deliberately targeted women in asian spas because, police say, he was having a bad day. >> he was pretty much fed up and at the end of the rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did. >> why reactions like that aren't happening as incidents against violence of asian-americans surge across the country. >> nurn of us should be silent in the form of any hate. then senator amy klobuchar and the new push for the violence against women act. congresswoman escobar on what's happening at the so you shall border. "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. there are eight people dead in the atlanta area after a horrifying spree shooting last night at three different locations, three different spas. the suspect is in police custody and we know some of the victims' names. delaina ashley yaun, xiaojie tan, daoyou feng, paul andre michels. seven out eight victims were women. six of the eight were of asian descent. south korean consulate in atlanta confirmed that four of the eight victims were ethnic koreans and don't know the nationalities. the rampage began around 5:00 p.m. yesterday at young's asian massage in acworth. four people were killed there. and about 45 minutes later, officers responded to gold spa in at least atlanta where they found three women killed. while officers were on that scene, shots were fired across the street at aromatherapy spa, found one woman killed there. police arrested 21-year-old robert aaron long following a manhunt yesterday evening charging him with eight counts of murder and a count of aggravated assault. this story you might recall breaking just as we got off the air last night and in the hours that followed many folks were watching this happen made the obvious connection between this tragedy and the horrifying in anti-asian hate crimes we have seen recently. stop aapi received reports of nearly 3,800 asian incidents. more than two thirds against asian women and that context hung over the news reports as they came out this morning and during the day and glaring as police held a press conference in atlanta this morning putting on frankly i have a say a strange performance sharing what the shooter allegedly confessed to them. >> he claims that these -- as the chief said, this is still early and claiming it was not racially motivated. he has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction and sees the locations as something that allows him to -- to go to these places and a temptation he wanted to eliminate. when i spoke to investigators that interviewed him this morning, they got the impression that he understood the gravity of it and he was pretty much fed up and at the end of the rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did. >> it was a bad day for him. a really bad day for him. to eliminate the temptation. as many people pointed out, what the understanding of the mottive or told police perhaps somewhat self servingly having been arrested after allegedly shooting and killing eight people or what the characterization it is, it is impossible to separate the context of these specific human beings who were killed, murdered where they worked and where they came from and what they looked like and the world inhabited and the violence committed against them by this individual. atlanta mayor keisha lance bottoms stepped out to the mic after officer baker to make that point. >> whatever the motivation was for this guy, we know that many of the victims, the majority of the victims, were asian. we also know that this is an issue that's happening across the country. it is unacceptable. it is hateful. and it has to stop. >> president biden echoed mayor bottoms this afternoon expressing concern about the violent trend in this country. >> the question of motivation is still to be determined. but whatever the motivation here, i know that asian-americans are in very -- are very concerned because i have been speaking about the brutality against asian-americans for the last couple months and i think it's very, very troubling. >> vice president kamala harris we should note the highest ranking asian-american in american politics offer third degree. >> i want to say to the community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people, but knowing the increasing level of hate crime against our asian-american brothers and sisters, we also want to speak out in solidarity with them and acknowledge that none of us should ever be silent in the face of any form of hate. >> for the latest on the investigation we go to nbc news correspondent kathy park in atlanta. what is the latest? >> reporter: chris, good evening to you. it certainly has been a very difficult day for the people of atlanta as well as the asian-american community. you might notice the growing makeshift memorial behind me in front of one of the shooting locations, one of three in a span of about an hour or so. the suspect robert aaron long, 21 years old of georgia, said that these attacks were not racially motivated. however, officials are not ruling this out at this point but he did say that he was -- had a sex addiction and was targeting these establishments which he has visited in the past before as a way to lash out. as far as the victims, there are eight. one person is injured and still recovering from his injuries at this hour. but six of those victims were of asian descent and that's why it's been so painful for the asian-american community because there's a surge in anti-asian hate crimes, against