Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax Wednesday that the Biden administration is not taking the situation at the southern border “seriously,” even as President Joe Biden campaigns for more money from Congress for Ukraine.
“We don't want Putin to win, obviously,” Lankford said during an appearance on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “This is Putin, with funding from China, with weapons systems from North Korea and Iran. That's not an alliance that we shouldn't step back and push back on by any means.
“So, yes, we want to see Ukraine win, push back on the Russians, push back on the Iranians and the North Koreans that are actually supplying all these weapons, but we also want to see our own borders secure,” he continued. “To say that we're obsessed with other people's security, and we're ignoring our own seems to be the whole focus of the Biden administration. So, let's just make it really clear: We have an open border. We have Russians also crossing our border. Chinese citizens. We have Iranians. We have Pakistanis. We have people from known terrorist areas that are coming into our country, and this administration is not taking it seriously.”
The Oklahoma Republican said more than 10,000 people crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on Tuesday, and more than half a million people have crossed into the U.S. in less than two months.
“This is total chaos and we're just saying stop the chaos,” he said.
Asked about the likelihood of passing any type of measure involving Ukraine aid and border security before Christmas, Lankford said “that’s up to the administration and up to the Democrats, as this point.
“We've been at the table, laying out proposals, for weeks and weeks,” he said. “They're now saying, 'Oh my gosh, we've got to be able to hurry.' We said we've been at the table with proposals for now, two months, so, at this point, if they want to actually finish this out, we can do the work that needs to be done to be able to finish it out. But this is going to be the focus from actually this White House. They can't just do rhetoric in the media and not actually do the work behind closed doors.”
Lankford also said that there are a lot of people who don’t want to see Russia win in its conflict with Ukraine; they just want to figure out if Kyiv is winning and Biden is not providing clarity.
“Ukraine has actually recovered 50% of the territory that the Russians actually took,” he said. “Ukraine is now retaking control of the Black Sea. They are making progress in some key areas. This is a very difficult war. We've had more than 300,000 Russians that have been killed in this war so far, as Ukrainians have been pushing them back out. It's been a very bloody, very difficult war. This is what real war looks like — a land war — and what actually occurs.
“The president’s not making that case, but he's also not making the case why we should actually secure our own southern border,” he continued. “We need to be able to actually do national security here and, as you said, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
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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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