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U.S. Braces for Tens of Thousands of Migrants as Border Rule Expires; Welsh Composer Wants You To Know He Wasn't Meghan Markle In Disguise. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired May 12, 2023 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:02]

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: I mean, you can, I don't think --

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: It's a thing.

MATTINGLY: I know, I know.

HARLOW: The Minnesota State Fair.

MATTINGLY: Minnesota.

HARLOW: Now, best.

MATTINGLY: All right. More in the sports realm, I guess. Jayson Tatum got hot late helping the Celtics force a winner take all game seven against the 6 76ers. Andy Scholes has this morning's bleacher report.

ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Hey, good morning, guys. You know, I'm humbly one of the best basketball players in the world. Those were the words from Jayson Tatum after turning his night around big time to help the Celtics keep their season alive.

Now Tatum, he was having just an awful night. He missed 14 of his 1st 15 shots, but then just came alive halfway through the fourth. Tatum hitting back-to-back threes to put Boston up by four with under four to go.

Then with under two minutes to go, Tatum coming up with the dagger three. The Celtics force a game seven back in Boston on Sunday with the 95-86 win. And here was Tatum afterwards.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAYSON TATUM, BOSTON CELTICS FORWARD: I'm going to humbly one of the best basketball players in the world, you know, go through struggles, go through slumps. It's a long game and, you know, thankful I got some great teammates that held it down, Brogdon, JB, Smart, Al, and they all trust me, right? They said, we keep taking great looks, it's going to fall, keep impacting the game in other ways. And all that matter was we in this game, right? Give ourselves another chance, come back home for a Game 7 .

(END VIDEO CLIP) SCHOLES: All right, the NFL's regular season schedule is now out and the teams making the announcement in some very creative ways on social media.

But the best video of all was from the titans, who asked fans to name that opponent on the streets of Nashville.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Boston Bobcats? No idea. No idea.

WOMEN: Cowboys, cowboys, yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Baltimore. Baltimore, Orioles.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This one is the red stallion.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: 49ers --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. Stars?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's a Pirates from the islands of the Caribbean.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHOLES: It's OK.

HARLOW: You got to made our day.

SCHOLES: I think my favorite was how sure those group of girls were they, it was cowboys, cowboys. And it was actually Indianapolis Colts, it's too good.

HARLOW: I think it's terrible.

SCHOLES: I mean, look, there's nothing like the self-assurance or lack of self-awareness of those at a bachelor or bachelorette party in Nashville, Tennessee.

HARLOW: Thanks, Andy.

SCHOLES: All right, have a good one.

HARLOW: Title 42 officially expired at midnight. And now border officials are bracing for tens of thousands of migrants to attempt to cross into the United States. We're going to be joined next hour by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. That's ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:37:05]

HARLOW: Welcome back to CNN This Morning, Thousands of migrants lining up along the southern border waiting to enter the United States as this pandemic era policy known as Title 42 ended overnight.

President Biden saying the migrant surge at the border is, "going to be chaotic for a while." Here's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaking yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: I want to be very clear it our borders are not open. People who cross our border unlawfully and without a legal basis to remain will be promptly processed and removed. As we have done all we can with the resources that we have and within the system that we are operating under. It is going to take a period of time for our approach to actually gain traction and show results. And I've been very clear about that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is really taking the Biden administration to task on this. She says the administration's preparedness is insufficient and unacceptable. Let's talk about this and a lot more with CNN Senior Political Analyst and Senior Editor at the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein. Ron, good morning. Really good morning for you in Los Angeles.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning. OK.

HARLOW: You, I mean, you have been writing and diving deeply into this issue since prop 187 in California. That was in the early 90s, right? And look where we are.

BROWNSTEIN: Right.

HARLOW: Look where we are now. And you make the point that, you know, when we think we have it pretty much right, it's usually suboptimal.

BROWNSTEIN: Yeah, I don't think there's ever been a point over those 30 years where the mix of policies on the border have kind of kept everybody satisfied. I mean, this is a problem that you manage, not a problem that you solve. You either manage it more well or less well.

Look, you know, the President and the Secretary have both said there are going to be scenes of chaos there in the coming weeks. And this is already one of the area, is where President Biden gets his lowest marks from the public on his performance. So that is probably going to get worse.

But I think the history Poppy is that the voters who are most concerned about the border tend to be right leaning voters to begin with, who are very difficult for the President to get on other issues. I think the exception is Arizona, where I think this is kind of a political problem for him. But in the states that are likely to side the presidency, there are other things inflation, abortion that are probably going to have a much bigger impact on his fate.

I would point out as part of that mix of how hard it is to get this right, the former President Trump on the CNN Town Hall said that signaled very strongly that he was going to resume the practice of separating kids from their parents at the border and then also went on video yesterday and promised the largest domestic deportation in American history.

People going basically door to door, rounding people up is what he's suggesting. And I can promise you that neither of those will be any more popular than the scenes of chaos that you see on the border now.

