Republican who backed bipartisan border bill warns of ‘loopholes’ despite record-low border encounters

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Fox News Digital he still believes the bipartisan border bill was necessary to secure the border, despite President Donald Trump achieving record-low border encounters through executive action.

In February, U.S. Border Patrol recorded the lowest monthly total of migrant apprehensions on the U.S. southern border in at least 25 years. There were 8,326 southern border encounters in February 2025, down from 189,913 in February 2024.

“Same law, same opportunities. Obviously, very different applications of the law,” Lankford said. “We had one day last week, there were less than 200 people [who] even tried to illegally cross the border. You go back to a year and a half ago, that number was 12,000 a day. So dramatic difference in application.”

Lankford said the combination of Trump’s rhetoric and policies has led to the stark drop in illegal border crossings. But the Oklahoma senator said Trump wouldn’t need to play so much “catch-up ball” if the bipartisan border bill was passed under President Joe Biden’s administration. 

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“We had a million additional people that came into the country in 2024 that would not have been in the country, if we would have passed that bill,” Lankford said. 

Lankford, who led the Republican charge to pass the bipartisan border bill, said it would have required the Biden administration to exercise their “legal authority” and create new authorities to secure the border. And even with the record-low number of border crossings, Lankford told Fox News Digital that border security requires legislative action to make a lasting impact. 

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“It’ll be the challenge in the days ahead. There are still gaps in the law. There are still loopholes there. And I would anticipate within two or three years the cartels will test it, test it, test it, test it. See if they can find a way to make a breakthrough. We saw this in the first Trump administration. The first two years, the numbers were down. But in 2019, there were almost a million people that illegally crossed that year under the Trump administration in the third year, because the cartels were testing, testing, testing, trying to find loopholes in the law… that challenge will come again,” Lankford said. 

Lankford said the first step was Trump applying the law by enforcing border security, and next is closing legislative “loopholes.”

“When we see the loopholes, close those because President Trump’s going to be president for four years. We don’t know who’s to be president five years from now. We’re going to have the same issue again. If we don’t fix those gaps in the law, then we’re going to have this issue come up again. So if you want to fix it, it’s not just elect somebody for four years. It’s fix the law, so we never have to deal with this again. That’s what I was trying to do, was to be able to stop the chaos that was already happening in 2014, and then to say no matter who is president in the future, we’re going to enforce this law,” Lankford said. 

Lankford has supported border security legislation since he was a representative for Oklahoma’s fifth congressional district. He supported the Secure the Southwest Border Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2014, which was designed to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to enhance resources for unaccompanied minors on the southern border. 

As senator, Lankford was the lead Republican negotiator on the Border Act of 2024, more commonly known as the bipartisan border bill. Lankford collaborated with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., to introduce the legislation early last year. 

The bill sought to deter illegal border crossings through a quota system, tighten asylum application processes, increase border patrol agents on the ground, create work visas for migrant spouses of U.S. citizens and develop pathways to citizenship for “documented dreamers.”

Lankford’s Republican colleagues blocked the bipartisan border bill from passing in the Senate. Trump reportedly opposed the bill for not going far enough to secure the border and for the political victory it would have granted President Joe Biden and the Democrats on border security. Lankford has continued to defend the legislation, despite the Oklahoma Republican Party censuring him for aligning too closely with the Democrat’s agenda in championing the bill. 

The bill became a political fixture of the 2024 presidential campaign, as Democrats up and down the ballot blamed Trump and Republicans for blocking legislation that would have increased border security. Meanwhile, Republicans blamed President Joe Biden’s policies for the illegal immigration surge.

A new report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found there were more than 18 million illegal immigrants in the United States following the Biden administration. The population of illegal immigrants in the United States grew by 4.1 million or 18.2% since December 2020, the report found. 

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to secure the border on day one of his administration. He signed a series of border security executive actions on the first day of his second term, including declaring a national emergency on the southern border. 

Fox News Voter Analysis found that the economy and immigration were the top issues for voters in 2024. Nearly half (47%) of voters in 2024 said immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be deported rather than given a chance to apply for legal status, and 68% favored reducing the number of immigrants allowed to seek asylum at the border.