‘The Interview’: Senator James Lankford on Trying to Solve Immigration

At a campaign rally in Georgia late last month, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to supporters about one of the biggest issues in this election: immigration. She talked up her record as the former attorney general of a border state, and she made a promise that if elected president, she would “bring back the border-security bill that Donald Trump killed” and sign it into law.

The bill she was talking about was negotiated starting late last year by a bipartisan trio of senators, and the Republican in that group was Senator James Lankford, a former Baptist youth minister from Oklahoma. Lankford, who arrived in the House as part of the Tea Party movement in 2011 and became a senator in 2015, clearly has big political ambitions; he’s currently running for Senate leadership. And for months, he worked on that immigration bill with Senators Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. Their negotiation was a rare show of bipartisanship in Congress, and after getting sign-off from both party leaders in the Senate and an endorsement from the White House, the bill looked as if it was going to become law. It would have been the first major piece of bipartisan legislation on immigration in decades.

But then Donald Trump came out against it — he didn’t want to give President Biden a political win on such a sensitive issue during an election year. And even though the bill contained most of the hard-line policies that the right wanted, it became toxic among Republicans. In the end, only four Republican senators voted for the bill, it tanked and Lankford was left holding the bag.

I wanted to talk to Lankford about his experience working so hard on this bill only to see it fall apart and what that says about the prospect of getting anything bipartisan done in a Republican Party that is beholden to Trump. But we started by talking about his faith, which he told me guides everything he does.

Before you were in politics, you ran the largest Baptist youth camp in the country, Falls Creek. A friend of mine from Oklahoma basically said it’s the place everyone goes when they’re young. I think when you were elected, something like 40 percent of Republican primary voters in Oklahoma either had gone to Falls Creek or knew someone who did. What role did that organization play in your life? Wow, that’s a huge question. I served 22 years in ministry, working with students and their families. So when you work with middle school and high school students, you’re dealing with all kinds of trauma that happens in those families. That’s what my wife and I did for 22 years, to be able to just love on families and to encourage them. I didn’t do anything in politics other than vote. And in 2008 and 2009, we really felt a calling to be able to run for Congress in the central district. I had to go to our state Republican leaders and introduce myself and say: “Hi, my name’s James. I’m filing to run for Congress.” And they basically pat me on the head and said, “That’s nice.” But saying all that, my faith is important to me, and it’s not something I take off and put on. I tell people all the time, your faith should affect everything about you. It’s how I treat my wife. It’s how I treat total strangers. I believe every person’s created in the image of God. They have value and worth. Even if I disagree with them, that person has value and worth. As I joke with some of my Democrat colleagues, we’re friends, but they’re wrong all the time. They vote wrong all the time, but we can still be friends in our conversation and relationship and try to be able to engage.

Speaking of working with people you don’t agree with: At the end of last year, you raised your national profile when you were tapped by Mitch McConnell to negotiate a bipartisan border bill. You worked for four months with Kyrsten Sinema and Chris Murphy. What was that like? So, Kyrsten Sinema is an immigration attorney in her past, and so she’s extremely knowledgeable about this. Obviously, Arizona is one of the epicenters of illegal immigration. And so she was very engaged, very knowledgeable of the issues, and every time we talked about it, she could give a personal story that this is what it actually looks like on the ground. And she grew up in southern Arizona, so she grew up with people crossing the border. But she could also say how different this is now than what it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Senator Murphy, he’s a progressive from Connecticut, extremely smart, but it’s a different perspective when you’re from New England on dealing with immigration. He was keenly aware of the criminal aspects of some folks that are coming across that are real threats to national security. He wanted to be able to focus in on those aspects. But he was also very outspoken the whole time that he’s very supportive of the Dreamers, and he wanted to be able to resolve a lot of bigger issues, which we weren’t going to be able to make any progress on at this point. So there was a lot of dialogue back and forth about how do we actually find the areas of agreement that we can on the national-security issues and not continue to make this so big that it falls under its own weight.

This was a very tough border bill. There was no legal pathway to citizenship, as you mentioned, for Dreamers. Why wasn’t that included? Did you think it was going to be a bill killer for the Republican side of things? Yes, quite frankly, I did believe that would be a bill killer. When you have two and a half million people a year that are crossing the border illegally, when you’ve got millions of people in the backlog, the energy and the focus was: Let’s first stop the bleeding, and then let’s figure out how to be able to take care of everything else.

