Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma has been reporting from the border over the last several days and has been detailing how migrants coming across the border from Mexico are being released into the U.S. with very little processing or restrictions.
“If they have a child that is 6 years old or younger, or they’re an unaccompanied minor – but they can have ten people together who all say they’re family – and if they have one child that’s 5 or 6 years old, all these folks will be released tonight into McAllen, Texas. Literally within a couple of hours from when they walk up from Mexico,” the Republican Senator said while standing in an area where there appeared to be several hundred migrants waiting to be released into the U.S.
The area Lankford was filming in on Thursday night is an area he says media was not being allowed into.
The migrants were being released, he said, with little more than a “notice to appear.”
“It’s a piece of paperwork that says you’ve got to show up at a court hearing,” Lankford said of the notice. “Some of those court hearings are three years later. So literally they’re into the country for the next three years,” he said.
The following morning Lankford posted another video in which detailed reports from border patrol officials that said drug cartels were sending massive numbers of migrants across the border in one area on the southern border to tie up manpower and resources, then sending massive amounts of drugs into the country through other areas left unsecured.
“This is the problem. This is one of the areas that the media is not allowed to be able to come into. That’s why I wanted to be able to be here…literally people walk across the border, they check in here and they are all released. 100% of the people that are here tonight will be released,” Lankford said of the original area he recorded in Thursday night.
“This is absolutely an open border situation.”