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U.S. To Require Negative COVID Tests For Travelers From China; Southwest Chaos Snowballs As Federal Scrutiny Intensifies; Supreme Court Keeps Trump-Era Border Policy In Place For Now. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired December 28, 2022 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[15:02:11]

SARA SIDNER, CNN HOST: It's 3 pm Eastern and thank you for sticking with me. I'm Sara Sidner.

This just in, the U.S. will now require all travelers entering the country from China to show a negative COVID test. The new requirements come as cases in China surge following the country's move to ease restrictions. CNN's Kevin Liptak is traveling with President Biden as he vacations to the Virgin Islands. Kevin, tell us about these new restrictions and why they've been put in place.

KEVIN LIPTAK, CNN REPORTER: Yes, Sara. These are going to go into effect on January 5th, so about a week from tomorrow. And what they do is require all passengers who are traveling from the United States to show proof of a negative COVID test before they get on their airline, it can be a negative PCR test, it can be a negative self-antigen test that's administered by a telehealth service, but they will need to show it before they begin their travel to the United States.

And it's not just people flying directly from China to the U.S., they will also require that on people who have stopped over in certain cities on their way to the United States. Now, this is all coming amid that surge in COVID cases in China following the lifting of their very tight COVID zero policies.

The U.S. has grown increasingly alarmed at what they're seeing more because of the lack of transparency necessarily because of the surge of cases. The U.S. officials say that they haven't received much genome sequencing information that doesn't allow them to track certain variants. If there's a new variant emerging in China, what U.S. officials say is that they aren't necessarily getting that information to help prevent its spread in the United States.

And this all really sort of has echoes of the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020 when the U.S. applied those strict travel restrictions on China and other places around the world. It also speaks to this growing mistrust between the U.S. and China, specifically when it comes to COVID. And federal health officials say that China continues to resist U.S. offers for vaccines for Chinese citizens. Of course, the U.S. has also said that China hasn't necessarily been transparent about the origins of COVID and so these new rules will stay into effect until the U.S. has a better handle on what's going on in China. And so officials say that things will take place January 5th. It will affect passengers over two years old.

Then the Chinese Foreign Ministry did respond to reports that this might happen today saying that the U.S. and China and all other countries need to work together to help the global economy respond and rebound from COVID. So certainly, there could be a fierce reaction from Beijing, but we'll have to wait to hear what they say, Sara.

SIDNER: We know that our Selina Wang who is in Beijing has been doing a lot of great reporting and has some numbers, but she's also talked about the fact that COVID is going insane there.

[15:05:03]

There are bodies that are piling up at crematoriums, so there's a lot to answer for. Thank you so much, Kevin Liptak.

Also, I got to say, boy, you got a good assignment today.

LIPTAK: Yes, someone's got to do it, right?

SIDNER: All right. Relief is still days away for customers and they certainly are not smiling, because they are stranded but - by why what may turn out to be the biggest operations failure ever for Southwest Airlines. The nation's largest domestic carrier has canceled 2,500 some flights today alone, more than 2,300 flights are expected to be canceled tomorrow. And in total, more than 15,000 flights have been canceled since last Thursday, when disruptions from a major winter storm began.

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said he is truly sorry to the customers.

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BOB JORDAN, CEO, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES: We always take care of our customers and we will lean in and go above and beyond as they would expect us to. Teams are working on all of that, processing refunds, proactively reaching out and taking care of customers who are dealing with costly detours and reroutes is just a few examples. Our plan for the next few days is to fly a reduced schedule and reposition our people and planes and we're making headway and we're optimistic to be back on track before next week.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: We have seen in correspondents at two of Southwest busiest airports, Gabe Cohen is at BWI in Baltimore and Adrienne Broaddus is at Chicago Midway Airport.

Gabe, we're going to start with you. I mean, the first and most important question is how are travelers doing? GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well Sara, look, upstairs in the ticketing area, it's quiet right now because, remember, Southwest preemptively yesterday canceled the vast majority of those 2,500 flights, about 62 percent of their schedule that's canceled today. Down here in baggage claim, though, a lot of frustration from passengers and this is why, take a look behind me.

You can see this sea of lost luggage stranded bags along the wall there. There are these handwritten signs indicating what airports, what cities some of these bags came from. And for so many people showing up here, they're confused. They're just trying to figure out where their luggage is and where their belongings are.

