All right, but thank you very much. I am Chris Cuomo. Welcome to Primetime. While the debate rages on about who wants to lead on the democratic side,

tonight I want to show you what is not getting the attention it should. I'm going to bring you a special report on the ongoing crisis in the Bahamas.

Here's the reality. We don't know way too much about the situation, especially the missing, the dead, the level of destruction and loss.

You will see when we take you to the ground, it's a function of two things, the scale of the loss and the inadequacy of the ability and the resources to respond.

Now we hear Dorian battered islands could be hit by another tropical system soon. We'll show you the current path and expectation.

We also have the president's top immigration official here, Ken Kuchinelli. We're going to ask him why the administration's making it so hard for Bohemians to seek refuge here.

Now more so than before the storm. Why? And two Titans doing remarkable work to help hurricane victims join us. Chef Jose Andres is literally feeding the Bahamas.

An NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony is here with an important reminder. Don't forget Puerto Rico. What do you say? Let's get after it.

Now this is the interesting part about the missing situation. The number is down from like 2500 to now 1300 listed as missing about two weeks after the most powerful storm in Bahamas history.

But we know that that number is soft because they haven't even been able to search all these places. And they know that for sure there are thousands, many thousands living with nothing and many need to get out of there at least for a while.

However, one escape hatch from the catastrophe seems to be closing. CBP here in the US says those trying to enter the US are being reviewed on a case-by-case basis. And we are told about 3900 evacuees have been processed through Florida.

But then the president made this unproven claim that smacked of bad ombre about drug dealers and the Bahamas trying to get in. Now access has been denied. And the policy is supposedly unless you have a visa or documentation that is almost impossible to organize in this chaos, you can't get in.

I don't want to allow people that weren't supposed to be in the Bahamas to come in to the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers.

So we are going to be very, very strong of that.

Let's bring in this acting US citizenship and immigration services director Ken Cuchinale. Ken, thank you for joining us.

Can we leave you Chris?

Now as you know, I got good sources at CBP, I got good sources at DHS. Nobody can put meat on the bones of that allegation. They pushed back on me and said we didn't close the door.

We're going to let people in, we're figuring it out. I don't say that it's over. But nobody could back up the president's claim he just made about what this risky population is.

And the only one we know of being denied was not a group of drug dealers. They were mostly people with their kids trying to get in.

Yeah, I don't, I don't have anything to add to the subject. Obviously we always want to be vetting people no matter what the circumstances.

Presidents describing people who aren't from the Bahamas coming through the Bahamas, which is something that we are on watch for and have added vetting resources over the years, particularly during the Trump administration.

That's been a major priority for him, whether it's the proof of what he alleged.

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