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Biden Admin to Roll Out New Measures to Curb Surging Migrant Crossing; Contract Negotiations Stall as 7,000-Plus NYC Nurses Remain on Strike; Setback in Space as Britain's First Rocket Launch Fails. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired January 10, 2023 - 10:30   ET

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

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JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: In the next hour, President Biden will meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, one-on-one, this part of the North American leader's summit being held in Mexico City. The issue of immigration a big one at the summit.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: And it is always a big issue back here in Washington, at home, of course. The White House preparing to roll out a new plan aimed at curbing the surge of migrants at the southern border.

CNN's M.J. Lee is traveling with the president and is in Mexico City. So, M.J., just refresh our memories, what are the details in this plan?

M.J. LEE, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, as you both noted, this issue has, of course, been a very big one for President Biden back at home and now has been a major issue here in Mexico City at the North American leader's summit. Just in a little bit, we are going to see the president meeting again with the Canadian prime minister and the president of Mexico to discuss this and many other issues.

And what we will be seeing is an announcement from the administration to roll out a virtual portal, this is being described by administration officials as sort of a one-stop shop for migrants and asylum-seekers who can hopefully go to this platform and figure out whether there are legal ways for them to enter countries, like the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

We are also told that there are efforts being made to build physical resource centers, including in Southern Mexico. Again, the idea there, too, is to give a resource -- more resources to migrants to go to these kinds of centers and figure out how can I legally migrate to a place like the United States.

All of this sort of goes to show that the U.S. believes that there needs to be a coordinated effort, that the U.S. needs to work with partners in the region, like Mexico, like Canada, to deal with the situation of migrants trying to cross the U.S. border at record numbers.

And I think it is important to note that back at home, you know, there are going to be some mixed responses to some of these new measures being rolled out, particularly since we don't have the full details yet. We don't know exactly how effective they're going to be and there have been some concerns raised about the fact that oftentimes when these migrants, asylum seekers are coming to the border without first sort of taking the proper measures to try to apply for asylum, they are doing that simply because the situation back at home, the situation that they're trying to leave behind is so dire and so desperate.

So, we will see how the three leaders potentially talk about this issue of migration when we see them later this afternoon. But certainly, as you noted, back at home for President Biden, this remains a huge political liability for him.

HILL: Yes, it absolutely is. M.J., I appreciate it. Thank you.

Joining me now, Democratic Congressman Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, who joined President Biden on his trip to the U.S./Mexico border over the weekend. Sir, good to have you with us.

REP. VICENTE GONZALEZ (D-TX): Good to be here.

HILL: As you know, President Biden was criticized about that trip that he didn't meet with any migrants while visiting that migrant center in El Paso. Do you believe it was a mistake for the president?

GONZALEZ: No, it was a very effective, productive day on the border for the president. He got to actually visit the border, visit how people are processed, met with Border Patrol, met with the Customs agents on our border, got to discuss detailed processes of what migrants go through and got to see what trade and drugs that are being interdicted on our border, how they're being processed. So, it was a very effective trip for the president.

Also you have to remember, Secretary Mayorkas was with us. He has traveled extensively along the border. He is very knowledgeable and he's briefing the president regularly. We -- he had three members, border members of Congress, myself and two others, with him. So, we were able to brief him on what we've been dealing with for years now.

[10:35:00]

And I was able to talk about the Safe Zone Act, which is another proposal on top of the administration to try, to improve conditions along the border and make it a more orderly process for people who seek asylum to come to this country.

HILL: And I do want to ask you specifically about that Safe Zone Act. In terms of who was there, your fellow Texas Congressman, Tony Gonzales, a Republican, said he wasn't invited to that trip at the southern border but had asked to go. Was that a missed opportunity for President Biden? GONZALEZ: Well, we had a lot of members that wanted to come and a lot of members -- obviously, it was limited space to come and visit, but Tony and I talked on the floor and discuss the border regularly. Listen --

HILL: Would it have helped to have a Republican there?

GONZALEZ: Republicans were there on the ground, people that we talked to.

Donald Trump used to come regularly to me border. He never invited me along. So, that just happens. But I could tell you we always work in a bipartisan way. This bill that I'm talking about, the Safe Zone Act, is a bipartisan bill, and we're going to continue reaching across the aisle and talking to our Republican friends.

HILL: So, in terms of that bill, so, currently, under current U.S. immigration law, as I understand it, a migrant has to be physically present in the U.S. or at the border if they want to claim asylum. They can't do it in an embassy or a consulate in another country. Part of the Safe Zone Act that you're proposing, as I understand it, would change that, wllowing them to apply for asylum before they get close to the southern border.