And you can see this line of people waiting to try to find their bags where I'm standing right now. Just about an hour ago, I interviewed a woman here who has twin boys, seven years old. Well, they're only about halfway down the line at this point. So it gives you a sense of just how long people are waiting to have any questions answered.

Some of these people are still stranded, others never left, their flights got canceled, but they'd already checked bags and they don't know if their bag made it out of the airport, if it's still here somewhere and they're trying to get answers. And some of these people are getting back from nightmare travel over the past week where they've dealt with those cancellations.

Now quite a few stranded passengers are still in hotels, many of them at this point are footing the bill for that paying for food, some of them for clothing because they don't have baggage right now. Even though Southwest has said you can send those seats in - send receipts in and try to get reimbursed and the Department of Transportation at this point has said they are going to hold Southwest accountable. They expect people - them to take care of these affected and stranded passengers.

But again, for a lot of those customers, they're spending a lot of money and they don't know if they're going to see it. Sara?

SIDNER: That is one of the things that people will be waiting to see what happens next.

Adrienne, you're meeting some Southwest fliers facing serious health challenges because of flight cancellations as well. This isn't just about getting to your parents to grandma's house. Tell me about them.

ADRIENNE BROADDUS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Not at all. We're talking about LaWauna Grimes who lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Unlike the bags behind me here, her luggage never showed up from Las Vegas and she told me she's in big trouble.

She is struggling to breathe, she lives with COPD, inside of her luggage, it's - it contains the medicine she depends on to control her high blood pressure and other health challenges. She fears she will end up in the hospital because the portable oxygen machine she's using isn't working properly.

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BROADDUS (off camera): Lots of anxiety right now?

LAWAUNA GRIMES, TRAVELER: Lots of anxiety but my faith in God is what's keeping me going. My chest is like it's about to - you can see how it was going, it's plugged up but this is a defective machine and the batteries aren't barely been charging. So I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do.

But if it gets to the point where it's real bad, I'll stop at a fire station or something and ask them may I please have some oxygen. But it's just such an inconvenience, a lot of this could have been avoided.

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BROADDUS: And she is an example of these ripple effects, Sara.

[15:10:01]

For example, she and her sisters were able to leave their homes and travel to Las Vegas to be together. This was their first Christmas without their mother who recently died. Their flight wasn't canceled. But yesterday she says they sat on the airplane for over an hour and the staff had to provide oxygen while she was on that plane. Sara?

SIDNER: These stories are just terrifying. I hope Mrs. Grimes is okay and will be okay. Gabe Cohen and Adrienne Broaddus, thank you both so much for those stories.

The cancellation meltdown at Southwest is weighing on stock again today as you might imagine. And now other airlines are placing price caps on travel to and from select cities in an effort to help stranded Southwest customers get home, finally.

CNN Business Correspondent Rahel Solomon is following all of this for us. I see you got the memo. Can Southwest dig itself out from this? There are passengers, we're hearing over and over again a long time, very happy with Southwest, years, and now they're saying they never want to fly in them again.

RAHEL SOLOMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Eventually Southwest will be able to dig itself out of this scenario, right? The question then becomes sort of what does this do to its brand, which we'll get to. But Sara, listen, you listen to those stories of people at the airport and people are dealing with some real challenging life or death situations.

But there is also a financial impact that we wanted to talk about, so take a look at the stock you can see. Shares are off last I checked, about - they've accelerated now, off about 5 percent. Compare that to yesterday when the stock was off about 6 percent.

Part of what's hanging, what's dragging on the stock is investors sort of coming to terms with the cost of all of this, right? Not just the human component, but the cost of all of this, how much it's going to cost for Southwest to reimburse all of these travelers who don't want to rebook. They just want their money back.

How much it's going to cost the airline to pay all of these employees who have to man the phones, who have to work the reservation desk to provide some sort of customer service and relief to people who are stranded at these airports trying to get back to where they're going and then also upgrading those systems, so lots of costs at play here.

To put this in perspective, I spoke to an aviation analyst a short time ago, earlier today, Sara, who told me: You're looking at about a million customers, ballpark, if an average ticket is $250 to $300 that suggests the upper limit in terms of financial exposure is $250 million to $300 million in terms of absolute value, the question is how they defray that, that coming from Robert Mann.

So moving forward, you're probably going to see Southwest offer some very generous perks to try to get you to hold on to your ticket and stay with Southwest. But what also I think you get to which is really important, Sara, is the reputational damage, the brand damage and that's harder to put dollars and cents to but you better believe there's certainly an impact. And we've heard it all day from passengers who have said, I've been flying Southwest for decades, I'm never flying Southwest again. We'll see.