[06:40:04]

MATTINGLY: I'm always struck on this issue, the political expediency or incentives just generally outweigh the policy necessity and has been the case as you and Poppy are talking for decades here. But to your point about kind of how the Biden administration views this from the political lens and I've spoken to them repeatedly about this over the course of the last couple of years, their concern is pictures chaos. They don't feel like immigration pops into the top issues that people are most concerned about until they see pictures of chaos. You know, what happens if this becomes a chaotic type of moment for them? Does it end up elevating to a point where they have a significant political problem?

BROWNSTEIN: You know, Phil, I think in public opinion on immigration over really decades, it's been incredibly consistent. I mean, people do want order at the border. They want the rule of law upheld. They don't want the idea that, you know, people are just kind of en masse illegally entering the country. They want order.

But they also just as consistently, over three decades have supported kind of realistic solutions for dealing with the millions of undocumented people that are already here. And more recently, we have kind of a third element that's grown in importance, which is that we don't talk about it much, but from 2010 to 2020, the American population grew slower than in any decade in U.S. history except the Depression.

And you see the impact of that in the struggles that many businesses are having finding enough workers, which is one of the reasons why the Fed is keeping interest rates high. So in many ways we are all paying a tax for the lack of population growth through high interest rates.

And we are in this paradoxical situation. Obviously, the people lining up at the border is not the solution, but the idea that we are trying to figure out the best way to keep people out while we don't have enough people in the workforce simultaneously. Obviously calls for some kind of solution of creating legal pathways to get the workers we need to get the economic growth we want.

HARLOW: It's such a good point and it's so obvious, now Republicans even -- remember Kevin Hassett in the Trump administration who had been very vocal about, we need more immigrants for the economic point you just made, Ron.

Before you go, we have -- we really wanted to have you on also to talk about what the heck is going to happen with the death ceiling, because you wrote this great piece back in January that was illuminating to take us all back to 2011 and remind us why and what Biden learned then in those debt ceiling negotiations that leads to his refusal. Maybe that'll change to negotiate now, what's the lesson?

BROWNSTEIN: Well, look, President Obama did agree to negotiate with then Speaker John Boehner about the budget in the context of a debt ceiling increase. Obama notably saw it even then as two separate processes. He thought the budget negotiation had to balance out internally, that the increasing the debt was not something Republicans gave him, but nonetheless, he was willing to tie the two. And Biden was the lead figure in that for many months, negotiating with Eric Cantor, then the number two in the House before it broke down.

But that process ultimately proved so scarring as the negotiations fell apart weeks before hitting the deadline, with the U.S. debt being downgraded, chaos in the markets, and this chaotic scramble to avoid a default at the last minute that Obama and his team came out of that convinced that they would never do that again.

You know, and it is so -- and the fact that Biden is taking this hard line is so striking because the next time Republicans tried in 2013, Harry Reid was so worried that Biden would want to make a deal with Mitch McConnell that he demanded of the White House that they keep Biden on the sidelines.

And in fact, Obama never did negotiate with them again after 2011. He refused to tie the debt ceiling to any budget negotiation. Ultimately, Republicans agreed to raise the debt ceiling. Now, will they do that again? It's a smaller majority. McCarthy is weaker than Boehner, and it's a House majority that is further to the right. I think Biden very clearly came out of that, saying, you cannot link these two.

But Poppy, he has been equally clear that he is willing to negotiate on the budget itself. And you can see sort of the parameters of a potential deal with permitting reform, some domestic discretionary caps and clawing back COVID funds, but he does not want to legitimize the idea of linking the two.

MATTINGLY: Ron Brownstein, great context as always, my friend. Thanks so much.

BROWNSTEIN: Thanks for having me, guys.

MATTINGLY: Well, a conspiracy theory gained steam online, suggesting Meghan Markle attended King Charles coronation in disguise. That's what you're looking at there on the screen. But it was actually this man, Sir Karl Jenkins. He even had to defend himself on TikTok.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SIR KARL JENKINS, AWARD-WINNING COMPOSER: Someone wrote I was there, whoever I was, to steal the crown jewels. I look this way all the time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Good news, Sir Karl Jenkins is here to put the conspiracy to bed for good.

[06:45:03]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATTINGLY: This man is not Meghan Markle. No matter what you've read on the Internet. The conspiracy theory started racing online after last Saturday's coronation of King Charles.

Now, idea behind it that the Duchess of Sussex had donned a shaggy wig, glasses and a big and impressive fake mustache to attend the ceremony, incognito. People tweeted, almost had me fooled. And you're not fooling us. That's not Meghan Markle. It's Sir Karl Jenkins, a very famous Welsh composer who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2015. And he joins us right now.

Sir Karl Jenkins, thanks so much for joining us. Look, I'm going to be honest. I watch your TikTok video. That seems like something Meghan Markle would say if she was trying to confuse people and stay in disguise. Can you confirm that was in fact you, sir?

