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JUST IN: GOP Senator Betrays Trump, Suggests Biden’s Border Bill Was Better

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Simmering controversy over President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda drew criticism from an unlikely corner last week when a typically conservative Republican in the U.S. Senate suggested that former President Joe Biden introduced a better plan for reforming the country’s immigration system.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who isn’t up for reelection until 2028, told CBS News last week that Biden’s 2024 bill “should have passed” and would have closed many of the loopholes that critics say embolden illegal immigrants to cross into the U.S.

“One of the challenges we have is our asylum laws do include a lot of loopholes in them that cartels have exploited for years,” he said. “They’ve become experts in exploiting our laws because it’s become billions of dollars of income to them when they can find those loopholes and gaps.”

If the bill had passed, it would have granted Biden the ability to close the border to new asylum requests if daily illegal crossings exceeded an average of 5,000 for at least one week. It would have also restricted humanitarian parole, a freedom which critics claim allows migrants to enter the U.S. with little oversight while waiting for court dates as far away as nine or 10 years.

While migrants in the 1980s and 90s typically avoided border patrol agents through nighttime crossings or other evasive measures, a more recent approach has involved surrendering to authorities and claiming asylum, according to experts who spoke with the New York Times during debate on Biden’s bill.

Lankford mocked a conservative commentator on social media who last week suggested that “somebody needs to bring up a bill to close some of these loopholes.”

“I laughed and I thought, I know somebody that’s brought one of those,” he said about Biden. “I know a guy, and I know a bill that could do that.”

The bipartisan legislation was ultimately voted down in the Senate after President Trump urged Republicans to oppose it, both for political and policy reasons.

Politically, maintaining chaos at the southern border was a cogent strategy for returning Trump to the White House. Republicans also opposed the bill on its merits, arguing that a daily crossing threshold of 5,000 was far too high to earn their support.

“Was the bill everything I wanted? No, I was negotiating with a Democrat White House trying to get it done. But many of the areas that we need to close the loopholes were in that bill, and some form of that we will eventually get done,” Lankford added.

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It remains up for debate whether Biden’s border bill would have addressed the millions of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who made their way into the country prior to its conception.

In contrast, President Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill, signed into law last week, has showered immigration authorities with hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding to ramp up deportations. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone is expected to receive $170 billion, enough to hire an additional 10,000 officers and offer each a $10,000 signing bonus.