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Consumer Confidence Nosedives; Tuberculosis Outbreak in Kansas; Senator Schumer Holds News Conference on Capitol Hill; ICE Arrested More Than 3,500 People. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired January 28, 2025 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

JIM ACOSTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Some breaking news to tell you about the latest Consumer Confidence Report is out. The numbers are not good. Let's go to CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich with more on that. Vanessa.

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Good morning, Jim. The conference board puts out these numbers every single month and looking back in January, people are still feeling very sour about the economy despite a new administration in the White House.

That's the top line number there. Consumer confidence really plummeting 5.4 percent in the month of January, followed by consumer confidence weakened the month before, in December. But you want to look at where people feel about things right now, and where they think things are going.

So, the present index is down 9.7, that was the steepest drop of all five components that this report looks at. And then if you look at where people think things are going, they also think that the economy is not moving in a great direction, down 2.6.

And there's a couple factors why, Jim. The first one is that people are concerned about the labor market despite really strong jobs growth. They're also concerned about business conditions, concerned about income. Are their wages going to rise in line with inflation? And the big part of this report that we're seeing is Americans still very concerned about inflation. In fact, they expect it to rise in the next six months. And that could be some of the concerns that people have about the Trump administration and some of these economic policies that they're putting into place like tariffs.

Just a point of good news, though, Jim, people do not think a recession is coming. And also, people are feeling pretty good about the stock market still. And also, despite everything I just mentioned, consumers in this report say they're still planning to spend.

But Jim, this is always a really good report to look at, because what it shows is how people are truly feeling about the economy, despite all the numbers that we report, which really does paint a very healthy economy. People still feeling really beat down by the past couple years with high inflation, the expectation that interest rates are going to rise, and the uncertainty about the future. People like to feel really secure. And this report shows, Jim, that they're not feeling very secure about the economy right now and even looking forward into the next six months, Jim.

ACOSTA: Yes, Vanessa, we were just showing the latest at the Dow right now, and it looks as though there isn't a whole lot of concern in the market after that tech sell off that we saw yesterday with some very popular stocks like NVIDIA and so on. I suppose that might be kind of a good sign at this point. But you're right, when consumer confidence drops like that, that is -- that's going to cause some nervousness, I have to think.

YURKEVICH: Yes, certainly. You know, you have to think about the stock market being a little separate from Main Street and how people maybe are feeling. Most Americans don't play in the stock market. But of course, the stock market is very fickle. It can go down one day, recover the next, but how people feel they're still holding on to that bad feeling about the economy, Jim.

ACOSTA: All right. Vanessa Yurkevich, thank you so much. Coming up, Kansas struggling with an unprecedented tuberculosis outbreak. We'll talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:35:00]

ACOSTA: All right. Right now, officials in Kansas are trying to get a handle on a historic tuberculosis outbreak. There are 67 active cases and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment says the outbreak is ongoing, meaning there could be even more cases. Joining me now is Dr. William Schaffner. He's a professor of medicine in the infectious disease division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Dr. Schaffner, great to see you again. I'm having a little bit of deja vu. We used to talk to you all the time during the COVID pandemic, but great to have you back and your expertise. Let me ask you about what's going on in Kansas. The officials there say that this outbreak poses, quote, "very low risk to the general public, including the surrounding counties." Do you agree with that assessment? What do you make of this TB outbreak that we're seeing right now? It is concerning.

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, INFECTIOUS DISEASES PROFESSOR, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER: Well, it is concerning locally. This is going to be a local phenomenon, Jim. And as you know, TB is caused by a bacteria that principally involves the lung. And it usually is transmitted person to person with prolonged contact.

So, we'll find all the cases, and then the local and state health departments with CDC assistance will go out and get all the contacts of those positive cases and test them to. If they test positive, we can treat them with drugs so that they won't get sick. And if there are people who don't have insurance, the drugs will be provided for them by the local health department.

So, health departments know how to deal with TB. This is a local phenomenon. We don't know the populations exactly affected. The news reports have been kind of scarce, but I am absolutely confident that the local health departments have this under control and we'll get to the edges of all this pretty quickly.

