represents mesothelioma victims and their families. >> if you or a loved one who has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, call us now hey, on inside politics, border, crack down. president biden is unveiling his most aggressive move, yet to stop illegal immigration. it would sharply restrict asylum claims. >> the goal here is political protection, but so far the backlash is bipartisan plus, i will not be intimidated what words from attorney general merrick garland, who is testifying on capitol hill right now. >> he's pushing back on the republicans who baselessly accused him of quote weaponizing the justice department against republicans and guns, drugs, and explicit photos. >> the first way fitness is on the stand right now in the hunter biden trial, and we have new details on the prosecution's case and how personal and uncomfortable it's likely to get for the president's son. i'm dana bash. let's go behind the headlines content inside politics we begin with breaking news, new details right now on president biden's announcement today that he will effectively shut down the southern border to asylum seekers coming into the us illegally. that would happen if daily illegal crossings hit a certain threshold. now, it's biden's most aggressive crackdown yet on illegal immigration and issue that has be bedeviled his president's presidency cnn's priscilla alvarez joins me now from the white house, brazil, i know you have all the details. give us the top leinz on this and the political implications dana, this is certainly presidents president biden's most dramatic move on. >> migration since he took office. and is intended to tackle head-on, one of his the biggest political vulnerabilities we're now learning from senior administration officials that they anticipate invoking this authority and using it later today. so in effect, this is going to take effect pretty quickly. now, what it does, it shuts off as access to asylum for migrants who crossed the border illegally when that dili thrust hold of 2,500 jared is met. we've been there, in fact, homeland security officials told me that just yesterday, they encountered over 3,500 migrants crossing illegally. this would be turned off when those numbers dropped down to 1,500 a day. now, unaccompanied migrant children are exempt from this. there are also some other exemptions for a unique circumstances. and the idea here, we that these migrants would be turned back to mexico or deported to their origin country now, senior administration officials acknowledged that they anticipate getting some lawsuits on this from either side of the political spectrum, republicans or democrats, they're prepared for that. >> but this is essentially taking a page from former president donald trump's play good luck. >> in fact, in 2018, he tried to use this exact same authority to shut down the border. now, when pressed about that senior administration official said, this is totally different because they do have exceptions because they do have a way for migrants to come to the united states legally. but there is no question here, dana, that they are trying to prevent attacks from the former president before that first debate, later this month, that they're also trying to blunt republican attacks which have been ongoing over the course of the president's administration. so this is again, a significant move, particularly for a president who began his administration saying that he wanted to restore the silence of asylum system dana, priscilla, thank you so much for all of europe, fantastic reporting on this. i want to bring in some more great reporters. cnn's mj lee as dead harnden of the new york times, leanne coldwell of the washington post. thank you all for being here. >> mj. you are also a white house correspondent for us. i know you've been doing some reporting as well. what is your sense from administration officials you're talking to and maybe in this case, campaign officials, you're talking to about how much they think this will, will help. we're going to talk about the policy in a minute, but just on the rob politics well, they fully expect that they are going to be criticized. and i think the criticism has already been pouring in because we've been reporting on the anticipation of this news for awhile, they expect that they're going to be legal challenges. they expect that they're going to be slammed by folks on the left, by immigration groups. and there were senior administration officials that we're briefing reporters earlier today on what to expect. and there was one thing that an official said that i thought was really interesting. they said, we expect that we're going to get challenged from everyone on the political spectrum from the left and the right. and that is always what happens whenever we do anything on this issue. and by the way way, that tells us that there is no lasting solution other than basically congress acting on bipartisan immigration reform. >> and i think they happen to be basically right, right. >> this is an issue where no matter what the president does, he is going to get slammed if he doesn't act, that he's week if he does take action like the one that he's doing today, he's labeled a trader by the left by immigration advocates and sort of applied in what you just were reporting is the fact that there was a bipartisan senate bill and it was done with conservative republicans and it was at the behest of donald trump, killed and never saw the light of day and that was the reason why senior administration officials at the time said that they couldn't well, that was part of the reason why they said that they couldn't do what the president is doing today because it needed to be done legislatively. priscilla mentioned the fact that donald trump use an executive action to do some of this. it was rejected by the courts and that was a big reason why biden was reluctant to do it and wanted to do it through through congress, but congress is perennially stuff yeah, i mean, i think that some of this, we should see as an acknowledgment from the biden white house that some of their political arguments on immigration haven't so, when we look back to 2020, most of that democratic field was mostly saying that what republicans and donald trump was doing were bad, not really offering an affirmative vision that hasn't really been able to hold for democrats while in office, you've also seen after that sin and bipartisan compromise fail, the white house sable voters will blame republicans and donald trump for nuking this deal. >> and we haven't seen that really baer route and data to the point where we do see the white house making this action. and i think it's right to point out before the debate to be able to give the president something that insulate himself from republican attacks. the big tell is also that those down ballots and the democrats have been running away from biden on this issue. they've been breaking an axiom for a harsher border enforcement. and so that shows the kind parties language on this issue has shifted, but to the point about the advocates, they've been upset for awhile. do they feel like the top levels of the party have ceded a little ground, a little more ground, a little more ground to the right-wing activists on this issue to the point where it is now the mainstream democratic position to be enforcement first. >> so that is definitely true when you talk about the frontline democrats. i mean, tom suozzi was in a special election and on long island democrat, he won in large part because he was able to flip the script on immigration, not so for a lot of other democrats, more progressive democrats, land, you talked to several of them ahead of this, and i'll just read some of them. pramila jayapal all biden's executive order is very, very disappointing. sylvia garcia of texas, i do not think that shutting the border, quote, unquote, is a remedy and then hillary scholten of michigan, it's heart wrenching to see this