tonight on kqed newsroom. from health care to civights democratic presidential hopefuls got to make their pitches. also shocking detention conditions for migrant children emerge as appeals for borditarian aid at the divide democrats. and the supreme court ends its term. we'll look at how key rulin this week could affect california. hell and welcome. we begin our showith the democratic debates. this week millions of viewers tuned in for their first extended look at the crowded democratic primary field. the debate featured 20 candidates. last night senator kamala harris attacked former vice presijont e biden for his comments on bussing and working with

segregationist senators. on wednesday senator elizabeth warren who is the only candidate polling in double digits on stage held strong in the first part of the debate. many are calling julian castro the breakouttar ofhe first night. joining me is the senior political writer for the "san francisco chronicle" and los angeles political times writer joining us. much anticipated twos nig of debates. we're going to get into the details of those heated exchanges in a moment. first off, do you think the fundamental tenor of has changed this week? >> absolutely. i think we saw some xcnges between these candidates, particularly between kamala harris and joe biden that this a pivotal moment in the race. there's such a long time to go. we have more than 200 days until the iowa caucuses. did the last two nights determine anythin no. did it decide who the nominee is

to be no. but these exchanges, particularly the heated exchange between kamalaharris and joe biden over race is going to be one of those pivot points in the race. >> i feel like there wasw very expectations in some ways. more happened ike on the second night than maybe we thought might. >> i got a text from a former colleague who said biden isi aging in the as we speak. this could be the beginning of a tough spot for biden. he as to defend lot of thing s opened up thursday night. also on his age. eric swalwell went at him on the age question. is i think that kamala ha really had a standout night. joe, you and i have flowed her for a long time. th biggest moment wasen she went after joe biden about working with those

segregationist tors. let's listen to part of that exchange. >> we've also heard and i'm is at vicnow direct t president biden. i do not believe you are a racis but i also believe and it's personal and it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two united states senators who built their reputions and career on the segregation of race inis t country. >> i don't know. what do you think? i feel like this might be the best i've ever seen kamala harris. >> everyone declared her thenn of the two nights of debates. she had such a brmakthrough ent. one of the things voters are looking for is who cantake on he president on the debate stage. also with joeden, everyone knew he came into this as a front runner with a target on his back whswalwell went after him on the age thing, he sort of smiled andbrushed it off.

when kamala went after him, his reaction was a little stilted. the coverage has been continuing all day today. i think she score major points last night. >> it was sort of both. it was the fact that kala harris seemed so authentic and clearly b prepared also relaxed. but also that he didn't seem to have a response for something he should have known wascoming. >> terrible debate preparation. also she did something th was ry unusual in that she was able to combine a very personal anecdo anecdote, her childhood in berkeley talki about rac which is very difficult to talk about. nd then she went into prosecutor mod said, do you still support bussing. iacwas all of kamala. this was a kamala that we did not see when she was nning for a.g., senate andt district ney. we have watched her mature before our eyes. >> we're going to have to talku abhe other candidates. before we do, what do you think about how joe den has dealt

with this in the aftermath of the debate? seems like he digging in. >> yeah. >> we haven't heard him apologize or find a way to kind of get past th issue which quite frankly has been brewing for more than a week since he made thosecomments. >> today you see the statements where he's saying of believe the federal government should have a role in these things and no states can't justd de it completely contradicts his record. secondly since new audio ca out today from asnprim s saying he would support a constitutional amendment to ban forced bussing. seems like he would say i've had a long career over 40 years and ybe he's changed his mind. i don't understand how he's digging in his heels, but he is. >> there were 18 other candidates on stage. i think on the first night elizabeth warren was really the

one to watch. she really held her own. what impressed me on both nights about her and sanders was how much they as the progressive ng of this party seem to be really pushing the there were more moderate candidates trying to push back a little but it w kind ofn the progressive terms. >> absolutely. someone who was cheering that it was on the progressive terms was president trump, especially when they said everyone put up hand if you support giving health benefits to undocumentedg imnts, everyone hand went up. >> on thursday night. >> on the first night and the second night, who supports taking away private health insurance, which is not popular? bernie and kamal p their hands up. second night warren and bill de blasio on the first night. elizabeth warren, if she's the nominee, just cut her first attack ad when she said i'm with bernie. that may work well in the