asian-americans across the country. a nonprofit who's been tracking the latest numbers said that the number is around 3,800 since the pandemic kicked off around march. and you have celebrities, every day citizens here in atlanta and beyond who are now speaking out on social media saying enough is enough. chris? >> kathy park in georgia, thank you so much. i want to turn to nbc news correspondent jo ling kent covering the hate incidents against asian-americans and joins me now with more on that new report. jo, we have seen reporting on this. we have seen folks speaking up about it. starting to get the data, as well. >> reporter: that's right, chris. it is an understatement to say the asian-american community and asians globals are feeling so much pain over the 24 who 36 hours and past year when this is underreported and unacknowledged and we see the reports of hate incidents from all 50 states and washington, d.c. it is approaching 4,000. the pace is picking up according to stop aapi hate which is tracking these. i want to point out that this is -- these are people who are reporting these incidents, not the scores of individuals who aren't reporting. as for who it's happening to, it's happening twice as often to women as it is to men according to those reporting. 68% of incidents reported came from women. 29% male. we want to know where is this happening? what is the context here? we know now according to this data that 68% -- 35% of the time it is happening at businesses. on public streets. and that's reinforced by what we saw in atlanta and of course we don't have a causal link at this time. when you look at the context in which so many of these incidents have been reported, you start to see a pattern and why the asian community is feeling so much pain right now, especially asian-american women. >> jo ling kent who's been reporting on this throughout, thank you for making time for us tonight. i appreciate it. want to bring in democratic congresswoman judy chu of california. a lot of folks i talked to today, there is a raw sense of anguish and fear in the wake of yesterday, particularly because it comes on the heels of this past year. how are you thinking about what we're seeing here? >> we were shocked and heartbroken when we heard about the deaths of these eight people, six of them being asian women. we think that this is a culmination of a whole year's worth of hate that was stoked by the xenophobia of donald trump. and let me point out this man says that this was not a hate crime but he picked three businesses to deal with this sex addiction and all three of them just happened to be asian businesses with the first one being called young's asian massage. so what does that lead you to believe when the majority of the victims were asian-american? nonetheless it is something that you could have seen from this year and what has happened with the 3,800 hate crimes and incidents that have occurred. >> i want to ask you about the personal experience in terms of constituents because this is something that for the last year there's been a lot of focus on coronavirus, the president calls it the china virus, and increasing rhetoric from a lot of corners of american life of china as an enemy and in your relationship with your constituents how has that impacted the folks you represent? what's that meant over the past year? >> well, we first saw it in january whether the coronavirus was making the appearance but when donald trump started calling it the china virus, contrary to the voice of cdc and world health organization who said to call it covid-19 because calling it otherwise would only cause a stigma for those of different ethnicities and from different countries, donald trump actually doubled down and had the republican followers use the terms even more. hence what it caused was even more fear and terror in the asian-american community so we kept on hearing about stories after stories of people who were the victims of taunts and racial epitaphs, of people like -- that in the sands club in texas where a man stabbed all three of them, two being children 2 and 6 and said it's because to kill asian-americans due to the coronavirus. so this is happening all over. in my district, there was a chinese-american man who was attacked with his own cane at a bus stop causing him to lose part of his finger so it is happening everywhere including in my district. >> the house judiciary committee tomorrow will be having a hearing about this which you will be participating in. i guess the question is, what at a federal level of policy, right, what can be done? >> we have been pursuing many things. one is right after the president made his executive order we asked for a meeting with the department of justice and let me say how significant it was that president biden did that. we have been asking for a year to meet with the department of justice due to all these hate crimes and ins dentdss but totally ignored. president biden issued this executive order for the department of justice to meet with the aapi community and we met with them on addressing hate crimes. we called for the anti-asian hate crime hearing which will take place tomorrow in the house judiciary committee and calling for the passage of the no hate act to vastly improve the collection of data on hate crimes which right now is very spotty, toothless because the federal government relies on local law enforcement to report and many of them have great variants of how to hate crimes whether they