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