primary. it may work well in lifornia t it may cause them problems in the general election. >> i'm curious wat you thi about this. what we're hearing from republicans is that this is extly what they want, this is the socialist democratic party. you kno but i think there's obviously a lot of excitement around these candidates as well. so that's a balance they're going to have toigh in the coming months. >> clearly this will create excitement among one wing of the democratic party. bernie sanders, savannah guthrie presence ehi pressed on will your health care plan raise taxes. will.id yeah it any politician when you're ad t admitting that your plan is going to cost middle class taxpayers more money, that clearly is going to be in some atck ad along the way. >> he was asked how are you going to implement this with a divided congress, he said well there's goingbe a political

re lucia revolution. what if there isn't? >> let's talk about eric swalwell, congressman from the east bay he's been polling very low. this was an opportunity for him to stand out. he came in with some zingers. he came after biden for his age. he talked strongly about guns. i don't s i don't see this is going to change the race forhi >> he used the zinger about biden beingld ice. he basically took one for the team in terms of the other democrats by raising the specter ofbiden's age which is very difficult. > bernie sanders later called it ageism. >> he called it ageism and he said it depends the virility of your ideas. tood 't know if swalwell out. remember, in september he's going thave twice as many donors and he's polling 2%. it's going to be a he better sharpen up his

swalwell for congress sign. >> the other person that d break out, however, was julian castrorom texas we really saw him go after some f the other folks on stag around immigration. do you think this is a litt bit of gas for his campaign? he has been somebody that is rtxciting some of the democratic party but not getting that attention? >> absolutely. after wednesday night he went afterow his feexan beto o'rourke and he got the better of him in that the thing is, then we have thursday night and the kamala/biden show. i have to think that sort of took all the action out of the room. if he had been maybe the second night i think he might have been able to better use whatever momentum he got. >> which speaks to how i tortant it i how the line-up is over the next debates in july. >> right. >> so quickly, what do you

neexpect t? >> well, in terms of biden, i expect a lot of op research into his very, very long career. he was first elected before i was born. we're going to have a fund-raising deadline or disclosures coming up soon. that willell us a lot about how these candidates are doing and who has the resources for he long haul. people are talking about the win knowi i winnowing of the field. at some point toward the end of the summer people are going to have to make some decisions. >> joe, who do you think has the most momentum? >> i think even overnight we're seeing kamala harrisas a little bit of spike. fund-raising has spiked for juliancastro. i think warren is going to be definitely helped by thihi i biden, you're going to see that big lead he has whittle down a down and then the narrative becomes biden's losing

his lead and that kind of stuff feeds onitself. you know, who knows. >> we're going to leave it there. thank you both for being here. >> thank you. now to immigration. a team of lawyers revealed shocking conditio at a border facility in texas they visited last week where hundreds ofil migrant en have been detained for weeks on end. the lawyers interviewed dozens of children there. they reported seeing up to 50 children coined in a single room withed ed ttoddlers being for by older children. many of them dn't bathed and were wearing dirty clothes. also yesterday the house passed a $4.6 billion border aid bill bked by the senate despite objections fromme semocr democr who say it lacked protections for migrants held in rsshelt

jo thank you both for joining me. bill, i want to start with you. you were in clint, texas, you were one of the inspectors for plaintiffs in this flores settlement, decades old legal case. it really c requiretain conditions for children. can you tell us a little bit about what you saw, maybe pick a couple stories to tell us. >> what i saw was heartbreaking. children as young as 2 years ol who arft to take care of themselves. they were confined to rooms, sizes for 20-50 people. you're right, the younger theat child t saw, the dirtier they were. i interviewed a 5-year-old and a 4-year-old. their clothes were filthy. their hair was dirty. when i walked into a large conference room to use a printer and one end of the room and nother interviewer was interviewing 7-year-old girl

who started crying. and that interviewer walked her across the room to what i thought was maybe her mother because it was another older teen with a 2-year-old in her lap. that 7-year-old went over to be comforted. i found out later on this teen was not a mothe the teen had just out of the kindness of her heart taken care of the 2-ld and the 7-year-old and they had bonded. it's unbelievable. i've been doing this work for decades and i've never seen anything like this. the fact that they were left to take care of themselves was just heart wrenching. >>rd we've h stories that some of these kids maybe came across with an adult but were separated. why are kids this young alone without a legal guardian or parent with them? >> the separation is separating any chheld at border who is coming with a non-parent. so the vast majority of kids that i interviewed came with their aunts and uncles or older