ACOSTA: And Dr. Schaffner, I mean, help me out here because I remember during the COVID scare, the concern was somebody would have it get on a plane, could spread it around at the airport, wherever they go off to. Could that happen with this TB outbreak in Kansas? Somebody could not know that they have it, go to the airport, go to another city, spread it around an airport, or are we talking about two very different things, and we shouldn't worry ourselves about this?

[10:40:00]

They're very, very different. COVID is spread rather readily by the respiratory route, if you're close to other people. TB takes much longer to be transmitted. But if there are people in those local communities who are concerned and they go out into the public, well, put on your mask. You'll be protected against TB, and you'll also have some protection against flu, which is out there everywhere still.

ACOSTA: All right. Dr. Schaffner, thank you very much. And we do want to tell you that happening right now up on Capitol Hill, the Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer is holding a news conference. He was just talking about Trump's federal aid freeze a few moments ago. He had some comments about this, blasting the president. Let's take a listen to what the senator had to say just a few moments ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), MINORITY LEADER: Look, last night, President Trump plunged the country into chaos. Without a shred of warning, the Trump administration announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country. In an instant, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that directly support states, cities, towns, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and most of all, American families. It's a dagger at the heart of the average American family in red states, in blue states, in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. It is just outrageous.

Funds for things like disaster assistance, local law enforcement, rural hospitals, aid to the elderly, food for people in need, all are on the chopping block in this new administration. Why? They need tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and these cuts, they think, will fund them.

Every one of our offices has been deluged with calls from people who are in panic. What is this going to mean? What if I have a hospital that has people on life support? What are we going to do? And just like the January 6th pardons, this decision is lawless, dangerous, destructive, cruel. It's illegal. It's unconstitutional.

I spoke to my attorney general this morning. She's head of the State Attorneys General Association. They're going to court right away on this horror. This -- plain and simple, this is Project 2025.

(END VIDEO CLIP) ACOSTA: All right. There's the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer fired up over this frozen federal aid that Trump initiated last night. More after a break. Be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:45:00]

ACOSTA: President Trump is barely a week into his second term and his administration is charged out of the gate on illegal immigration. In just the past two days, immigration officials say they have arrested 2,000 people. Other federal agencies have joined in on the sweeping raids across the country, stoking fear and mistrust in the migrant community.

And joining me now is Dylan Corbett. He is the founding director of the Hope Border Institute. That's an advocacy group that helps migrants between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. Dylan, thank you very much for joining us right now.

I do want to ask you about how people are feeling right now in the migrant community. I have to think that there is a huge level of anxiety right now. People have to be scared, frankly.

DYLAN CORBETT, FOUNDING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOPE BORDER INSTITUTE: Yes, that's right. Good to be with you. You're absolutely right. El Paso, we're a strong community. We're a vibrant community. But we're also an immigrant community, and we've got a significant amount of people who are undocumented. We've got about 50,000 people.

But this is a community that's very much part of the daily life, the daily fabric of what it means to be El Paso. Our community pays -- undocumented community, they pay over $70 million in taxes. 70 percent of them have been here for more than 10 years and many for more than 20 years. One in three of them have a U.S. citizen child.

So, if we saw increased immigration enforcement here in El Paso, something like mass deportations, it would be an economic catastrophe, it would be a moral catastrophe, and it would be a social catastrophe.

ACOSTA: And, Dylan, what does this mean for families with both documented and undocumented loved ones? People might be unaware of this, but there are many mixed status families in this country. What about them?

CORBETT: It's true. There are mixed status families across the country. There are mixed status families here in El Paso. That means that if we see increased deportations, we're going to see families affected. This is going to be something that strikes at the heart of families across the country. These are people who study -- children who study in our schools, parents who pick their children up at schools.

You know, last week we saw something that really strikes at the heart of what it means to be a community here in El Paso when the administration reversed what's called the sensitive locations policy. And what that's done is restrained unnecessary immigration enforcement in places like schools, in places like churches, and in places like hospitals. And that is -- you know, that's a direct attack on families. That's a direct attack on parents and children, a direct attack on people who are sick, who are trying to get health care, who need health care, who don't want to be contagious in our community, and it's a direct attack on people going to church.

