Senate Republican says GOP is ‘making progress’ with Democrats on border security

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday that the GOP is “making progress” with Democrats over a bill on border security.

“We are making progress on this,” Lankford told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week.” “This is exceptionally important. When the administration actually put out their national security package, they asked for funding for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan and for the border.” 

“And then literally two days later, after they put that proposal out in their request, they also put out a piece saying that the border funding element would be, quote-unquote — this was their term — a ‘tourniquet.’ What they really need is a change in policy, because that’s the biggest issue that they need,” he continued.

A bipartisan group of Senate negotiators has been meeting over recent weeks to reach a consensus on a deal that would change immigration law in exchange for another round of Ukraine funding. However, some Senate Democrats have already sounded the alarm over the direction of the border talks.

Lankford pointed to statements made by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that suggested that the Biden administration wants to see “changes in policies so we can actually secure the border.”

“That means we’ve got to actually bring a proposal forward that will actually make that different, that could actually reform how we handle asylum, in his words, from top to bottom, that we can actually handle how we’re actually handling the process of all those individuals, and that we’re not just mass-releasing thousands of people,” he said.

When asked about whether he is prepared to go forward with any kind of overseas aid without a deal on border negotiation, Lankford emphasized that the package will need to include funding for the border and overseas aid.

“No. We’re going to do this all together,” Lankford said. “That’s been the agreement that — again, from the White House, originally. It asked for all these things to be together. We have agreed to do all these things together. We can get this done by the end of the year.”

The Biden administration outlined a roughly $106 billion national security supplemental funding request in October that included money for Israel and Ukraine as well as investments in the Indo-Pacific, humanitarian aid and border security measures. However, the House GOP passed its own package last month that only includes aid for Israel — a measure that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said the upper chamber would not take up.