siblings. the policy the trump administration is doing is if you'reitot coming your parents, you're going to be separated. this 2-year-old, this 5-year-old that i interviewed that come with an aunt and uncle. >> i can't imagine the trauma. i also understand there were some incidents this with their teen mothers, is that right? >> interviewed three teen mothers with infants as young as hemonths old. two of children had experienced diarrhea, vomiting,e ch they were rushed to the emergency room and stayed there for three or four days until they recovered. they were not sick when they arrived. >> just heartbreaking. you have been ated boardeder in california. what have you seen? >> we know thatustoms and border protection especially and his is something the agency themselves will tell you, they're not equipped or ou red or designed to deal with the kinds of migrant flows

that we're seeing these days compared to what we saw earlier like in the '90s or 2000s when it was mostly mexican men coming to the u.s. looking for work. and now the changeos isy central american families with children, children who come with relatives but are still separated because it's not their parents. we're seeing a lot ofignts that are just in border towns in mexico and the administrationg implementis metering policy where they only allow a to people in at a time request asylum, which is why we're seeing more people turnac ss the border between ifficial points of entry and unfortunately s the cases of the deaths of migrants. >> the heartbreaking photo of the father and the young child. get to the point where you're trying to cross the rio grande with your 23 month old kid as that father was ere you'r

willing to go into these situations, i mean ty must be fleeing heartbreaking situations. frida, can you explain to us briefly why people say they're willing to take these risks? >> this is a very daerous trek that people in central america are takingou t mexico. and every potential asylum seeker i've spoken to on the mexican side ofbo theer says they're fleeing crushing violence, extreme poverty and impunity and corruption in then governbecause people don't even have the basic -- theygo can't to school, they can't go to work, they can't start a business. >> we have seen congress this week attempt toon re they passed this humanitarian aid bill. quickly, what's in it? and bill, i want to talk to your about whetou think it's going to make a difference. >> so the bill that the senate approved first and then the house approved just recently, it

gives more about $800 million to expand the capacity of customs d bord protection to be able to handle the surge of migrants. and also gives money to health and human services so that they can open up more space at shelters for kids thantthe govern halabels as unaccompanied minors but many of them reall came with relatives. there's also other provisions it there sort of like scratch the surface of trying to get these agencies to meet their own standards they have already in migrants.ment of but of course it doesn't have as many restrictions as the house bill. >> do you have any confidence that this will make a difference for these children? >> i don't. it's not addressing the problem. the problem is the separation of the kids at the border from their relatives. they don't need to be int detention i first place.

yes, it's true that o.r.r. is drunning out of space, but they're slowing processing of those children that are in their now.tion righ there's this term that's become pejorative, catch and release, but it worked before. it's you process them, you se them on their way to wherever hey're headed and there was a 98% appearance rate. these folks are not absconding. they have every incen to pursue their asylum claims. >> do you think anything will happen in thee flores c that could change the situation on the ground? >> i do. given what w saw, children way beyond 72 turs were k for three weeks. >> that was the agreement the government had made. >> exactly. that will end, i'm pretty confident, soon, within the nexo h, i hope.

what won't end is detention, because the money that the senate and congress appropriated yesterday is to build more bed space. >> and frida, i mean, given the fact tha liberal democrats are pretty angry over this compromise, do you think that this bill is sort of the end of the story in congress for now? it's such an eintracta issue in d.c. >> i don't think so. i think this was a lot of more liberal and hispanic caucus saw this bill asn opportunity to put more strings on that, on those funds thatre they approving, like billions of dollars for this aid. so i don't think it's going to be the last we'll hear of this. and i also wanted to point out that someakers like california lawmakers just introduced a bill yryterday to o put more attention on the root causes of migration an

at the u.s. can do to try to slow down this flow of migrants in the home countries to address the issues that are mang people flee. >> thank you so much for joining us. >> tha you. yesterday theupreme court ended its term with two big rulings. the court ruled 5-4 that federal courts can't hears challen to partisan gerrymandering where the party in the majority draws voting district maps unfairly favoring their candidates. so chief justice roberts sided th the liberal wing in rejecting the reason given by the trump administration for adding a citizenship question to the u.s census form. professor, thanks for joini us. can the trump administration now include this question on the 2020 census? >> it's actually unclear becauso tht remanded this to the district court for further