[10:50:00]

So, we've already seen the initial pieces of what could be an increased enforcement campaign here in the borderlands as well as throughout the country, but it's something that's going to hit us. It's something that's going to hit the country. And I'm not sure that people are fully aware of what the consequences are going to be. Economically, socially, it's a real attack.

ACOSTA: Yes. I mean, we were talking about this with Congressman Mike Quigley at the top of the hour. He's in Chicago. And he was concerned about people not going to -- kids not going to school because of fear, people not going to work because of fear. And I suppose one of the unintended consequences or perhaps intended consequences of this is to drive people into the shadows.

CORBETT: I think that's true. I think that's exactly what the administration is trying to do. You've seen high profile raids, workplace raids, raids in neighborhoods across the country in places like Newark and Chicago, and that's what they're trying to do.

They may not have the resources right now to do full scale mass deportations, but what they're doing is trying to do highly publicized events which are meant to drive fear into the immigrant community. And that's what people are feeling. That's what people are feeling here in El Paso. Our neighbors are feeling that. That's the point of this.

You know, as they've -- as others have said, cruelty is the point with these immigration policies. It's going to affect our country in negative ways. And we've already begun to see the impact here in El Paso. People are afraid. People, as you said, are afraid to send their children to schools, afraid to go to church.

You know, El Paso is also a community that still goes to church. And last week, we also saw officials like Tom Holan, you know, they attacked Pope Francis, they attacked the Catholic Church. Over the weekend, the vice president attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops just for defending migrants. This is vile. People think this is despicable. And there's a lot of fear and anxiety on our families, that -- which is really unnecessary.

ACOSTA: Dylan, asylum seekers are arriving at the border and finding it essentially sealed. Are you concerned about the desperation of some of these asylum seekers? And what does it say about this country? Because I mean, my father's a Cuban migrant on my mother's side. You have people immigrated to this country. This country has always been a beacon of hope through its immigration system, through immigration.

ACOSTA: That's right. The U.S. is a country of migrants. Migration is part of what makes our country strong. What you need at the border basically is a couple of things. You need legal pathways, people who need to migrate, vulnerable people. We have to have legal pathways by which they can migrate so that they're not pushed into the deserts and dying. They're not pushed into the hands of cartels and people who would exploit them.

And you also need a functioning, clear, transparent system for asylum at the border. Towards the end of the Biden administration, we began to get that with things like CBP One. And actually, the numbers of people arriving at the border began to plummet. The Biden administration handed off to the Trump administration the lowest numbers of arrivals in years.

But on day one, he blew up that whole system. He blew up the legal pathways. He got CBP One. And so, now there's effectively no system. There's no way for asylum seekers to access protection here in El Paso or along the border. And these actions risk plunging the border back into chaos.

ACOSTA: All right. Dylan Corbett, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it.

CORBETT: Good to be with you.

ACOSTA: Good to be with you. And I just wanted to end today's show by thanking all of the wonderful people who work behind the scenes at this network. You may have seen some reports about me and the show. And after giving all of this some careful consideration and weighing an alternative time slot CNN offered me, I've decided to move on.

I am grateful to CNN for the nearly 18 years I've spent here doing the news. People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump. Actually, no. That moment came here, when I covered Former President Barack Obama's trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island's political prisoners.

As the son of a Cuban refugee, I took home this lesson, it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I have always believed it's the job of the press to hold power to account. I've always tried to do that here at CNN, and I plan on going doing all of that in the future.

One final message, don't give in to the lies. Don't give into the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope. Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message. I will not give into the lies. I will not give into the fear. Post it on your social media so people can hear from you too.

I'll have more to say about my plans in the coming days. But until then, I want to thank all of you for tuning in. It has been an honor to be welcomed into your home for all these years. That's the news. Reporting from Washington. I'm Jim Acosta.

[10:55:00]

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. You are live in the CNN Newsroom. I'm Pamela Brown in Washington. And I just want to wish my buddy, my colleague who I've worked with for years, Jim Acosta, the very best. He just announced that he'll be leaving CNN and he will be greatly missed.

And we begin this hour with an overnight memo from the Trump administration ordering a sweeping pause on all --

[11:00:00]