JENKINS: Yeah, it was I. Yes, I was there. This person. It would have been impossible for anyone to get into the Abbey because of the security. You have to present two photo IDs, utility bill with an address on. No one could have gone through that. And kind of typical aircraft kind of security scanning as well, so no one got through it.

[06:50:23]

MATTINGLY: Can I just ask, when did you hear about this and what was your reaction? Because this spread like wildfire. There are millions of views, everybody kind of talking about. I think the New York Post wrote about it as well. What did you find out?

JENKINS: Well, it was kind of very sudden. It was the next day when my publisher Boosey & Hawkes, my record label, Decca, kind of round me up and said, there's some movement here on social media.

I mean, I don't do social media, I have a Facebook page, but my publisher runs that, so I know there's been a lot of activity on TikTok that picked up on something I did. So, yeah, people come up, or people sometimes do come up to me in the street, but it's been ridiculous. This last week, people buy me drinks in pubs and pointing to me saying, you're at the wedding. The reason I was there is I wrote a piece of music. It was a half gun shirt, in fact, that I wrote for print for King Charles when he was a Prince of Wales. And he selected us for one of the pieces during the ceremony. So that's why I was there as a composer.

They can look up my website and see me there and all my glory, if you like.

HARLOW: All my glory.

JENKINS: I met Meghan and Harry twice, once was when I did a concert for them, for his charity, Combat Stress, and help the heroes to military charities. And we performed My Armed Man and masterpiece that would be done in Carnegie Hall in January, on January the 15th, incidentally, to get a plug in. But they were there, and they were charming, and she was charming and friendly. And as I say, I met them twice. And I really hope she's not upset by all this, because it has nothing to do with me.

HARLOW: I think she has a few other things to be upset by not this. Wait, just to confirm, you weren't there to steal the crown jewels, right? Just want to make, get it on the record here for CNN?

JENKINS: No, that's one. That's another one that came up, I wasn't stealing crown jewels.

MATTINGLY: Sir Karl, I do want to ask this.

JENKINS: Definitely not.

MATTINGLY: What people need to realize is your music, as you noted, was played during the coronation ceremony. You're also releasing a new single, spring has come next Friday. It's part of your new album, One World, which is coming out in a couple of weeks, all before you set off on a major tour right now, can you just -- like for people who are putting together who you are and what you've done over the course of your career, kind of this moment for you musically, as you launch your new album and your tour.

JENKINS: Summation of what I've done. I left the Roll Canada music in London, in the late 60s. I worked as a jazz musician. I was in a band called Soft Machine. I toured the States for a bit. I was wrote quite a lot of television commercials for Devia's Diamonds, Delta Airlines both of which attracts that became popular. And now I write what I do a lot of choral music about 3000 performances of my masterpiece. And the new album is One World. It's all about our planet, how we got here. And it looks at subjects like slavery, mendacious, leaders or politicians, issues facing us at this time on the planet. So it seemed a good time to look at this.

HARLOW: Indeed, we'll look.

JENKINS: Two music at once.

HARLOW: We will -- we will let you go, sir with the beautiful music of Crossing the Stone that was played at the coronation alongside the orchestra. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time, and thanks for confirming your identity.

JENKINS: My pleasure.

MATTINGLY: Thank you, sir. We'll be right back.

JENKINS: Thank you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:58:32] HARLOW: Our now this, a retired firefighter on his way to the gym springs into action by running into a burning home, risking his life to save two young girls. Our Natasha Chen has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CAPT. DANA LAMBERT, (RET.) ARIZONA STATE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT: Smoke was just starting to come out.

NATASHA CHEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A house fire exploding in the early morning hours last month in Phoenix, Arizona. The heavy smoke, flames and multiple explosions caught the attention of retired fire captain Dana Lambert, who happened to be driving nearby, coming back from the gym.

LAMBERT: I just went to watch the guys put the fire out.

CHEN: But when Lambert arrived, there were no fire engines on site, and he learned children were trapped inside.

LAMBERT: The neighbors are screaming that there's girls inside. Propane tanks are blowing up on the right side of the house. So jumped over the fence, got everybody out to the street because of the explosions, and worked to get the two girls out.

CHEN: Then heading back towards smoke filled rooms, he went inside the house again.

LAMBERT: One of the girls wanted to get her puppy, so we went back and made sure we got our little puppy.

CHEN: Lambert rescued the puppy and two young girls that day. Their parents were not at home. The girl's father was so grateful. Lambert was in the right place at just the right time.

JORGE PEREA, FATHER OF RESCUED GIRLS (through translator): I thank him from the bottom of my heart. I'm glad he was there, because if it wasn't for him, we don't know what would have happened. He's like an angel sent from heaven.

LAMBERT: It makes you cry, you know, because you feel good that they're safe.

CHEN: Lambert credits the Phoenix Fire Department with a rapid aggressive response that extinguished the fire quickly.