ryan grimm is here from the huffington post. david, mccain is spelling it out there. sounds like he says this is all solved if we had american troops on the ground. >> well, john mccain hasn't seen a situation where he didn't want to make it more aggressive and send in troops and whether it's in syria, iraq, and now ukraine. what's interesting about the republican party, you will see not everybody has rushed out on the republican side to join john mccain. i think the republicans saw with syria while they were not eager to vote in favor of any military action there, they realized the president can pay a political price for not solving the problems that maybe he can't solve. they are happy to throw brick bats at him and without putting anything down about what they want to do. they saw his approval ratings drop a little bit last summer out of the syria business. i think we are seeing the days ahead. a lot of people not calling for russian troops to the ukraine but calling the president weak, ineffective, feckless without saying what should be done in these foreign polic

i want to between in jonathan alt, and msnbc contributor ryan grimm.hat do you make of what the congresswoman just said about the president's decision not to go to the border? >> well, the congresswoman is a strong supporter of president obama. and you're now seeing she and other democrats are trying to send an unmistakable message to him that he should go down there and see for himself what's going on. now the white house i think is not playing this right politically, they think well why should we be have been the president so connected to this problem right now? or he should may have been tan some detachment and not own the whole thing, especially since it's the republicans right now who, by the way, let's not forget this. >> right. >> the president has asked for more than $3 billion to address this problem. republicans who have been for years agitating for more money for border security, which they have already pumped billions into, more money for border security, he already said, okay, i want to address this and they're saying no, because if he's f

. >>> joining me, washington bureau chief of the "huffington post" ryan grimm. you just heard the congressman defend his bill, the details of which still, it seemed, remain fungible, if you will. do you think the humane act is going anywhere? >> you know, it might. only because the president and his supporters want these several billion dollars to try to deal with the humanitarian crisis at the border right now. so in other words, make future children pay, and the current children who are stuck there, in order to resolve this crisis, because these children currently have special rights, as a result of this 2008 law, that was related to sex trafficking that says basically you can't send children back if they're going to be in danger. that puts more of an onus than this bill, as he said in a few days a judge could stamp an entire room full of them, get put on a bus or plane and sent back, to a places that is ravaged, incidentally, by a drug war that is funded by the united states, and by gangs that were deported from the united states to these countries. so it's a

ryan grimm is an msnbc contributor and reporter for "the huffington post." guess the first question would be, jose vargas is an award-winning journalist. did he not check out before he went down there the status of mcallen, texas, to make sure he didn't get stuck there? >> you know, he had traveled to, i think, more than 40 states in the course of reporting his documentary and the other work that he's been doing about immigration, but he told me over the weekend he'd actually never gone specifically to a border town. and if you haven't done that, or if you don't have friends who live there who describe it to you, it's very hard to understand just how different from the rest of america it is. it's sort of like a hundred-mile-deep bill of rights-free zone down there. you go from one place in america to another place in america, and you can get asked for papers. you can say, hey, look, i'm a u.s. citizen. they will say, prove it. so jose found out the hard way from people who knew this. they said, it's great you're down here. it's so brave of you to come down h