Migrants At Border Seek Asylum; Trump Talks about Deporting Immigrants
JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you, Kate. And welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us. The president ratchets up his anti-immigration rhetoric. Does he really plan to deny due process to those crossing the border, or is he trying to look tough after an embarrassing family separation flip- flop? Plus, the president's trade war wobbles financial markets and slams an iconic American brand. Harley-Davidson is taking a big, financial hit and now says it has no choice but to move some production overseas. And incivility in America. The president loves insulting and inciting his critics, but is the left now going too far in its counterpunch? Florida's attorney general among the prominent Trump supporters asked to leave or heckled when trying to eat at a restaurant, or take in a movie.</s>PAM BONDI, FLORIDA ATTORNEY GENERAL: If she wants people to protest, that's one thing. But to continue this, they're inciting violence. It's not just yelling at someone and cursing at someone in a public place. They were trying to create a fight. So then we went into the movie and I said, I'm not going to leave. By then there were marked units everywhere. And so after the movie they said, do you want to go out the back door? And I said, no way, I'm not going to be bullied by them. We're walking out the door that we came in.</s>KING: Back to that story in a moment. But we begin today with long lines at the U.S.-Mexican border and the tough talk of a president who wants his base to forget a giant White House immigration about face. On Twitter to begin the work week, this presidential vow, quote, to build a wall, and scorn for those who think more judges are now the answer to handling illegal border crossings. Today's muscular tweets follow the president's brash weekend rejection of a long-time American ideal, due process. The president tweeting, quote, we cannot allow all of these people to invade our country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came. That tough talk from the president sure to be candy to the Trump base. It is also a trademark strategy when this president is proven wrong or forced into a legal or political retreat. His government now scrambling to reunite families separated by the president's zero tolerance policy. More than 500 children have been reunited as of this weekend. More than 2,000 still in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, waiting to see their parents again. Not sure exactly when that will happen. Now, word today travels fast. Many migrants making their way toward the border now know families are no longer to be separated. CNN's Leyla Santiago is live from the border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico. Leyla, tell us what you're seeing right there.</s>LEYLA SANTIAGO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: All right, well, John, right behind me you can see this group of people sort of crowded around. Right now officials are actually taking in about 50 people who plan to seek asylum at the port of entry. This right here, what you're seeing, that's the legal way to do this. I talked to quite a few people who tell me they had -- they were hesitating. They had reservations about getting back in this line. But once they heard that President Trump signed the executive order saying child separation, or family separations, rather, were no longer going to be a thing, they got back in that line. Mothers who had backed off saying, look, I can't go back to Honduras but I also can't have my family separated. They were dealing with that sort of uncertainty. And now they are moving forward. They have this sort of unofficial list. The migrants made it. They manage it. And on that list right now, John, there are more than a thousand people. A thousand people waiting to get in. They put their name on the list and they come back weeks later. The woman who was next in line, a mother from Honduras traveling with her child, she said that she's been on the list for 16 days now. And so she plans to go in there and tell U.S. immigration officials her story, which is she is escaping violence. There was a threat made to herself, as well as her child. And she says if she goes back to Honduras, she could be killed. That's why she's heading here, out of desperation. We talked to her about the criticism that so many people have asked, what kind of parent would do this, and her response to me was, a desperate parent. John.</s>KING: And, Leyla, do they have any sense of what awaits on the other side? Meaning, the administration is now scrambling to create these new detention centers for families, but do those -- those migrants hoping to get asylum, knowing they could -- will be stopped and questioned, do they have any sense of what's going to be on the other side?</s>SANTIAGO: You know, many of these migrants are keeping up with the news because they're heading right toward that, right toward a place where immigration policy is really being debated right now. So they're keeping up with the news. But I will tell you, John, I spoke to a 16-year-old girl who she said the gangs threatened her, told her she had two options, either sell drugs or prostitution. The next day, her mother put her on a bus by herself, crossed the country of Mexico. And when I told her, do you know what's going to happen to you, do you know what this process is like? And she said, no. She had no idea if she would get to her aunt in North Carolina. She had no idea if she would be in immigration custody forever. Or she said she had no idea if they would return her to Honduras, where she felt she would face death if she didn't sell drugs or become a prostitute.</s>KING: Leyla Santiago for us. That's at the border crossing in Tijuana. Leyla, appreciate it. With me here in studio to share their reporting and their insights, Eliana Johnson from "Politico," CNN's Phil Mattingly, Tarini Parti with "BuzzFeed News," and Margaret Talev with "Bloomberg." Again, to make the distinction, that's how, if you're going to do it, that's how you're supposed to do it. If you want asylum in the United States, come to the border crossing and declare yourself. The president's scorn has been more at those who come across illegally trying to do that. But over the weekend, the president's saying to people, let's forget due process. Let's -- no judges. Even a lot of Republicans have said, let's have more judges. Let's have more judges. We can handle these cases quicker. People will be in these detention centers for a shorter period of time. We can clean this up faster. Is the president really, really hopeful of such a step, or is he just trying to get his base to forget he reversed course last week?</s>ELIANA JOHNSON, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, "POLITICO": I think throughout this whole immigration fiasco for the Trump administration, there are many cases in which policy has followed the president's rhetoric. And that's why it's been such a confusing process. And it's not clear whether the president was just blowing off steam and tweets, and there's a policy that will follow this or not at this point. But I do think it's important to point out that there is a statute that gives the president, by law, the power to cut off -- simply cut off immigration. Immigrants -- illegal immigrants are not necessarily entitled to a hearing before a judge. If the president overrules that and makes it our policy, simply to cut off immigration from, x, y or z countries right now. And so -- but I think it's not clear whether he's going to take that step. We'll have to see in the coming days.