Europe News: Poland and the Czech Republic said Tuesday they were introducing checks on their borders with Slovakia in a bid to curb growing illegal migration. Ger
she said she wanted to show them the resilience of these ukrainian refugees has inspired her and so many others. after she s going to go to a school where u krkrainian refug have been enrolled. and then on sunday, it is mother s day. the first lady is expected to spend time with ukrainian mothers and their children, who are in slovakia and she s expected to visit the ukraine/slovakia border where refugees have been filtering in. there are 850,000 in romania and 350,000 in slovakia.
we see a group of women and chil children. we had to get first tickets. reporter: trying to get a taxi, they came from kyiv. your whole family? no. we re separated. we don t know each other. reporter: don t know each other? yeah. we met on the train. and now traveling together? yeah. try trying. reporter: so we can see they re on an uber app. they re looking at trying to get a car to poland. back in our van, about one hour later, we saw where those ride hires ended. we ve just come to a complete stop. we re 28.5 miles from the border exactly. you hear or see cars going the other direction, now we understand why. i was wondering why they were there. because people are getting to this point and just turning
right now. and they ve opened it up and said you don t need papers or passports. it s not they aren t welcoming. they cannot handle the volume of people. this border we re at right now is much more remote, pamela. it s harder to get to, and it is by far appears to be the easiest border. it took us 20 hours to get here. but when we talk about what people can do, hungary of course used to have visas for ukrainians who want to come in. they waived that. they said you just need a passport. they re remote and if you don t have a car it s hard to get to them. and there are just things that can be done to alleviate the pressure and get people out of the country more quickly because on the inside you feel a palpable fear and a palpable crisis building that people are not getting out who need to get out. that s just frightening. and chis comes, of course, what
cnn s erin burnett spent the day with some of them. she joins us now live from ukraine s border with hungary. erin, you began your journey to cross the border in lviv 20 hours ago. tell us what happened when you headed for poland? reporter: so the first thing we did, we got up this morning, we d been down for maybe an hour, awoken by air sirens down in the bomb shelter. that s how it is now. and then we began our journey to the polish border. and first we pass the train station, and it is just hoards of people. just hoards of people. it is indescribable, people rushish to get on buses. and as you said it is primarily women and children. the men, obviously they re not ukrainians trying to get out. and trying to rush on those buses to get over the border. when we went to the border we were stopped dead about 29 miles from the exact border.