is not going to come close to solving the problem before you weigh in on this just to put some meat on the bone of what i said at the beginning of the program, which is there's bipartisan backlash, listened to what some of the republicans have said whatever a little short measure that he's going to do here is not solved the problem. in fact by some estimates, it might make it worse. why didn't you do this in 2021 why didn't you do this in 2022? why didn't you do this 2023? why didn't you do this last month or the month before or the month before? how many dead bodies? please is enough the answer to that last question is what we were just talking about. >> they were trying to get congress to do it and they didn't. >> yeah, that's right. and so you see the split screen that's happening right now with republicans, it's interesting because they say it wasn't trump, why we rejected the bipartisan bill. it's because biden can do this on his own. so they tried to skirt the issue and now they're saying, well, maybe this is not even going to be effective. and mike johnson's words but this is something that is providing some inks among on the left and the democratic party because they think that the president is ignoring the base voters the people that elected him by doing these these actions to appeal to the more independent voters that polling has shown, assigning with trump and republicans on the border. but like we've talked about, this is nothing new. donald trump did over 450 executive orders when he was in office again, because congress he partially blew up some of the congressional actions there to remember president obama and 2015 leading into his campaign, he signed the dreamer, the daca executive order that was an attempt to shore up his base. it's fascinating how the issue of immigration has shifted so much in the past eight years yeah. >> ears and even the past eight months, yeah. right. i mean, and on that note president biden did a lengthy interview with time magazine talking about what he would do in a second term, just as the former president trump did with time and one of the things that they were talking about was weather was whether or not president biden overturning what biden called trump's inhumane border policies whether or not that is what helped drive a record illegal border crossing, meaning pulled the tough measures back and whether that got people to say, oh, well, then i can come illegally into the united states here's some of that exchange. >> the question, were you wrong to lift any of those measures, meaning trump measures button. if i was wrong, it's because it took too long you put some back in place. the green card issue, it's been reported that you're looking at reinstating remain in mexico. are you looking reinstating at reinstating know, i mean, it's it's a really tough sort of fine line for the president and this white house to walk right on the one hand, this was a party that has systole said, i'm particularly during the trump years, everything that he is doing on immigration and at the border is inhumane and we don't support it. but at the same time, i think the fact that he is leaning on this 212f authority makes this really, really fraught because he is playing what that is this is the authority that was used repeatedly the by the former president as you do to do some again, yeah, and execute some of his hardline immigration policies. so the fact that biden is using that same authority makes us really tricky. now, i think the white house would certainly argue this is not the same because for example, you have humanitarian exceptions that are in place that's a reference to people who are coming to the border with really, really dire circumstances. it might be a health issue, it might be that they really believe if they were sent back to their home country, they would be killed. they will be tortured. so i think that is the argument that they would make. >> okay. everybody standby because we had some breaking news this past hour wisconsin attorney general filed charges against three allies of donald trump accused of taking part in the 2020 presidential fake electors scheme. cnn's sara marie is following that sara dana, yeah, it was content just becomes the latest state in a handful that have brought charges due to this fake elector scheme in 2020, where republicans signed these sort of alternate electors slate to try to overturn the presidential election. you see there the three men who were facing a charge of forgery in wisconsin ken chesebro, who has been accused of being the architect of this scheme. jim troop is an x trump campaign lawyer. michael roman, who has an x trump campaign aide. now, we reached out to all of them for comment. we're waiting to hear back from two of them, chesebro attorney declined to comment, but again, this is really interesting because we have seen charges in a number of states already how do we know that people have faced charges in georgia, in nevada, and arizona in michigan, wisconsin just becomes the latest state to pile on to try to bring some kind of ramifications for what several republicans did in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, wisconsin has also interesting because there was a civil suit. there already involving several of the folks who served as fake electors in the states, ten of them agreed in a civil suit that they essentially tried to improperly overturn the presidential election. but these charges again, are against some of the folks allegedly coordinating this effort. >> thank you, sarah. it's really fascinating to see it. it kinda, the big picture with that map that was gone, sun is just the latest, as you mentioned, a lot of other still swing states are dealing with this all right, coming up, attorney general merrick garland slammed what he calls republican conspiracy christie theories about the justice department. >> he's testifying right now on capitol 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we will not back down from defending democracy cnn's lauren fox is on capitol hill while lauren he still was mild-mannered in the way he approached that. but what he said, we don't hear that very often from him, but he obviously knew what was coming yeah. >> i mean, this is a about as animated as the attorney general merrick garland gets in these types of settings, but he clearly is frustrated by some of the attacks against career employees, people who he argues are just doing their job. one of the first lines of questioning today in this hearing came from matt gaetz, who was going after merrick garland, asking him a series of questions about district attorney alvin bragg and the case up in new york where trump was just convicted and repeatedly what you heard from garland is that the justice department has nothing to do with that meanwhile, democrats are making clear that that is the case, and that this is not about political persecution. because if you look at a set of high profile cases that the justice department has been working on. it includes some democrats who are actually members of this body here in congress and that was the point from steve cohen a democrat from tennessee. >> here he is as far as weaponization of the department goes did the justice department indict senator menendez? that's a matter of public record. yes. >> and he's a democrat, indy i'm assuming the answer is yes. >> and henry cuellar, justice department indicted him. >> he's a democrat to its amount, matter of public record and dana this is a general oversight hearing. so what you're seeing in the room from republicans especially is a series of potpourri really of issues that they want to talk about, whether that is the biden administration does immigration policies. you also have had a series of members who had been asking garland about the release of the audio tapes from hur's interview with president joe biden. obviously that is something that they are continuing swing to push for something that t