MSNBC "All in with Chris Hayes" - Transcript: "North Carolina House erupts."

Interview

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VELSHI: As thousands remain missing, then tens of thousands more are homeless in the Bahamas in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, a Trump administration official tells NBC News that the United States will not grant protected status to people who are displaced by the storm. Now that status would allow Bahamians to work and live in the United States until it`s deemed safe to return home. It`s the same status that was granted, for example, to victims of Haiti`s earthquake in 2010. Bahamians can still come to the U.S. temporarily if they have the right travel documents, which is proving complicated in some places. And this news comes on the same day that, quote, Bahama`s emergency services listed 2,500 people as missing. A government official says the list has not been checked against government records of who is staying in shelters or who has been evacuated. The number of people confirmed killed in the Bahama`s stands at 50 tonight. That number is almost certain to rise. Joining me now is Congressman Ro Khanna of California, a member of the House oversight committee. Congressman, good to see you. Thank you for being with us.

REP. RO KHANNA, (D) CALIFORNIA: Ali, good to be on.

VELSHI: In the wake of a humanitarian disaster, which I saw with my own eyes, as I just returned from the Bahamas, the president uttered language he`s used about all asylum seekers, and some Mexicans, he talked about criminals, drug dealers, gangs, people who are not legally in the Bahamas. And actually a lot of that is a reference to the Haitians who went thereafter the earthquake in Haiti. The -- it is not the normal tone you would expect in the face of a humanitarian disaster that the Bahamas is facing.

KHANNA: Ali, it`s morally outrageous. Let`s be clear what this administration is doing, they`re turning away poor black people who are coming after having faced a category 5 hurricane, and they`re coming here for temporary relief. These are climate refugees. I mean, they faced a more severe hurricane, because of the warming of the ocean caused in part by our carbon policies. The least we can do is to allow them here on a temporary basis. And this administration is just really despicable that they`re being turned away.

VELSHI: And to be clear, we have systems in place for doing this. The temporary protected status law allows for us to bring people in with documentation, know where they are, monitor it when the temporary protective status ends, they would go back. This isn`t a they`re invading us thing.

KHANNA: Not at all. And in fact, Senator Marco Rubio is asking they be allowed in. I mean, the idea that you`re going to require first documentation when they`ve just gone through a hurricane and you expect that they have their passport or visa defies any common sense. And second, almost any president in the past has allowed people, when there is a natural disaster to come here, they get to work, stay here temporarily and then they go back. We`ve done this when there was a natural disaster in Haiti. We`ve done in natural disasters in other parts of the world. So this president -- what this president is doing is also unprecedented.

VELSHI: It`s worth noting that a lot of people in the Bahamas are descended from American loyalists who went there in many cases with slaves, so the connection is very strong. Let`s talk about this whole NOAA thing, the president, the Sharpie, the Alabama thing. Would have been bad enough if it just happened, but the president continued to keep this in the news, continued to talk about it, and then it went a step further. It wasn`t just the doctored map, it went somewhere else. And with each passing few hours, we`re getting more information about how close the order to issue a statement to NOAA came from the president.

KHANNA: Well, as they say in Washington the cover up is almost always worse than the original misconduct. I mean, the president -- all the president had to do was admit a mistake, but this president is incapable of ever admitting that he`s wrong. And so he`s engaged in this elaborate cover-up to the point where the chief of staff to the president is allegedly directing an independent agency to put out a tweet defending the president and interfering in an independent process. So it just shows what can go wrong in a democracy when you have a leader who has a disregard for facts and who has no sense of humility, no sense of willingness to admit that he made a mistake.

VELSHI: I have to say I have a lot of reasons as a guy who`s reported on hurricanes to not want the administration or the National Weather Service or NOAA or journalists to misrepresent storms because people already have issues taking it seriously. But the idea that the chief of staff may have called the commerce secretary who may have called the head of NOAA to cause them to put out a public statement, because they didn`t want to contradict the president seems to be a greater offense to democracy.

KHANNA: It is. And it is a pattern with this administration. I mean, this is what got the president in trouble with the Mueller report, that he was trying to interfere with the Justice Department. He has tried to interfere with the fed. He`s now trying to interfere with the Commerce Department. He`s not king. He`s not a dictator. He lives in a constitutional democracy, and there are independent agencies that operate totally independent from his power. And he refuses to acknowledge the very basics of the checks and balances in our constitutional democracy.

VELSHI: Congressman, good to see you as always. Thank you for joining me. Congressman Ro Khanna.

KHANNA: Ali, great to be on.

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