Less than 2 . Look at the pattern here. You have seen a down trend in the last hour. We are waiting to see now what happens in the final hour of trading. I will keep a close eye on it. At this hour, the democratic senator catherine cotez mass troe is at the border. Garrett haake is with the senator. Whats up . Senator cortez masto is down here essentially conducting oversight of this process in person and with her feet. We are sort of working our way backwards if you will if through the process if you were someone who crossed the border. We started at a privately run facility where children have been taken. The senator was denied access there. We werent let in at all. Our second stop was a facility run by dhs where adults are taken. There the senator was let in, and we were turned away. But when she came back outside she described a little bit of what the conditions were like inside for the adults who have been there. Many of them she said have been separated from their children for weeks. Here is some of that interview. There is the barbed wire everywhere, right . They are put in overalls or colored depending on level of risk the color thisser this. They take their clothes at the very beginning and put it in a bag like you would in a prison system to secure thing. Certain times you can use the you had kpoo, certain time for free time, certain times you can watch tv but only on certain channels. Frankly some of the women i talked to said that if there is any type of news about the families and childrens and being deintad they will change the channel on them. Reporter that was one of the most striking things to me is that the folks who are in these detention facilities are just not getting information. Not just information about their children specifically. Obviously thats the hardest part of this for them. But information more broadly about how this issue has played out across the country over these last couple of weeks and how much attention is being paid to it. I just want to tell you where we are going next. We are going to be stopping at a customs and Border Patrol facility in just a minute. Mb allen is a border town but it feels like you could be in plano, texas, or Overland Park texas or any suburb with an interstate going through it that you have been to in any other city in america. Thats the feel of it. Except it has now become ground zero of this moment in time focusing on these immigration issues. We have one or two more stops to continue reporting on that today with one senator. I should add there have been a huge influx of senators and members of congress mostly democrats but some republicans who have come down here to do this very same thing. Essentially rather than having hearings and bring people up to washington kulgting this process with their feet. Oldfashioned american oversight having members of congress go down to the border and try to get answers themselves and get access to these facilities. Garrett thank you. We will continue to report on the story as we have been doing since it began. Garrett haake for us in mcallen, texas. We are hearing reports of the separated children being used as a negotiating chip against their parents. The Texas Tribune reports officials are telling migrants in detention facilities outside of houston they can reunite with their children if they agree to sign a voluntary deportation form. They report a father abandoned an asylum case and agreed to sign voluntary deportation paperwork out of desperation to see his 6yearold daughter. But also added i cant go back to honduras, i need help. A statement was provided to the tribune saying quote, it is unprofessional and unfair for a Media Corporation to report without names. The father asked to coop his identity secret because eggs afraid of retaliation. We have seen people pictured crossing the border being targeted this. Man has not yet been deported. Not been reunited with his daughter heert. Jay root joins us. This is a tricky one. I. C. E. Questioned the journalistic integrity of the Texas Tribune in publishing this story without naming the father. This is a common journalistic practice, to understand the veracity of your source and then make a decision based on that sources safety and security whether to publish their name. I didnt feel comfortable giving this guy up. These people in detention are held kind of in secrecy. If i walked out of the studio today and got arrested you could know my name and find out where i was and all of that. Its very difficult to do that with these people. And the government insists on keeping it secret. And i didnt want to give it give up this guys name. I didnt know what they were going to do with it. I just in good conscience could not give that information. But i did feel like they could still tell me whether or not this was going on. As it turns out we were working on this story think it was an outlier situation, but then as your correspondent tweeted sunday morning he was told by a dhs officials people are being offered hey, if you sign this paperwork you will get your kid back quickly. Jacob soboroff tweeted on sunday morning, dhs officials tell me parents were given the option. This is jacobs last line in that tweet is really the important part. At this point it falls upon journalist like jacob, like you, like the Texas Tribune, like all of us to force these questions because we are not getting a flow of information that necessarily tells us all the whole story. Right. And this came to us thanks to the lawyers who are working pro bono at the center for justice in houston. They were telling us look they are not going to be this doesnt sound credible. They are not going to be reunited with their kids. Little did we know you know, we were on the front end of a trend that jacob tweeted sunday morning. So i went to bed saturday night thinking, this is an outliar situation, and woke up realizing wait a minute, there is something going on here. The fact sheet from dhs