GONZALEZ: That is right.

HILL: How much support do you think you currently have in Congress for that --

GONZALEZ: We're going to have a lot of support for this bill. I had to discuss it with the president. I'm discussing it with President Giammattei in Guatemala this next week. And what it does, it creates this zone in Guatemala as the first pilot program for migrants who are coming south of the border to come up and process at that juncture, very similar to what they do in my district. This would be done in partnership with other countries, have them process their asylum claim 1,500 miles from the southern border. It does two things. It takes the pressure off our border, one, and allows Border Patrol and law enforcement to do what their job and it takes the cartel element out of it as well.

These migrants that show up to my border are paying between $6,000 and $8,000 a head to cartels to get to our southern border. So, cartels have made billions of dollars trafficking migrants to our southern border and we need to have a plan to eliminate that. This Safe Zone Act does just that. It is a bipartisan bill.

I have a meeting with some Republican members today to discuss it. And it is very humane for people who care about migrants. Why should we force migrants to walk 1,500 miles and pay cartels and women and children to be pillaged and go through horrible struggles that they go through if we're going to allow them in anyway under the credible first standard, which is quite a low standard? Let's do it from another place.

HILL: Well, hopefully, we look forward to an update after that meeting that you'll have later today with Republicans. So, feel free to fill us in.

We're getting tight a little tight on time, but as you know, immigration is an incredibly broad problem. It is also, in some ways, perhaps better politically for lawmakers not to work on solving this issue.

GONZALEZ: Well, some people --

HILL: Well, let me ask you, though. Is there one -- do you believe that there is one point, whether it is your Safe Zones Act or something else, is there one item in this broad list, this -- of potential action items that fall under immigration, that you could see some real bipartisan movement on in this Congress?

GONZALEZ: Well, if you look at the proposals that Biden has just from a policy perspective and how we're going to deal with migrants, one of them on the list is that anybody who seeks asylum in our country who transited through another safe country must ask for asylum there.

I've been saying this for years. I had Eastern Europeans that were in Paris and Rome and Madrid before they got to my place. They had many other safe countries to ask for asylum. People coming north stop in Costa Rica and Panama, Mexico, which is somehow still considered a safe country, other places where they could ask for asylum and they should be required to do so.

HILL: So, you believe that that particular point could have broad bipartisan support?

GONZALEZ: I really do. It makes sense. If we don't make this political, we can fix it. This -- what is happening on the border is not a Democratic or a Republican problem. It is an American problem that requires all of us to engage in a meaningful way and resolve it.

HILL: Listen, they are great points. I wish you great luck in not making it political. Because you're right, it is an issue that needs to be dealt with for all Americans.

Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, I appreciate you joining us this morning and we look forward to that update. Thank you.

GONZALEZ: Absolutely. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Still to come, another update on a story we've been following, thousands of New York City nurses are still off the job as their strike enters a second day. Workers at one hospital tells CNN the traveling nurses meant to help fill that gap have not yet shown up. We're going to take you there live for an update.

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SCIUTTO: Negotiations at a standstill as New York City nurses, thousands of them, enter their second day of a strike. HILL: More than 7,000 nurses walked out of two major hospitals citing low pay, long hours and what they say is insufficient and unsafe staffing levels.

CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich covering this for us in New York. So, where do these negotiations stand this morning?

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Jim and Erica. Negotiations are stalled, both here at Mt. Sinai and at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. But nurses out on the streets again here on New York's Upper East Side. The main sticking point is the safe staffing. That is the ratio of patients to nurses. Nurses on the picket lines right now growing frustrated that there have been no movement on these negotiations.

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And this is just not a New York City issue. This is an issue that is happening across the country, with these unequal ratios of patients to nurses. That in turn creates a situation where it is really hard to hire nurses and that creates labor shortage and then perpetuates this issue of ratios. It is a vicious cycle, Jim and Erica.

SCIUTTO: So, we know that hospitals had some warning of the strike and they tried to take -- make efforts to replace those nurses during this time. Is that working?

YURKEVICH: Right. Well, New York City and the hospital system at Montefiore and Mt. Sinai say that they're bringing in traveling nurses and that there is no issue with staffing inside of the hospitals. However, two nurses that we spoke to were working shifts yesterday said that they haven't seen these traveling nurses on their floors, that their experiencing ratios of three nurses to 30 patients, when it should be one nurse to every four patients.

And they're saying that this is creating a safety issue for patients. And they're saying that patients are growing nervous over this. One nurse telling me yesterday that she didn't know if she was going to come back to work today because it was so unsafe for these patients. And she could potentially lose her medical license if something went wrong.