explanation from the commerce department as to why they want this question. i think as it stands right now, they conot print the forms with that question on it. but they're just not goingto prhe forms and we're going to see what happens in the trial urt in the next couple weeks. >> the trump administnttion's arguor asking the supreme court to weigh in quickly was they needed to start printing those forms by this coming monday. will that undercut their argument with the court if they sor of do a reverse course on that? >> it definitelyts under their argument. the court said this is a pretext, it's real. there's a disconnect between the evidence and what you said. ifhey then sa well, actually we don't need to print the forms on july 1stai like we we had to, that's going to further undercut it. there's probably a huge fight happening r house and the solicitor ff

general'sce as to what to do to not further lose credibility. >> one of those cases we're going to get to a minut was gerrymandering. there was a trove of e-mals on a deceased gop strategist's hard drive that revealed the origins of the citizenship questions and sort of indicatedashat it political consideration. do you think that influenced how this court ru>>ed? well, they read the newspapers and we know they read the newspapers. th're human beings. they didn't mention this at all, this further evidence that suggests that actually there was a racial motive, a biassed motive to under count latinos and undocumented people. that evidence has come out l in tst 30 days but it wasn't mentioned in any court opinion.e chief just roberts, though, many people think may have changed his socievote in the la days. i think it has some impact. >> they do know what's going on

in the real world, notst j the courtroom. in this other gerrymandering case the court sai icould not overrule districts drawn by politicians for political purposes. were you surprised by this >> i'm very surprised and disap oppone disappointed. justice kagan said with deep sadness i dissent. they say it'sit a pal question that is beyond their competence or beyond their proper role ofauthority, which is just not consistent with the last 60 years jurisprudence. they review all sorts of t questiot are sensitive questions. difficult to say there's no standard to do gerrymandering when they already do racial gerrymandering. >> i guess within that context does this like impact past court decisions around gerrymandering or are we just talking abou moving forward? >> well, i think it's not going to impact anything that's finut

f there's pending lawsuits -- they took these two cases from maryland and north carolina yesterday and ordered the district court to dismiss those cases. his impacts a lot of litigation. and by the way, these same states, maryland and north caolina, they could go back and start analyzing was there actually a racial motive behind this. >> so there could be further challenges based on these same exact districts? >> i think c thereld be. in north carolina there have been other challenges based on race. >> inncalifornia we have independent redistricting commission. does this have any impact here? >> itve doesn't h any direct impact because we do have this s nonpartisan coon that does the job for the last 20 years or so. first of all, that could be repealed if one party decided they wanted to. second of all there's an indirect effect if other statess gerrymandetheir legislatures are dramatically overpowered by one pathty, e's kind of a ripple effect

back to california. >> or what happens in congress obviously. we've been watching chief justice robertsce closely s justice kavanaugh was confirmed. what do these rulings tell you about where he sits on the court? have a lot of respect for chief justice roberts. he is a conservative. there's doubt about it but he doesn't always play directly to that band. remember the health care decision, he was the voteat actually upheld obamacare. some conservatives iw call robertscare. this was another vote where he said i'll go so far with then rvatives but i'm not going to take a pretext reason in the census case.gerrymandering he s we're just not going to get involved. he's not a liberal but he's the center justice in a nine justice

court and he's exerting that power. >> he seemsto be very aware of what it means both politically and legally. finally justice kavanaugh, what are your take-aways with this first term? voted with the chief justice more often than any other justice.'s thpretty normal for your first term just to vote with the boss. the other is he's definitely conservative. he voted conservatively in a number of cases but he also split with gorsuch a o couple times. so they're not twins. they're not voting exactly the same. opinionsd a couple of that were actually pretty liberal, the flowers versus mississippi, he ruled for a capital defendant, vacated the penalty. i guess i'd say don't lose hope yet. people evolve. that will do it f us.

you can find more of our coverage at kqed.org/newsroom. thanks for joining us ♪

♪[music] sis joltsrder c congress. and the democrats debate. i'm robert costa. welcome to "washington week." frtures i the democratic party, at the opening debate. >> joe biden was right when he said it was time to pass the torch to a newf generation americans, 32 years ago. he's still right today. >> i'm still holding on to that torch. >> many contenders move left. >> health care is a human right, not something to make huge profit off of. >> andprake oident trump amid a migrant crisis. >> i would sign an executive order that would get rid of trump's zero tolerance policy. >> the debate and the president at the g20 summit, next.