One year ago, a handful of so-called Republicans, led by Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, backed a border bill that would have sold out American sovereignty. But as it would turn out, Lankford and his accomplices never needed to compromise our borders to secure them — as evidenced by the plummeting illegal crossings seen during President Donald Trump’s first month back in office.
New data shows illegal migrant apprehensions dropped an average of 2,000 per day in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration to just 786 following the inauguration.
“From Jan. 21 through Jan. 31, the number of U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border dropped 85% from the same period in 2024,” ABC News reported, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. “In the 11 days after Jan. 20, migrants apprehended at ports of entry declined by 93%.”
The results weren’t by chance. Trump signed a series of executive orders upon taking office that ordered construction of the border wall to resume, declared a national emergency at the southern border, reinstated his “Remain in Mexico” policy to deter illegal crossings, and authorized the National Guard to work with Customs and Border Patrol agents to secure the border — all things former President Joe Biden could have done but chose not to.
What’s more, Biden’s negligence was not an excuse for so-called Republicans to capitulate to the left’s radical open-border demands — yet, that’s exactly what a handful did.
Lankford, along with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Utah’s Mitt Romney, and Maine’s Susan Collins, backed a bill that could have allowed nearly 2 million illegal aliens into the U.S. over a year. They voted to hand the Department of Homeland Security emergency powers to close the border only on certain terms. The bill would have also given Biden the power to suspend border closure for 45 days per year if he decided it was in the “national interest,” as explained by my colleague Kylee Griswold.
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The propaganda press spun the bill as a “bipartisan” solution and used it to paint Republicans who opposed the open-border policy as uncaring about the border crisis.
This was made clear with headlines like HuffPost’s “Republicans Who Screamed About A Crisis On The Border Now Oppose A Plan To Fix It.” Vanity Fair claimed “Republicans Don’t Want To Lose Their Favorite 2024 Talking Point,” while Bloomberg argued, “House Republicans Don’t Want To Fix the Border.”
As Griswold noted, the Republican-led House had passed an actual border bill just the year prior “that would have restarted Trump-era border wall construction, required aliens to remain in Mexico while waiting out their usually fraudulent asylum claims, restricted asylum eligibility to legal ports of entry, enacted harsher punishments for overstaying expired visas, kept Title 42-esque ‘expulsion authority’ in place, and supplied border authorities with additional grant funding.”
Democrats didn’t care about taking action to secure the border until they realized it would hurt their re-election chances. But just because Democrats didn’t care about protecting our sovereignty doesn’t mean Republicans should have capitulated to their far-leftist agenda.
Lankford’s bill was nothing but a surrender to far-left open border policies, and Trump’s recent success at the southern border proves none of the concessions were ever needed to have a secure border.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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