</s>PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And I think what's interesting is kind of the two different worlds between the Oval Office and how they're trying -- the president wants to apparently try to address this on Capitol Hill, where Republicans are trying to figure out some type of short term fix to the executive action and every kind of -- the madness that followed as they try and figure it out. To your point, Republicans are trying to surge immigration judges. They're trying to speed up the process. They're trying to essentially supersede a court ruling from 1997. Basically make this entire process quicker and that's the way you address the concerns that are happening right now about detained families, keeping families together and then sending families back if those claims or not -- don't pass muster in a quick manner. That's the way the president's allies on Capitol Hill want to address this. That's the way Republicans in general want to address this. I think to Eliana's point, lawyers have looked at things like this, like what the president is asking for, in the past on immigration and decided there's not really a pathway forward there. There -- this isn't saying that his lawyers won't do this and his lawyers won't try and follow up with what he's saying, it just diverges dramatically from where the rest of his party is as they try and figure out some type of solution here.</s>KING: Right. And it does steer, and the president's very good at this, he understands how this works. It does steer the conversation away from, OK, after not being able to answer questions for days, the government did, over the weekend, to its credit, put out a list and said we have a policy. We're trying to locate these families. That we've reunited 522, I believe it was, as of Saturday night. Two thousand and fifty-three, if my numbers are correct, around then were still, you know, in these shelters and they're trying to connect the dots and everything. Applaud them for their effort. Now the skepticism is, do you actually have everybody accounted for? What is the process in place then to locate the parents? How is this all going to play out? That is a policy confrontation. It's a humanity conversation as well, whatever your views on immigration, you want these families to be properly reunited. The president would rather talk tough like this.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think the word "compassion" comes into it, but it's still equally as tough, if not tougher. We're going to keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it's been. If we don't do it, you will be inundated with people and you really won't have a country anymore. Our issue is strong borders, no crime. Their issue is, open borders, let MS-13 all over our country.</s>KING: There are people -- a lot of people who recoil at some of the words. But when the president says "infest" in tweets or "these people" in the tweet about we don't need judges, that is a conversation that he believes plays to his benefit.</s>TARINI PARTI, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, "BUZZFEED NEWS": Right. We saw last week the first split second there that the president brought up governing with heart. He mentioned that when he signed the executive order. But in the last few weeks, he's used such strong language against immigrants that he's clearly made the calculation that this is what his base wants and that this is what's going to help them in the 2018 election.</s>JOHNSON: Well, I think the reason he's ratcheted up his rhetoric is that he doesn't want his base to think he's retreating.</s>KING: Right.</s>JOHNSON: When he has actually retreated from this and the most likely outcome is that the government will go back to a catch and release, which is the policy from the Obama era that he's been</s>KING: Right, or they are now at the Pentagon looking to build these family detention centers, for lack of a better word. And someone help me if there's a better way to put it. But to create centers where you can actually keep the families together. Now, whether that stands up in court is a whole different issue, which is where you bring in the short term congressional action. Let's come back to Congress a bit later in the program, but as the -- as the administration now goes through this, this is Jim Lankford, Republican senator from Oklahoma, who says he buys it when the government says, we have all these children we've accounted for, now we're trying to do difficult work. They acknowledge it will take some time because people are in legal proceedings. Some of them are elsewhere in the country. Some of them may have left the country. We're going to figure out those. Senator Lankford says, I take them at their word.</s>SEN. JAMES LANKFORD (R), OKLAHOMA: We know where every single child is. This is an issue that's gone out there somewhat in some of the other media that's been -- not been responsible for this with the assumption that the administration's lost track of that. So let me clarify a couple of things. These are career professionals that work HHS. And that work with DHS and Customs and Border Patrol and ICE. These are not political appointees. These are career folks. They know where every child is to be able to connect them to their parent or the relative that came.</s>KING: Now, he's a serious policy guy. He seems to trust them. Is that well placed?</s>MARGARET TALEV, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "BLOOMBERG": Well, I think there's two agencies to watch now, and one is going to be the Pentagon, the other's going to be the Department of Homeland Security. I suppose the Department of Justice would be a third. But how the agency implements the rhetoric that the president is talking about, often from Twitter, is how everyone finds out about it, including the administration. How those agencies take those and access are going to be really important to watch in the coming days. Mattis has always been kind of -- his reputation inside the White House has been to kind of slow walk or hold the line when the president says, we've got to do x, y, z. He says, OK, we'll take a look at that. And a slow process begins that take a very long time to unfold. Is that going to continue to be the pattern or are things going to happen very quickly? And then the courts, of course, are the other place to watch. For the president you'd ask, like, is he serious? Does he really want it to happen or is it just rhetoric? And I think the answer is, yes. I mean, I think he's OK with it if it happens and he's OK with it if it just muddies the water and changes the focus away from the really real problem of hundreds of children being separated and or thousands at some point being separated and not knowing exactly where those parents are and how to reunite them.</s>KING: I suspect the courts will weigh in on this as well in the days ahead, as we'll keep an eye on that. Back to this story a bit later. But up next, a sell-off on Wall Street after Harley-Davidson says tariffs from the European Union now forcing it to move production out of Wisconsin to overseas.