And you felt that Democrats understood that, and the administration understood that? Eventually. That was a long conversation. I would say that was one of the most contentious areas of the debate all along that Chris Murphy never let go of. He was very faithful to his perspective on that one, to say, “This is really important.” And I hear him that it’s really important, but I also understood there was absolutely no way you would have a chance with the number of people that we’re dealing with right now that are illegally crossing into the country.

You seem to have won every concession from Democrats that Republicans wanted. And I’m curious now, in hindsight, why you think that’s true. Do you think Democrats and the Biden administration in particular realized that they had a problem on their hands at the Southern border? So, yes, I believe that the administration came to the table because they understood this is spiraling out of control. And quite frankly, I think they perceived they could say, “OK, those crazy Republicans, they forced us to be able to pass this bill, so we’re going to implement this,” when they actually quietly wanted to say, “OK, we’ve got to make this stop.”

Were you optimistic that it could succeed? I was.

And all signs indicated that your optimism was actually founded until Trump came out forcefully against the bill. He was basically whipping against it from Mar-a-Lago. Did he call you personally? We did not talk during that time period, actually. And on my part, that was intentional, because of that exact question. I didn’t want this to be perceived as, this is President Trump actually trying to run this bill. That would be toxic to my Democrat colleagues. I honestly believe that exact bill would have passed in December, but by the time it got into February, it became immediately the major focus in the election, because, as you recall, the Republican primary suddenly got resolved. It looked very obvious that President Trump was going to be there, and everything collapsed at that point. If that bill would have gone in December, I think it would have passed.

You’ve said before that a right-wing commentator threatened you over this bill. The radio host Jesse Kelly took credit. Was it him? I would only say that when he took credit, my first response was, “Who is that?” So, no. And I’ve never identified who it is, and I won’t. But I did have several folks, one just more blunt than others, saying: “I’ll destroy you if you do this. Because though I like you, I like President Trump better, and he’s got to be elected for the future of the country, and you can’t take this issue off the table.” My response was: “He has a job that’s running for office right now, but I’m in office. I’ve got to do my job. My job is national security.” I serve on the Intelligence Committee. I serve on Homeland Security. I have access to a lot of classified information. Starting last year, we saw the shift that happened on who was crossing the border, as more and more people from outside the Western Hemisphere. It was a very different group that was coming across, and it was criminal organizations that were becoming travel agents to be able to move people. They were moving people that wanted to be able to work here and then facilitating people that were within their organization. That’s why we had a couple of months ago, eight folks that were picked up in the United States that were ISIS affiliated. They were moving through those networks that I was aware of before and what was one of the many reasons I was so passionate to say we can’t ignore this moment. The frustration that I have is that it has become more of a political issue than a national-security issue, when it is really a national-security issue.

When did you get a sense that this was not going to happen? There were political commentators on television that came out immediately and online, saying that we can’t solve the border issue right now. “This is the single biggest issue. We don’t want President Trump to lose that issue.” Or they would say: “President Biden created this chaos. We don’t want to give him the appearance right before the election that he solved the crisis that he created.” And I would tell you, not just as a conservative, as an American, this is a crisis that the administration did botch. I said to their team over and over and over again, “If you would enforce the border the same way President Obama did — I know you don’t want to do it the same way President Trump did, but if you do it the same way President Obama did — we would not have this problem that we have today.” So I would bring all those things up to be able to talk about it on both sides, understanding it’s going to be hard. But the noise continued to build, and we reached a fever there in that first week of February. I think within the last 48 hours, I really realized this is not going to work. This is not going to happen.

You’ve talked about this as a national-security issue, but I am curious about how the work on immigration connects to your faith. Because there is this philosophy in the evangelical world, and it’s based in Scripture around the idea of welcoming the stranger. Yeah.

And, you know, the National Association of Evangelicals did support your bill. Do you think there is some daylight between the MAGA wing of the party and evangelical groups on this issue? Yes, there is, actually. There are people that are asylees that are fleeing from injustice around the world. We don’t want to ever lose in America, that we’re not a place for that. But we also know that right now we have two and a half million people a year that are illegally crossing. We also don’t want that, because when you create that kind of chaos, that’s not just, “We’re going to welcome the stranger.” That’s also welcoming folks that are, again, not just pursuing a job and pursuing family, which is the vast majority of people that are coming. But it’s also welcoming in people that are coming right now that are from Venezuelan gangs that are crossing in, requesting asylum, and then they’re deliberately targeting Venezuelans that are here in America right now. And then abusing them the same way they did back in Venezuela. That’s also occurring right now. We do have human trafficking. And we can all say, “Well, that’s not the majority.” But there is human trafficking. There is violence. There is sex trafficking. All these things are also occurring as well. And it occurs because we have too many people to manage on a day-to-day basis at the border.