Now, of course, the hospitals telling us in response, they are bringing in these traveling nurses to help staff up when these nurses are out here on the strike lines. They're telling us this morning that they would rather be inside, however, they're fighting out here for the very issue they feel like would be better for their patients in the future, Jim and Erica.

SCIUTTO: Yes. The nurses make so much of a difference in patient care. Vanessa Yurkevich, thanks so much.

HILL: Well, if you haven't already given up on your New Year's resolution to try to eat healthier, listen, I have faith in you out there. You can do this. It is only January 10th. And the good news there may be a new approach for you. There is a new study that was just released which explains how you can eat to live longer.

SCIUTTO: The donuts I had this morning, no one saw it happen.

HILL: They're totally on that list.

SCIUTTO: So, let's bring in CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Tara Narula. And, Dr. Narula, people have known eating healthy is go for you. I suppose, what is new in this study that people should take away with it?

DR. TARA NARULA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Well, the donuts are not on the list. Let's be clear. So, this is one of the largest and longest studies to really look at the idea of dietary patterns and how that translates into your risk of dying.

And so they looked at around a little over 70,000 women and a little over 40,000 men, they gave them food questionnaires every few years and followed them for about 36 years. And they found that those who had the highest adherence to four different healthy dietary eating plans or patterns had a 20 percent lower risk of mortality.

They also looked across the diseased spectrum and they found that this lower mortality related to decreased cardiovascular mortality, decreased mortality for neurodegenerative diseases, respiratory diseases and cancer. So, once again, even more and more data to point us in the direction that nutrition really matters in terms of our health. We think so often of medications and procedures but something as simple as food can just have such a tremendous impact.

SCIUTTO: Okay. Can you boil it down for us, I mean, give us some basics here?

NARULA: Yes. So, the four eating patterns we're talking about were pretty similar. They all really focus on fruits, whole grains, vegetables, legumes, much more plant-based, really limiting meat and also things like added sugar and saturated fat. But the nice thing is it promotes this idea of flexibility. So, a lot of times people think, well, which is the one diet I have to choose, and this is saying you can pick from these four. You can start as late as you want in life. I really promote starting early in childhood setting these patterns down. But, again, food is medicine, so, important to kind of emphasize that.

HILL: And also you are a cardiologist. You and I were talking briefly about this this morning. And I was sort of joking, you're a cardiologist, wine has a lot of benefits. But when we look at all of these foods, this is to live longer, but there are a lot of heart benefits here, too. What are your go-tos?

NARULA: Absolutely. So, I often talk about the Mediterranean diet, which is one of these four that they talked about, or vegetarian diets or plant-based. There's also a diet that we call the dash diet, dietary approach to stop hypertension. These are all really good. But the Mediterranean one is really easy one to do. You think about eating like you do if Italy or Greece.

HILL: Maybe we should just all go to Italy or Greece.

SCIUTTO: I was just going to say, the easiest place to follow that diet is in Italy or Greece. So, book your travel.

HILL: Yes. I mean, I'm available to go do some research. So, I think --

NARULA: Me too.

HILL: Yes. So, there we go. Well, Dr. Narula, thank you, we'll see you at the airport.

SCIUTTO: All right. Well, I'm going to take that heart, donuts be damned.

Another story we're following, a setback in the U.K.'s first space launch Virgin Orbit's rocket sadly fails.

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You see the images there. We're going to take a look at what went wrong.

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HILL: A setback in space after Virgin Orbit's first mission dubbed, Start Me Up, failed nearly two hours after the company's first launch from U.K. soil.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Tom Foreman joins us now with details. So, this is, in effect, Virgin's entry into the kind of SpaceX category launch payloads into space, compete with the government and so on. How significant is this?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: They've done five of them successfully from Mojave Desert. This is going to be bringing England back into the space game in terms of launch. It is significant in that this really was a different type of launch platform.

What happened was this airplane called Cosmic Girl took off.

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It dropped the rocket at about 38,000 feet from its wing. Four seconds later, the rocket fires, it blasts off into space, goes hypersonic. And somewhere during the burn of the second stage of the rocket, something went wrong, something they called an anomaly. So, it was in space. It had done all of the really hard work and something went wrong. We don't know exactly what it is.

It is extremely significant because the private space, space is very crowded and very competitive now and every setback like this represents many, many years of work and millions of dollars lost, and a slip in their competitive standing in all likelihood.

SCIUTTO: I will say, space is hard. Tom Foreman, thanks so much. FOREMAN: You're welcome.

HILL: Thanks to all of you for join us today. Always good to have your company. I'm Erica Hill.

SCIUTTO: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

At This Hour with Kate Bolduan starts right after a quick break.

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