talks aboutport isabelle being a quote reunification and removal center. Those two things are going together. One of the other pieces about our nbc reporting about people relinquishing asylum claims says we have people who are considering not continuing with really strong asylum claims she said stopping to catch her breath because they think they will get reunited with their kids faster if they give up their claim. Thats wrong. Contrary to what everybody has been seeing coming out of the white house in the last few weeks, some actually have legitimate sloil claims. There are real refugees, real desperate people. Everybody is not trying to game the system. The California Law review put out a study that i read that said half of the claims in which the credible fear exam is failed, a negative credible fear exam where they say you didnt pass the first hurdle of proving you have credible fear of torture or persecution when they return to their own country. Half of those are overturned when they go to an immigration judge. This guy was desperate to see he oenld talked to her once. They have to pay usury rates to make a phone call. I dont understand why any cant give them skype or stuff to talk to their kids. Communication is virtually free in 2018. President trump does not seem to be focused on the separation of kids from their families. Instead the president said quote hiring many ho thousands of judges and going through a long and complicated Legal Process is, quote not the way to go. He went on to say that quote people must simply be stopped at the border and told they cannot come into the United States illegally. He finished off by saying in all caps, build the wall. Joining me is nbc newss hans nichols. Hans, we are standing by waiting 20 minutes from now for a White House Press briefing. Yes. This is obviously going to come up. The president has largely said due process is not important in this front. He said due process is not important on the border. He had a different standard had he he is talking about his own cohorts and his allies. In february he was tweeting complains there is no due process referring to the press ill read you the quick tweet. He said peoples lives are being shattered and zrid by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old, and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely careered life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as due process. Wow. There, President Trump clearly on the side of due process. When it comes to migrants coming to the border he doesnt want them to have hearings or due process. So we will see here from Sarah Huckabee sanders just what the president s understanding of the potential solutions are. Because members of his own party, border state senators like ted cruz who are proposing to have double the number of judges bring it up to 700. Ali, remember that number. Boughs the president somehow in his head is convinced that he has been asked and requested for 5,000 additional bore dder judg. We cant figure out where that number is coming from. The main kopgs proposal is 700. The one thing to look for here in 20 minutes is clarity from the white house on just how many additional judges donald trump thinks have been requested because the number is much must have lower than the one he is building his public case upon. Hans, i know you specialize in being whatever we ask you to be, you are great at the white house but your home base is the pentagon. There is reporting we have that jim mattis is no longer central to consultation to the president particularly on matters where he may have expertise. Great reporting by my colleagues taking out a few example where is the president has deviated and not listened to this defense secretary that he picked and publicly lauded for the first part of the administration. There seems to be a shift there. You see it with the iran deal. With this idea of a space force. You saw it perhaps initially when president tru wanted to make some sort of change on disallowing Transgender Service members. According to the reporting, Administration Officials current and former that mattis was slow walking the president. Thats why that tweet, remember that day in july about a year ago came apparently out of the blue. In some ways that was a response to mattis thinking that his secretary of defense, a man he still calls a general and officially will have general mattis on a placard when he is at the white house although as secretary of defense he is clearly no longer a general it seems there is some distance between the two. What we know about mattis, we know this very well, when he is given an order officialcally and properly, he figures out a way to implement it the president has said they are preparing two bases in texas to house migrants. Secretary mattis just mentioned it. Lets listen to how he said it. He talked about nitd terms of a logistic imperative. We will provide whatever support the department of Homeland Security needs in order to house the people that they have under their custody. So we will work that out week by week, the numbers obviously are dynamic. So we will have to stay flexible in our Logistic Support for department of Homeland Security. Mattis is speaking in alaska. Hes on his way to china. One quick note on Missile Defense. Secretary mattis said he had utter confidence that theist Missile Defense system in the United States is functioning and it would be successful if there were a threat from north korea. Hans nichols for us at the white house. We will keep an eye out on the press briefing thats due in 15 or 20 minutes. The president s comment refuting due process for my yants grants is another well should be an Alarming Development since the zero tolerance policy. But what does the constitution say . The New York Times writes quote the fifth amendment mandates the due process of law. The 14th amendment in part expanded rights for immigrants with case law asserting those rates dating