SIDNER: You do hear it. Sometimes those prices are irresistible, I have to admit. So we'll have to wait and see what (inaudible) ...

SOLOMON: Yes, I mean, as one analyst told me, customers sometimes have very short memories.

SIDNER: That is true. We generally do in this country. Rahel, I love having you on. Thank you.

All right. Joining me now is Clint Henderson, Managing Editor at The Points Guy, a travel advice site. Clint, we are now days into this meltdown. What should passengers do at this point when they have had things canceled, they're on Southwest trying to figure it all out, what can they do?

CLINT HENDERSON, MANAGING EDITOR, THE POINTS GUY: So for the next few days, don't even try to fly Southwest. You want to book yourself on another airline. Southwest has said it will cover reasonable costs incurred by consumers during this mess.

Now, there's a lot of wiggle room in the word reasonable, so we're not exactly sure what that means yet. But keep receipts. Sure you're rigorous notes of everything you've spent during this disaster and hopefully Southwest will make good on it.

SIDNER: I'm just curious, there is a passenger bill of rights and I know I keep harping on that over this last few days. What does that do for us, anything?

HENDERSON: So the rule is that if your flight is canceled by the airline, they owe you a cash refund. Well, that's all well and good. But if you're stuck in the airport for four days and missed Christmas, it's not going to help you much. So there is going to be some political pressure to do a more enhanced passenger bill of rights. Something more like Europe has, EU 261, which it - does give passengers money back if their flights are delayed or cancelled.

So compensation may be on the agenda. Already the Department of Transportation, a lot of congressmen and senators have started really applying political pressure on Southwest. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens. We may be seeing push towards a stronger passenger bill of rights.

SIDNER: I'm like writing this down, EU 261, I'm going to go read it, because I'm curious. The Points Guy just published some overall tips on navigating an airline meltdown and this is news you can use. Talk to me about why people should, for example, check credit card benefits.

HENDERSON: This is one of the little known benefits of some of the really strong credit cards out there, like American Express Platinum or Chase Sapphire Preferred.

[15:15:02]

There is trip cancellation, trip interruption protection so they will reimburse you even in a weather meltdown like this, when the airlines won't, they'll reimburse you for hotels and Ubers, and things like that. Now, there is a limit on how much they'll reimburse you, but that's one unknown benefit of this.

Try not to check bags, if you can all avoid it, you want to book nonstop direct flights, you don't want to have to have a layover somewhere, it adds to the mess. So just a couple of tips we have at The Points Guy.

SIDNER: I am going to keep this up. Because I think it's really important for people to see not everybody can do all the things. But it's good for people to be able to understand, especially when you have so many people that may be taking their first flight in a very long time, who are not used to flying. Don't check bags, fly nonstop, check your credit card benefits, as you just mentioned, book another airline, that's sometimes harder done - easier said than done and save and submit your receipts.

I do have a question for you about Southwest, in particular, what will Southwest do going forward? How can they make this right, if at all? And how much damage has this done to Southwest Airlines?

This is not a good look for Southwest, first of all. Big reputational damage, but what's really going to matter now is how they recover from this so are they paying their passengers back for those incurred costs? Are they really sticking to their word and saying they're going to reimburse you for having to book yourself on United or stay at a hotel for four nights? Are they coming to the rescue of these passengers eventually in making it right? If they don't do that, you're going to see their heat - their feet really held to the fire going forward.

SIDNER: Clint Henderson, thank you. I do enjoy The Points Guy. You guys have a lot of good points, if you will.

HENDERSON: Yes.

SIDNER: Thank you for being on.

Well, the Supreme Court keeps Title 42 in place. Customs and Border Patrol is opening a temporary migrant processing center in El Paso to help with the influx. I'll speak to a member of the El Paso City Council coming up next.

And Republican Congressman-elect, George Santos, is in damage control mode as you might imagine after he was caught lying multiple times about many different things. Yet still, GOP leadership has gone silent. We'll discuss.

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SIDNER: At the U.S. Mexico border, the Supreme Court just decided to keep in place the deportation rule known as Title 42 for now, that is while the court considers all of the legal challenges that it will begin hearing in February. The Trump-era policy allows federal officials to quickly expel migrants while they wait for an asylum hearing.