report it or not and three states don't have a hate crime statute and calling for march 26 to be a national day to speak out against anti-asian hate. >> march 26. that hearing will be tomorrow. congresswoman chu will be participating. thank you for your time tonight. >> thank you. okay. so there's one part of the story to talk about more. and it's the explanation that the male shooter was having a really bad day. obviously i think that police officer if he could take those words back and phrase it differently probably would. a really bad way to explain why seven women and a man are dead this evening. we'll talk about why that is right after this. worth. and that - that's actually worth more than you think. don't open that. wealth is important, and we can help you build it. but it's what you do with it, that makes life worth living. principal. for all it's worth. ♪ for every idea out there, that gets the love it should ♪ ♪ there are 5 more that don't succeed ♪ ♪ and so are lost for good ♪ ♪ and some of them are pretty flawed ♪ ♪ and some of them are slightly odd ♪ ♪ but many are small businesses that simply lack the tool ♪ ♪ to find excited people who will stop and say 'that's cool'♪ ♪ and these two, they like this idea ♪ ♪ and those three like that one.♪ ♪ and that's 'cause personalized ads ♪ ♪ find good ideas for everyone ♪ it's moving day. and while her friends are doing the heavy lifting, jess is busy moving her xfinity internet and tv services. it only takes about a minute. wait, a minute? but what have you been doing for the last two hours? ...delegating? oh, good one. move your xfinity services without breaking a sweat. xfinity makes moving easy. go online to transfer your services in about a minute. get started today. i spoke with investigators, interviewed him this morning and they got that impression that, yes, he understood the gravity of it and he was pretty much fed up, at the end of his rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did. >> even if you take the accused massed murderer at the word that he was motivated to murder eight people at three different spas because of a sexual addiction on what police amazingly called a quote bad day, we're still talking about a suspect with an intense view of asian women specifically. blaming them, hating them for his own perceived failures before targeting and murdering them. police said he planned to go to florida to murder more people connected to the adult film industry. the other context for this mass murder is at least a year of rising anti-asian bigotry and acts. it was a full year ago at the very start of the pandemic niktd had this head line, chinese-americans spit on, yelled at and attacked. various groups and media outlets sounded the alarm, the data shows it intensified. margaret wong is president and ceo of the southern poverty law center and brittny cooper, associate profession or of women's and genders studies at rutgers university. margaret, it was a brutally horrifying act committed here. how have you been processing the aftermath of it? and particularly the way that the law enforcement spoke about it today. >> thanks so much, chris. i was outraged by what sheriff baker said in his press conference today. i think there's no question that this was a hate crime. it was a hate crime against women. it was a hate crime against asian women. and it's clear to me that the georgia law enforcement agencies needs some traning on what hate crimes are and how they need to do the types of invests. >> britney, your response? >> you know, one of the problems we have with white supremacy is many white people don't believe it's racist unless a racial slur is used but this is a targeted attack on asian-american folks and women. rhetorical violence always proceeds physical violence and president trump himself created a violent environment for asian-american folks, blamed them for this pachd, ginned up the public and created this context for things to be unsafe and now folks are acting surprised it led to this violence when it was predictable. >> margaret, spencer akaman has reported about the war on terror and has a book coming out making the point today that like, you know, when post-9/11 when the u.s. and u.s. officials mobilized against the threat out there, it led quite clearly right to increased severals of bigotry and hate crime and persecution against muslim-americans and you can see in the last year the rhetoric of the trump administration and america's foreign policy leadership, increasing rhetoric of china as a big enemy for the next century. how much do you think that matters? how much does that reverberate through the society? >> i think there's no question, chris, that is a main driver of the anti-asian violence we have been seeing across the country over the last year. it is the president's narrative, president biden's narrative about the chinese virus, about kung flu that has driven so many incidents of hate and discrimination and violence against asian-americans and that rhetoric is still being perpetrated by members of congress today. you will still see members of congress making the same references using the same narrative on the floor. we need elected officials to own responsibility for contributing to this problem and we need a shift in the narrative around these issues. >> you know, britney, it is a very sick and disturbing part of life as an american journalist that accrue a library of mass shootings with different details over the course of your