The new administration is grappling with a decades-old problem: how to deal with the surge of migrants at the southern border. With President Biden’s new policy of not turning away unaccompanied minors, the number of children arriving at the border has rapidly increased, up nearly 30% in the last week alone.  Over 4,200 children are currently being held in overcrowded Customs and Border Protection facilities, and nearly 3,000 have been in CBP custody for longer than the 72 hours required by...

A trillion of anything is hard to fathom. It's a million millions. Or a thousand billions.  Now double it.  This week, the House of Representatives is expected to pass the nearly $2 trillion COVID relief package and a signature from President Biden will make it law. The legislation will send money just about everywhere - to families struggling to get by, to states and cities where tax revenue has fallen, to restaurants and to the unemployed.  The White House is calling it the most...

Little by little the restaurant industry has begun to creep back to life. At the low point of the pandemic-induced recession, more than half of the industry's 15 million employees were out of work, a haunting statistic. Roughly 110,000 eating and drinking establishments closed temporarily or for good.  We all hate to lose our neighborhood favorites. But maybe during the pandemic you also found a brand new pizza joint that takes orders and delivers via app.  Now what if that pizza place...

As if the coronavirus pandemic hasn't wrought enough anguish on our country, there's a disturbing viral side effect that has no vaccine cure or therapeutic treatment. Americans are being attacked by other Americans. They're being beaten, spat upon, yelled at, shunned and hounded with racial slurs. Some have died, others have been hospitalized.  The victims: Asian Americans. Their crime: the way they look. Roughly 3000 incidents of hate against Asian Americans have been recorded since the...

For the second time in just over a year, the Senate elected to acquit Donald Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, this time over his role inciting the lethal January 6th melee at the Capitol.  The vote was the most bipartisan exercise of its kind. Seven Republicans joined all 50 Democrats and independents to convict the former president. The outcome, though never seriously in doubt, provided a view into the future of the Republican Party. Yes, Donald Trump's relentlessly loyal base still...

While we were putting this episode together, we quickly realized the vast, convoluted scope of QAnon, its tantalizing effect its followers and the bit players who conspired to propagate the lie were bigger and more twisted than we'd imagined. QAnon, we learned, is many things to many people.  So we decided to focus on a question we kept encountering: what to do about the untold legions who have fallen for QAnon's intoxicating allure. Could they be disabused of their beliefs and brought back...

If your friend tells you it's going to rain tomorrow, and it turns out to be sunny, that's misinformation. Your friend was misinformed or the forecast changed. But if your friend tells you it's going to rain lizards, that is disinformation. And disinformation – deliberate falsehoods spread to mislead the public – has never been more prevalent.  The 2016 election was marred by a hostile foreign actor engaged in a coordinated disinformation campaign. In 2020, homegrown disinformation -...

In a feat of human achievement, vaccine developers cracked COVID-19's scientific code in less than a year, testing and developing a shot that has so far proven effective against the deadly infection. What's proving difficult now is getting that vaccine out of manufacturing facilities and into Americans' arms.  President Trump's Operation Warp Speed placed the onus on states and localities to figure out distribution. The Biden administration wants to the federal government to take a greater...

Every four years on January 20th, the United States sends a worldwide reminder: this is what democracy looks like. Our incoming and outgoing presidents traditionally share a limousine ride to the Capitol. They appear together before the assembled masses and then bid one another farewell. What will the inauguration look like in 2021? Will our example of a peaceful transfer of power still shine as brightly in the dark, autocratic corners of the globe? In the wake of the January 6th Capitol...

History will record Wednesday's assault on our democracy as one of the US's darkest, most shameful episodes. Mob rule was the ambition of the marauding, counterfeit American patriots who laid siege to the Capitol on a false premise: that Donald Trump had won an election he so clearly lost. For months, President Trump convinced his supporters that he could not lose. That if he did, the election was somehow rigged. And when he did, that widespread fraud in key states had tipped the election in...

America's economy needs women. It also needs working parents. Coronavirus has taken a toll on both, but women with children have suffered more than men. They've lost more jobs, lost more in wages and some 2 million dropped out of the workforce entirely. In early 2020, there were more women on payrolls in America than men. Then, as coronavirus swept the nation, 11 million women lost their jobs. Even as some of those jobs came back, balancing the stresses of working remotely, childcare and...

Yes, whatever you ordered online is taking longer than usual to be delivered. Be patient. Listen to our podcast while you wait. Your shipment will get to you. Eventually. America's shipping networks are literally and figuratively filled to the brim. More people are shopping online because of the pandemic. Add to that peak holiday season gift-buying and millions of vaccines that need to get from the manufacturers into people's arms as soon as possible.  By one estimate, the US Postal...