back to 1886. The times points out hins mr. Trump was elected hess administration has been working to expand the terms of a 96 statute that allows officials to quickly deport undocumented immigrants as well as those whose paerms are believed to be fraudulent. Danny is a val owes joins us from mcallen texas. I have to provide context to this conversation, in a the United States has a bit of a blemished history. It has a fantastic history with immigration on some fronts but a bit of a blemished history when it comes to how we dealt with the japanese during world war ii. When it comes to how we del with jewish Asylum Seekers during world war ii. The issue of how we deal with Asylum Seekers or people who try to enter our borders is kind of central to who we are. This isnt a legal technicality on the side. Yes. I mean, when it comes to asylum, and when it comes to migrants coming to the United States, they do not have the full range of constitutional protections when it comes to removal proceedings. But they do have fifth amendment rights to due process. And thats why trumps notion of getting rid of these people without even having a hearing or anything else is simply unconstitutional and wouldnt survive an attack in any federal court likely. Similarly, parents have 14th amendment rights, including migrants, including aliens in the United States. They have the fundamental liberty interest in raising their children. That is another thing that cannot be taken away from them or citizens unless they have due process under the 14th amendment. And that means clear and convincing evidence they have abandoned their children or are otherwise unfit. These protections exist. And they exist for migrants. Not exactly the way they do for citizens, but for the most part in all the contexts we are talking about, migrants are entitled to constitutional protections. Danny, what happens next . I mean the fact is the Administration Donald Trump tweets this stuff. He talked about hiring a whole lot of judges isnt the answer. We just heard from hans that we dont really know where this hiring many thousands of judges comes from. But what does this mean . Whats the legal standing of the brez tweeting that these folks shouldnt have due process . Does that actually change any of their protections under the law . No. The tweets dont change anything under the constitution. Anything unless he actually acts to try and remove them without any due process, then certainly the courts could eventually step in. But the notion that he has to hire 5,000 new judges, really when you take a step back this is about the backlog, the backlog of cases the ones i just saw, 60 to 70 defendants sitting waiting to enter their plea of guilty and be sentenced. That backlog, that bursting docket is the result of strict enforcement of the misdemeanor entry into the cup. When you enforce that crime strictly, what you end up with is a huge list of defendants being prosecuted then lets say the judge sentences them to time serves, ten days or 30 days after which what are we doing . Exactly what we would have done had we not referred them for criminal prosecution, which is remove them from the country. In other words, we are seeing by prosecuting all these folks we are adding to the docket. We are adding to our costs of housing these people while we punish them. At the end of which we simply do what we would have done anyway, give then to customs and send them back to their countries. Danny, the act of crossing the border not legally, as donald trump would say, coming in noted a a Border Crossing that is a misdemeanor crime in america . It is a misdemeanor. It is a complicated statute. But the misdemeanor statute at least the misdemeanor component of the statute is about illegal entry. Technically, if you have been removed already, then you are illegally reentering, and that becomes a felony. Got it. Practically speaking i have seen many instances where prosecutors will just charge the misdemeanor when they know from the record this person has been apprehended and removed in the past. That is a prosecutial decision. If it is, we should acknowledge that prosecutors are at least using their discretion to some degree in avoiding to some extent the felony. It is a complicated issue. In many cases there are other crimes that the government alleges people commit when they come over, if they use a Social Security thats not theirs or whatever the case is. But the act of illegally entering is a misdemeanor. Up next, americans have an unwavering love for family. But american policies dont. Im going to break down the countless ways the u. S. Trails behind so many developed countries when it comes to helping parents, children, and the family unit. You are watching msnbc. Gins to y cause trouble with recall. Learning from him is great. When i can keep up anncr thankfully, prevagen helps your brain and improves memory. Dads got all the answers. Anncr prevagen is now the numberoneselling brain Health Supplement in drug stores nationwide. She outsmarts me every single time. Checkmate you wanna play again . Anncr prevagen. Healthier brain. Better life. And back pain made it hard to sleep and get up on time. Then i found aleve pm. The only one to combine a safe sleep aid, plus the 12 hour pain relieving strength of aleve. Im back. Aleve pm for a better am. So, the debate over the trump administrations family separation policy showed us how much americans support families. But the u. S. Government actually lags behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to policies that help families. Lets begin with one of the favorite alltime examples, paid Maternity Leave. Look at this chart. This is from the washington post. The most generous countries with paid Maternity Leave are on the right side. Estonia, slow vac republic, finland are outliers in terms of how much paid maternity you get. Do you know how much you gut get in the United States . Not even on the chart. It is a zer