work, which is true for me. i have covered a lot of them now. i thought about this piece today from "the new york times" from august 2019, a common trait of mass killers, hatred toward women. this has cropped up time and time again which is, a man with access to guns and hatred in his heart and often hatred toward women that ends up in this kind of situation. that's a not just limited to mass shootings but violence in america every day. >> one of the challenges we have is that we don't speak intersectionally enough so we always think that because this is a white supremacist crime it is also a gender crime. its has to do with the way that white men in particular think that their owner particular challenges should become adjudicated through public violence. it is not just about whiteness. it is also about a particular brand of violent masculinity which also reached heightened levels in the trump administration. this man-made into the presidency after learning about specific acts of jendser violence he committed and bragged about but we had seen it with white men angry and often kill girlfriends and then go out and commit mass acts of violence against other people. this time it's come booned but we have to be calling out pay tri ar i can, too. many professors, activist thinkers and the general public said this is a session julization of women that's as part of a violent fantasy that's being played out here, too. and it is a problem. >> margaret, i was thinking today of getting details about the victims here and the establishments but these are not -- these are places where folks are if not at the margins of society far from the centers of power, establishments targeted by law enforcement depending on not specifically about these ones eveningly but as a group that's the case in the past and folks that don't necessarily, the people who are working there, have a lot of power in american society. >> absolutely, chris. i think what's important to realize is that as you know these are low wage workers. these are people who are struggling already to survive. and what's critical is that you want those people to feel safe in coming forward when incidents like what happened yesterday occur. and instead, we have seen an incredible focus on the perpetrator of this violence. his photo is used in stories. we don't see the stories of the families about how this has struck them. i think it's critically important that we start to shift that narrative and lift up the voices of those who are most directly affected. >> yeah. this is something i think that all of us in the media are getting better at, again, through the awfulness of the fact that this is a reoccurring phenomenon in american life. margaret and britney, thank you for being with me. >> thanks. the house today voted to reauthorize the violence against women act but over 172 republicans voted no. senator amy klobuchar is a fierce proponent of the bill. she joins me next. guy fieri! ya know, if you wanna make that sandwich the real deal, ya gotta focus on the bread layers. king's hawaiian sliced bread makes everything better! ♪ (angelic choir) ♪ and here's mine! need a change of scenery? 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>> well, first, chris, i want to thank you for devoting your show to covering the victims in this case and who just can never be forgotten as the mayor of atlanta said, keisha lance bottoms, that this is a crime against all of us. and we are seeing as your guest congresswoman chu and so many others describe the increase in violence against asian-americans. secondly, for the violence against women act which would be a big help in general for violence against women, this was traditionally a bipartisan bill when president biden was in the senate and working on it, very bipartisan. over the years that's frayed and it is really concerning because it is about things like that protecting lgbtq victims, immigrant victims. the bill that i have in there, by the way, i am happy to get 29 republican votes, because that will give me some momentum in the judiciary committee in the senate. one of the more controversial things is pretty relevant to what we are talking at today and that's a provision that convicted stalkers and convicted domestic abusers who happened to be dating partners instead of husbands. right now in some states, these guys can get guns and this provision simply says they can't. >> this is referred to in the past as the boyfriend loophole in terms of putting -- is the gun element -- seems to me there's two elements that republicans have been citing. there's the gun element. there's also immigrant visas if i'm not mistaken for women subject to domestic abuse that's something that there's a lot of controversy over in the trump administration which i believe you sort of administrative procedures to get rid of this. >> yeah. >> are those the objections? >> the main thing, the gun one, has been one that they have pointed to which by the way the money witnesses at a hearing several years ago, self described conservative sheriff from wisconsin said, you know, a gun in the hands of a dmersing abuser whether it's a boyfriend or a husband, they shoot just as tough and they kill just as much. and so they're just even they agreed with that piece of the provision so, you know, it may be these crimes like these and these mass crimes are going to convince them. i hope so. we are proud of this bill and we are going to push it forward starting in the judiciary