The Man Who Tried to Solve Immigration for the G.O.P.

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