There were signs at the Republican National Convention saying, “Mass Deportation Now!” That is one of the tenets of the Trump platform. Is that a position that you think is the right one? So, yeah, by the way, I think there will be mass deportations at some point. People define that differently, and some people will hear that as a Latina grandmother that’s been here 30 years. And they’re going to say, “Is she also the target?” I think the first target that ends up coming are the folks that literally a court — and we have millions of people now — that a court has ruled on a final order of removal, and no one’s actually removing them.

But a lot of people understand mass deportation as the rounding up of communities that have been here for many, many years. And many supporters of your party do want there to be just a complete uprooting of people who are undocumented. I actually don’t see a future Trump administration just rounding up all 12 million, 15 million, whatever number that is, and removing the entire number. I just don’t. I see them targeting the folks that have gone through the court proceedings, that have been ruled that they’re not legally present, have a criminal record. We have a high number of those folks. But the folks that are going through the process, they legally cannot remove them. A court would stop that immediately. They know that. They’ve been through this for four years before. They’ve seen how the court responds to it.

There have been discussions of large camps that these people will be put in and just raising the specter of things that, quite frankly, to many in immigrant communities are frightening. Yeah we’re back to the social media world and the things that get promoted and the things that get said there. The large camp — I don’t know what that would look like, other than a gathering spot that’s very similar to what happens at the border right now when people are legally across. Even under this administration now, just in the last few months, they’ve started actually putting up locations to say, “We’re going to detain you and to try to have all the hearings and to have your first appeals and evaluation at the border rather than just released into the country.” That’s the nature of actually trying to be able to manage that number of people.

In your speech when introducing the doomed bill, you noted that many of your colleagues hadn’t read it and didn’t want to read it because it was long and technical. And I’m wondering what your takeaway was, from your colleagues not wanting to legislate. I mean, what does it say to you that politics won out over policy here? Politics won out over policy. No doubt on that. I had colleagues that said, “Hey, this is very technical, and I’m going to need a week to be able to read this and review it before I can vote on it.” And I said: “I totally understand that. We’ll give you the time to do that.” But within 30 minutes of the bill being released, they were putting out statements saying: “I’m opposed to it. It’s terrible.” So a couple of things I would say on that: One is we needed more cooks in the kitchen. The process of actually everybody picking a champion on each of the party areas and putting them all together to resolve it for something this complicated and for something this controversial — we needed more people that were invested early on. It would be great if our committees worked and actually pushed out a lot of very hard things like this. But they’ve not been successful of late actually getting negotiations and getting commitment on that. I hope that we can get back to that. We do have some big bills like the F.A.A. bill. They got to a resolution that they agreed on unanimously, moved it, came to the floor, passed it; it’s law now. So it can be done.

I guess the question is, can it be done when Trump doesn’t want it to be done? Everybody’s got to come onboard on this.

But how much independence does your body of legislators have from what Trump does or doesn’t want for the party? I mean, you are a separate branch of government. Yeah, we are. I have folks that will tell me when President Trump was president, “OK, he’s the boss.” And I would say: “No, he’s not. He’s a coequal branch.” I don’t work for the president. I work for the people of Oklahoma. That’s who I work for. I think we do have to protect that constitutional integrity of government and how things are set up. President Trump obviously has influence, because there are millions and millions of Americans that also believe in him. Many from my state as well that would say: “That’s the opinion that I have. That’s the expression that I have.” And so it’s not just that President Trump thinks it; it’s that there are millions of Americans that also think that as well.

What is your relationship with former President Trump now? Actually, good still. I reached out to him after the assassination attempt and said, “Hey, Cindy and I are praying for you.” You had a very good response in the statement that he made the very next day on it. He was obviously protected by God for a reason. He needs to live that out. I personally believe that that was a semi-miraculous event. So, reached out; he reached right back to be able to say thank you. And so we continue to stay engaged in ways. Where we agree, we agree; where we disagree, we disagree. And even in a statement that he made at lunch about a month and a half ago now, when he met with the Republican senators, even in that statement, he said: “Let’s find areas where we can agree; let’s work on those. And areas where we don’t agree, let’s keep talking about it.” That’s a different attitude than I think a lot of people have about President Trump. They don’t see that part of him. But he is still ultimately a negotiator, and he feels like he has the greatest negotiating power when he states a really strong opinion up front and says, “This is what we have to do,” and kind of punch you in the face, but then come back to be able to negotiate the rest. That is really how he functions on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it does not.