committee and for the first time in years we have the gavel. senator durbin is the chair and a proponent of this bill and we are ready to go. >> this bill would as the senate is currently constituted have to clear almost certainly a 60-vote threshold because some republicans will invoke a filibuster, a staff member just has to send an email saying that. chuck schumer said the next piece of legislation is for the people act with campaign finance reform and reform to national election administration, making atd national holiday and so forth. there's no way ten republican votes and is this now going to be the fight over the filibuster? >> i am tired of these akayic rules getting in the rules of doing things for the american people. look what just happened. the american rescue plan highly popular with republican voters as well as democrat ek voters and we had to resort to that process of reconciliation just to get that done. and i think people are tired of waiting. they voted for change in georgia, when they voted for joe biden. and that's why i favor getting rid of the filibuster but even short of that you could have a standing filibuster which senator manchin is talking about where you require the other side to actually like they used to do in the movies stand and object day after day after day. but however we do it, this bill itself deserves a moment and that is senate 1 which is the for the people act already passed the house and bring the democracy back again. over 250 bills have been introduced to suppress the vote since january 1 and i just don't know what usually when people lose an election like the republican party did in a big way by 8 million votes they step back. the party did that. their party has done that. how do we change the policies? instead what they're saying is, we'll double down on our positions on effect from immigration to choice on and double down and just disinenchiozza the voters that voted by mail and the like and one thing i hope you remember talking about it with other guests, nine of the provigszs are bipartisan. a number of provisions supported by republican governors and secretaries of state and why it's called simply for the people. because it is about preserving our democracy. >> senator amy klobuchar of the state of minnesota, who has been working very hard on the violence against women act reauthorization, thank you for your time. >> thank you. this is an argument for getting clark and gupta confirmed. they know what they're doing on hate crimes and we need to get them through the senate. >> great tonight. two nominees who would be deputies at the justice department. a few weeks ago i called out republicans for claiming to be the party of the working class while staying quiet on the union fight at amazon and now we have an update from none other than marco rubio. that's next. managing type 2 diabetes? 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(sounds of mower cutting grass) it even makes mulching a breeze. ♪ ♪ so you can cut the hassle out of yard work, and focus on the reason lawns exist in the first place. run with us, because the best job is the one that's easily done. nothing runs like a deere. get a new z300 series zero-turn mower with 0% apr for 24 months at your john deere dealer today. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ what i wanted to say is, jeff, you are worth $180 billion, "b," $180 billion. you are the wealthiest person on earth. why are you spending millions of dollars trying to defeat a union organizing effort in alabama where your workers are fighting for decent wages and decent working conditions? what is your problem? >> last night on this show senator bernie sanders called out jeff bezos the ceo of amazon and the richest man in the world for opposing efforts to earn a decent paycheck. there's support for the right for workers to unionize in alabama trying to organize in one of the most profile union campaigns in recent memory and i pointed out that given the try hard posturing of prominent republicans about how they're the party of the working class this unionization push is a great opportunity for them. >> the republican party really wants to be the party of the working class and unions that's great. okay? but it has to mean something. here's a simple test, gentlemen. go on the record with your support of the rights of workers for amazon right now. otherwise we'll superit's an insulting act. >> now since i putt that out i feel butty bound to report on a republican that did kind of answer the call in the most passive aggressive way possible. senator rubio of florida that penned an op-ed in "usa today" last week and supports the workers which great but his reasoning has to be read to believed. here's my standard. when the conflict is between the working americans and a company whose leadership decided to wage culture war against working class values the choice is easy. i support the workers. it is no fault of amazon's workers they feel the only option available is to form a union. tomorrow it might be a rirnltd that workers embrace management's woke human resources fad. basically and i read this op-ed a bunch of times. i don't like unions or organizing campaigns. the republican party doesn't. we stand to stand with capital against labors but because you defy the cultural sensibilities now it's payback time. rubio concludes, quote, amazon's workers are right to suspect the management doesn't have the best interest in mind. they're viewed as a cog