If projections from news organizations felt insufficient and certified election results from state officials did not convince you, the electoral college has spoken. On Monday, 538 electors in 50 states and the District of Columbia confirmed Joe Biden will be the next president. Biden's 306 electoral votes equaled President Trump's total four years ago. On January 6th, congress will meet to tally those state totals and two weeks later, Joe Biden will assume the presidency. Despite calls to...

More Americans are hungry now than at any time since the Great Depression.  Let that sink in.  The uptick is yet another awful consequence of the covid outbreak. Watch the evening newscasts recently and you've probably seen lines of vehicles snaked around stadium parking lots-turned-food distribution points. Maybe you've volunteered at one of those sites. Maybe you've waited in those lines yourself. By nearly any metric, hunger in America is at crisis level. Food banks are stretched....

This month, three major vaccine developers reported preliminary data showing their covid-19 vaccines were highly successful in protecting participants in late-stage clinical trials. This news may feel like a lone bright spot in a year of ugly - and deadly - pandemic-related headlines.  In a matter of weeks, the Food and Drug Administration could sign off on emergency use of these vaccines, making them available to vulnerable populations, health care and frontline workers and eventually the...

For those who lived through it, the presidential election of 2000, might seem comparable to what is going on now.  It is not. Then, fewer than 600 votes in Florida separated George W. Bush and Al Gore. Voter intent was in dispute (hanging chads anyone?). The election hung on the outcome of the vote in one state.   Today, thousands - and in some cases tens of thousands of votes - separate Joe Biden and President Trump in several states. Voter intent is well-established....

Election night in America is usually just that. A night. Just one night.  Not in 2020. Not in a pandemic-afflicted year when so few things seem normal. This is the story of the people at CBS News who brought you Election 2020 coverage that started on Tuesday and ended Saturday. At 11:25 AM eastern time, CBS News Elections and Surveys Director Anthony Salvanto piped into the internal communication channel at CBS News with a historic projection, "Joe Biden: win, Pennsylvania. Joe Biden...

The last time an incumbent president lost re-election, Google, Netflix and friend weren't verbs. The year was 1992. And it was Major's first time covering a presidential race - incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush against Arkansas Governor and Democratic upstart Bill Clinton. Let's be clear: we don't know who is going to win in 2020. But the parallels between the 1992 and 2020 elections are striking. In this episode, Major reflects on the Bush-Clinton race, what's changed and what remains...

America is voting. And it's doing it in record numbers. With a week to go before Election Day, early voting totals have eclipsed 2016 levels. Turn out in Texas is already 82% of overall participation four years ago. In Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, it's 66%. Experts predict turnout will only accelerate the closer we get to November 3rd. Our debut episode in July examined the challenges posed by voting in a pandemic. Would there be enough poll workers? How about enough funding? Could...

"To Bork" someone, according Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, is "to attack or defeat (a nominee or candidate for public office) unfairly through an organized campaign of harsh public criticism or vilification." The phrase entered the lexicon after Ronald Reagan's nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, faced a bruising confirmation process in 1987. By all accounts, Bork was a qualified jurist, but Senate Democrats, then in the majority, feared his conservative ideology would swing...

President Trump's campaign stop in Florida Monday marked the first time he'd left the White House after checking into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center ten days earlier. The president announced his positive covid-19 test result on October 2nd. Thereafter, his doctors provided cherrypicked details about the president's condition that painted a picture of the 74-year old president triumphing over a disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. Missing were key details like...

Attention political junkies: we are taking a poll. How many of you like to know trends and results of the presidential race on election night? How about who’s up or who’s down during the race? Or what sorts of voters voted for a given candidate? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you can thank a pollster.  For this episode of “The Debrief with Major Garrett,” we pull back the curtain on polling and election night projections. How do they do it and why is it - mostly - accurate?

During his convention speech in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump proclaimed, "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it." Not congress, nor the courts, nor the states or any other institution we vest with power. Just a would-be President Trump.  The bounds of presidential power have been defined and redefined since the nation's founding. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton sparred with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison over then-President Washington's...

In one week, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will meet on the same stage in Cleveland for the first of three presidential debates this fall. In a political year marked by so much that is abnormal, the debates should finally look like something recognizable.  For this week's episode, Major Garrett dives into the relatively short history of presidential debates and how they've changed since John F. Kennedy debated Richard Nixon in 1960 in a made-for-television...

On March 11th, the sports world - led by the NBA - started to shut down. Coronavirus fears prompted the NCAA to cancel March Madness. The Masters was postponed. Baseball, hockey and basketball, put on hold. What followed was perhaps the quietest spell in modern sports history.  By midsummer, professional sports started to creep back to life and this past Thursday they reached a crescendo when all four major sports leagues - the NBA, NHL, NFL and MLB - held competition along with golf,...