The temporary stay is creating confusion, as you might imagine, in places like El Paso, where new CNN drone video captured U.S. Customs and Border Protection erecting a tent-like facility to increase capacity by about a thousand. Claudia Rodriguez is a city councilmember in El Paso. We talked, I think, earlier this week, how does this temporary stay affect the surge of migrants that you were anticipating coming into El Paso?

CLAUDIA RODRIGUEZ, CITY COUNCIL MEMBER, EL PASO, TEXAS: I mean, I think it affects it in the way that these people are no longer going to be staying in the street or so we hope. As you just mentioned, it's going to hold about a thousand people but we're seeing releases of upwards 2,000 people a day.

So I mean, everybody is overwhelmed, NGOs are overwhelmed. We have - we also set up the Civic Center, our local school districts set up to shelter that to vacant schools. And so we are providing a lot of shelter, but I mean, obviously this is just a temporary or should be, I hope it is, a temporary solution. Because long-term, this is absolutely unsustainable.

SIDNER: You talk about it being unsustainable. You talk about some of the things the city is doing to try and deal with just the numbers of people who have been coming over into El Paso both those who are undocumented and those who are undocumented. Can you give me a sense of how you are going to deal with this going further? Are you getting, for example, the federal funding that you need to try and deal with this issue?

RODRIGUEZ: So as far as I'm aware, FEMA is helping us. They are providing funding for us. The problem is, is that long-term that's not the solution. FEMA should not be our permanent solution, providing more money towards FEMA should not be our permanent solution long- term. Our solution should be legislative.

So here in El Paso, we are a border community. We are a city of immigrants. I myself is - I'm a first generation Latina, but my parents and my husband, everybody, my grandparents are all immigrants, but this is not normal. What's going on right now is something completely different. It's something unprecedented. It's something that we have not seen before.

We're not used to people coming over the way they're coming over and running through our highways. We're not used to people sleeping on our streets. That's not the type of community that we are. So right now the temporary shelters, I suppose, are a band aid to what is to come, but long-term we need to be better prepared.

For now we have Title 42 staying in place. However, that's not the solution either. And so the federal government needs to provide real solutions and not just temporary fixes to what's going on here on El Paso.

SIDNER: I think that's been the call out for all administrations going back many, many years that something has to be done. Congress as well has a major role in this. CNN has some new reporting now that the Department of Homeland Security had actually warned officials about possible domestic terrorist attacks if Title 42 was lifted.

[15:25:09]

Had you heard anything about that and is the city being given any information on that front?

RODRIGUEZ: I mean, it certainly is a very scary situation that we are facing in El Paso. Like I said, we are a city of immigrants, but we have never seen anything like this before. It is something very scary that could affect the entire state, the entire country. And, again, you mentioned that prior administrations have been trying to fix this and you're absolutely correct.

However, the difference being is that here in El Paso, we have never seen it the way it is right now. This is a complete first for us. And we're the sixth largest city in the state of Texas and we're the first largest city on the border - excuse me, on the border across the country.

And so for us, this is something very scary. It's very unsustainable. The federal government needs to do a better job. Congress needs to act. I would ask our Congresswoman, Veronica Escobar, to invite a bipartisan group of Congress people and the President himself, they all need to come down to El Paso.

We have a border wall and El Paso. However, we don't have the proper tools to utilize it appropriately. I feel that if they were to do something legislatively, we could probably - could save ourselves a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort, and the migrants themselves can - don't have to be putting themselves in harm's way the way they're being put right now.

SIDNER: Councilwoman Rodriguez, I can hear the frustration and the concern in your voice. Just quickly, yes or no, does Title 42 being kept in place give you relief or concern?

RODRIGUEZ: I think it's relief in the sense that we finally declared a disaster in the city of El Paso and so we started to prepare, I felt that we didn't have enough time because we prepared about a week before it was meant to be taken away. Now that we have a little bit more time I'm still concerned because it shouldn't be the solution.

We are passing COVID and Title 42 was put in place to help with COVID to - it was COVID policy essentially and it's not okay that we want to say, okay, no more mask, no more this, no more that, but let's keep this Title 42 in replace, while it's temporarily helping us. It should not be a permanent solution.

And again, the Biden administration should be calling on Congress to find a permanent solution so that we're not having to deal with these surges of migrants.

SIDNER: Claudia Rodriguez, thank you so much for your candor and good luck with running the city.

The U.S. House just banned officials from using TikTok on their official devices, more on that development just ahead.