in the machine. conservatives like rubio and tom cotton and tucker carlson have stretched the word woke past any coherence. they are now arguing the richest man in the world who's fighting against paying the employees more the chamber of commerce and the u.s. military, yes, the u.s. military are all bastians of wokeness. maybe that word just is not a useful descripter. to be honest part of the problem is that republican values in the post-trump 'ra are keening sense of grievance grow bitter and anti-social honestly by the day and the more they act on the weird sort of whiney impulses the more it alienates them from larger swaths of mainstream american culture and then they turn around and accuse the pentagon or the chamber of commerce of persecuting them because they're woke. but sure. look. if concluding the richest man in the world is too woke for you is the reason rubio supports organized labor, i guess i'll take it. she'll enjoy her dream right now. that's the planning effect, from fidelity. we need to reduce plastic waste in the environment. that's why at america's beverage companies, our bottles are made to be re-made. not all plastic is the same. we're carefully designing our bottles to be one hundred percent recyclable, including the caps. they're collected and separated from other plastics, so they can be turned back into material that we use to make new bottles. that completes the circle, and reduces plastic waste. please help us get every bottle back. advil dual action fights pain 2 ways. it's the first and only fda approved that completes the circle, and reduces plastic waste. combination of advil plus acetaminophen. advil targets pain. acetaminophen blocks it. advil dual action. fast pain relief that lasts 8 hours. [drum beat and keyboard typing] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [keyboard typing] ♪♪ [trumpet] [keyboard typing] now is not the time to come. the border is not open. this is a treacherous journey. the vast majority of people will be certainly sent back on their journey. and that's the message we're sending. >> biden administration comes under increased scrutiny on their border policies, nbc news is reporting the department of homeland security is restricting the information border agents can share with the media. the reporter who broke that news, julie ainsley, joins me now. >> basically what we're find something along the border are different sectors, especially under the trump administration, they were very vocal about what they were finding. enter the new administration and they find every media request, even an interview with a local station, has to be cleared through washington. a lot of those requests are being denied. more importantly, from an access and transparency perspective, they're also having to deny journalist requests for access to the very facilities where these children are being held. we talked about this overcrowded border processing facilities that are being filled with unaccompanied migrant children who are crossing the border. and also they're not able to do ride alongs where you're able to go with a border agent firsthand and see the border yourself with a border agent. now, dhs says that this is because of covid precautions. they're not able to bring journalists into places where they used to be, but we're also not even getting picks of the inside. so we're left really with just very bare bones accounts of what's going on, how children are being treated. whether or not they even have a place to sleep at night is really unknown. >> there's a context here that feels like i need to state, right? border patrol agents tend to -- the union endorsed donald trump, very famously. cdp, i think as a body, its political valence, you know, tends to be fairly hawkish on immigration enforcement and there's obvious tension between the institutional culture of cdp and the administration. do you think that's fair to say, as part of the site of this tension? >> definitely, that's an element of it. we can see it firsthand really. there have been border agents who have been leaking videos. >> yes. >> of what they're seeing at the border. you can see that. that wasn't authorized by this administration. unlike the last administration that wanted to endorse and incentivize these border agents to talk about how tough they were being, to post the number of immigrants they arrested on a single day, using terms like rounding up. this is a completely different tone that this administration wants to strike. that is certainly part of it. then it goes a little further when you just talk about access in general. part of it really does become troubling for journalists who, regardless of the administration, regardless of the culture, want more access, want more transparency especially when it comes to the care of children. it's something that the biden administration is going to have to handle as it moves forward, particularly with all of the information and scrutiny around this particular event we're seeing at the border now. >> julia ainsley, great reporter. thank you for sharing that excellent report. >> we want to turn to someone who deals with this every day, congresswoman escobar of texas. you live in a city on the border, largest binational community in the western hemisphere, if i'm in the mistaken, between el paso and juarez. let's start with this. my understanding is that through a combination of a variety of policies, the trump administration had effectively shut the southern