Do you consider yourself MAGA? Am I passionate about making America great? Yes, I am. People try to identify and try to project whatever they want to project on people that say you’re passionate about making America great again. If you want to project everything that is President Trump on me — no, we address things differently. If I can tell you one funny story on this?

Please. I went to the Army-Navy game with President Trump one year, and he had invited me to be able to travel on Air Force One. And we were flying over to the game, and we’re sitting right next to each other on the plane and just chatting. And at one point, he’s working on a tweet — back in the old days when we used to call them tweets. He leans over and he goes, “You wouldn’t tweet this.” And I laughed, and I said, “Well, you probably shouldn’t either.” And he laughed. He said, “I’m going to, because I think it’s funny.” And then he finished it, and he showed it to me. And I said: “You’re right, sir. I wouldn’t have tweeted that.” He and I can agree on some policy areas, and some policy areas we disagree. We have different methods; we have different perspectives. That’s OK. I try to stay who I am. He solves problems in a different way than I do. We’ll see which one works, and they’ll work for different issues in different ways. I don’t have the same swagger and attitude, but I do have a very conservative perspective, and I’m going to try to persuade. I’ve never had anyone ever persuade me of something by yelling at me and cussing me out.

Your former colleague, Senator JD Vance, is now the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Do you have any thoughts on him and his very brief record in the Senate? That’s actually my challenge — that he’s been there 18 months. We really haven’t got to know each other very well. We don’t serve on any committees together. We’ve not traveled together or anything else. And so I really haven’t had much of an opportunity to be able to get to know him personally and to be able to know his perspectives on things. Obviously, we’ve had dialogues in a public setting in our lunch times, which are supposedly private but that seem to get leaked out to the media every single lunch. But we’ve had some dialogues around there, but I’ve had very little contact with him.

As we’re talking, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mike Pence. Because he was someone who was deeply conservative, deeply religious and also deeply loyal to Trump, until he took what he felt was a principled stand at the end. And looking at the immigration bill and how quickly the party moved against you — do you think it’s possible to stick with your principles in this G.O.P.? Sure I do. You live your principles out, and the days you lose a vote or an issue that you feel is important, you back up, and you keep going at it. From my ministry background, Nehemiah 1 does a great story about Hananiah, who’s the brother of Nehemiah coming back from Jerusalem when they’re both living as slaves in isolation and exile. And Nehemiah catches his brother Hananiah and says, “What’s it like in Jerusalem now?” And Hananiah says: “Oh, it’s awful. The people live in disgrace. The walls are down. The economy’s collapsed. It’s terrible.” And Hananiah walks off. And Nehemiah, who wasn’t even there or didn’t even see it, prays: “God, this is terrible. What do I do about it?” There’s two different perspectives that come out of that. There’s a Hananiah that sees the problem and says, “Stinks to be them,” and walks away. And there’s a Nehemiah that says: “That’s terrible, God. What can I do to make that better? What can I do to help solve that?” I have to make a decision every single day. Am I going to be Hananiah, or am I going to be a Nehemiah? I’m choosing to be a Nehemiah.

White evangelicals are a huge part of Trump’s base. And it’s one reason that I was curious to talk to you, because you are part of that community. What do you make of the way that he addresses your community? He made some comments recently where he said: “Christians … you won’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.” I have no idea what that means. Clearly we’re going to have another election four years from now. In fact, I’ve already had a conversation with folks to say: “You know, for the past 12 years there’s been this conversation about President Trump. That’s not going to be so four years from now. So we as a party have to think about what we’re going to be like and what our focus is going to be and what direction things are going to go.” Those are pragmatic conversations, but we’re certainly going to have elections. Nothing’s going to break the Constitution.

And in those conversations where you’re looking to a post-Trump era, what are you telling your community about what that will mean? Well, I’m just getting people thinking about that. Who are we going to be, and what will be the things that are going to be most valuable to us? How we’re going to resolve debt and deficit. What does national security look like? I go back to immigration. This doesn’t just magically get better. That involves sitting down, having dialogue, setting principles down, saying, “All right, let’s actually work through this to be able to make a decision.” Because when that hard decision is done, there’s another hard decision coming right after it.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.

Adblock test (Why?)