba, Venezuela, and many Asian and African countries have been arrested this year. This is not just a Central America problem, but the southern border has become a conduit for many other areas of the world—and the cartels in Mexico facilitate human trafficking as their business practice.”
Lankford continued, “As I rode along with our border law enforcement at night, I personally watched a group of adults traveling with children move across the border. Then moments later, while law enforcement was processing the family units, a different group of single adults unsuccessfully tried to slip past border patrol a mile away. Later in the evening, the border patrol agents were simultaneously interdicting family units on the road, a group of single men working through the swampy cane fields, and a raft of narcotics crossing the river. Their job is dangerous, hot, and difficult. But the only complaint I heard from any federal agent protecting our country was their consistent frustration that some in Washington and the national media continue to tell a false story about them and their work. None of them claimed that law enforcement was always above reproach, but all of them could tell stories about lives they have saved, drugs they have interdicted and ways they have personally served poor families as they illegally cross into the US. I do not understand why some of my colleagues have chosen to demonize our federal law enforcement, rather than help them with the legal tools they need to protect our country.
“It was ironic to see the makeshift processing center for 1,500 to 2,000 daily illegal crossings literally under an international bridge that carries thousands of people legally crossing into the US each day. The US has the most open immigration system in the world. I walked the pedestrian and vehicle crossing area at McAllen and saw the security features and the constant legal movement of people from Mexico into the US. Our border is not difficult to cross legally. But cartels in Mexico have created a multi-billion dollar business of moving people illegally across our border. We can either ignore the problem and assist the cartels or we can address the problem and stop child smuggling and human trafficking. It is time to address the serious legal and funding problems at our southern border.”