border to any asylum seekers through both covid protocols and this remain in mexico program, which they kept expanding, which essentially sort of took the border and pushed it back into mexico. and it said you have to stop here before you get to the border, before you can make an asylum claim. between those two things, before the biden administration came in, they had essentially locked down the border, even though they never announced it as such. is that an accurate characterization? >> hi, chris. so great to be on your show. yes, it is an accurate characterization. not only was the border effectively shut down in many respects to unlawful entry, but it was also shut down to lawful entry and refugee programs. we saw the trump administration essentially try to shut every door to america, even asylum, which is legal. and it dismantled the asylum system. so what happened was immigration and the migration, flow of humanity from central america never stopped. it's just right outside our front door. and the misery became even worse. so, that's, in part, why the consequences are so much worse for the biden administration, why they're dealing with such, you know, terrible -- such a terrible situation. you also had the trump administration shut down a program that offered a pathway for children to get to their family here without making the journey. and so without that alternative, that flow then became even more dangerous and treacherous for kids. >> wait. explain that last part. the alternative for children to come, to reunite with families in a manner other than presenting at the border for asylum? >> right. so the obama administration created the central american minors program so that kids in central america could apply from their home country to be reunited with their parents. the trump administration eliminated that. and that's why i've been saying, you know, the biden administration is dealing with the consequences of policies and practices created by the prior administration that made things worse. so, those kids, in the absence of that orderly, legal or rather orderly and safe pathway to apply for a legal process, they're now making that journey. so all my republican kl eegs who keep, you know, expressing deep concern all of a sudden for the children who are arriving at our front door, they did not have to make that journey, had that program been left in place. >> there was a hearing with secretary mayorkas, newly confirmed head of dhs today. i want to play a little bit of your exchange with him and get your feedback. take a listen. >> my republican colleagues, especially on this committee, are focusing on trying to return to the trump-era status quo. mr. secretary, did migrants stop their journey northward while donald trump was president? >> no, congresswoman, they did not. >> mr. secretary, do walls stop people from coming to the united states? >> they do not, congresswoman. the security of the border requires a multi-faceted approach. physical barriers, individual personnel and technology. >> are you satisfied that the biden administration, mayorkas, has their arms around what will be an extremely difficult problem, right? you have this essentially stateless archipelligo of people who have been pushed out of sight, out of mind. problem solved. the mexican government has to deal with it. the moment you begin to lift that status quo, you're going to get people coming to the border. that's just obvious. >> and, chris, it's going to happen even if you don't lift the status quo. let me tell you why. the only reason why right now, or during the trump administration these vulnerable souls were out of sight and out of mind was because mexico was collaborating with donald trump and cooperating with donald trump. there will come a point in time where mexico also says we're at a capacity. we can't keep taking these refugees in anymore so, united states, we're going to have to start letting them through. and so we cannot ignore the challenge at hand the way that it's been ignored for four years. that's what's really gotten us to this moment. i'm focused on solutions, chris of the we've got to get to the root causes of this. we finally have an administration willing to do that. and as challenging as things are today and right now -- and i will tell you, i want to manage everyone's expectations. they're going to get more challenging over the next few months, because they do every year. in the warm weather, we see more migrants arriving at our front door. but in the meantime, unlike the last four years, we will not have an administration making it worse. instead, we have an administration wanting to peel those awful policies away, create the infrastructure and fix it once and for all, by addressing it with the countries in the northern triangle. that's why i have hope. it's unacceptable today, but everyone is working on it, and i have hope. >> congresswoman veronica escobar, a very difficult set of problems. you were there up close and viewing it. thank you for your time tonight. that is "all in" for this wednesday night. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. >> thank you, chris. much appreciated. it has been a little over 24 hours since police say a 21-year-old man entered an atlanta area spa with gun. he killed four people there and injured one other. he then drive half hour, 45 minutes down the road, entered two more spas and shot and killed four other people at those two locations. eight people dead. all three of the