On weesday senatorlizabeth warren who is the only candidate polling i double digits on stage held strong in the first part of the debate. Many are callin jul castro the breakout star of the first night. Joining me is the senior Political Writer for the San Francisco chronicle and los angeles political times writer joining us. Much anticipated two nights of debates. Were going to get into the details of those heated changes in a moment. First off, do you think the fundamental tenor of this race sos changed this week . Tely. I think we saw some exchanges between these candidates, particularly betwamala harris and joe biden that this is a pivotal momentr in the e. Theres such a long time to go. We have more than 200 days until the iowa caucuses. Did the last two nights determine anything . Did it decide who the nominee is going to be . No. But these exchanges, particularly the Heated Exchange between Kamala Harris and joe biden over race is going to be one of those pivot points in the race. I feel like there was very low expectations in some ways. It does seem like more happened onthe second night than maybe we thought might. I got am text f a former colleague who said biden is aging in the ring as we speak. This could be the beginning of a ugh spot for biden. He has to defend a lot of thin s s that were opened up thsday night. Also on his age. Eric swalwell went at him on the age question. I think that Kamala Harris h real a standout night. Joe, you and i have followed her for a long time. The biggest moment was when she went after joe biden aboutwo ing with those segregationist senators. Lets listen to part of that exchange. Weve also heard and im going to now direct this aten ve pres biden. I do not believe you are a racist, but b i alsolieve and its personal and it was hurtfuu to hear talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the egregation of race in this duntry. It know. What do you think . I feel like this might be the best ive ever seenamala harris. Everyone declared her the winner of the two nights of debates. She had such a breakthrough moment. One of the things voters are looking for is who can take on the president on the debate ge st also with joe biden, everyone knew he came into this a front runner with a target on his back. When swalwell went after him on the age thing, he sort of smiled and brushed ito. When kamala went after him, his reaction was a little stilted. The coverage has been continuing all day today. I think she scored major points last night. It was sort ofboth. It was the fact that Kamala Harris seemed so ahentic and clearly prepared but also relaxed. T also that he didnt seem to have a response for something he coming. Ve known was terrible debate preparation. Also she did something that was very unusual in that she was able to v combiney personal anecdo anecdote, her childhood in berkeley talking about race, which is very difficult to talk and then she went into prosecutor mode and said, do you still support bussing. It was all faces of kamala. This was a kamala that we did not see when she wasor running a. G. , senate and district attorney. E have watched her mature before our eyes. Were going to have to talk about the other candidates. Before we do, what do you think about how joe biden has dealt with this in the aftermathf t debate . Seems like hes digging in. Yeah. We havet heard him apologize or find a way to kind of get past this isshich quite frankly has been brewing for more than a week since he made thosemm ts. Today you see the statements where hes saying of course fi believe teral government should have a role in these things and no states cant just decide. It completely contradicts his record. Secondly since new audio came out today from npr has him s saying het would supp constitutional amendment to ban forced bussing. Seems like he woul say ive had a long career over 40 years and maybe hes changed his mind. I don understand how hes digging in his heels, but he is. Otherre were 18 candidates on stage. I think on the first night Elizabeth Warren was really the one twatch. She really held her own. What impressed me on bothnights about her and sanders was how much they as the progressive wing ofhis party seem to be really pushing the debate. There were more moderate candidates trying to push back a little but it was kind of on the abogressive terms. Lutely. Someone who was cheering that it was on the progressive terms was President Trump, ally when they said everyone put up your hand if you support giving Health Benefits to undocumented immigrants, everyod went up. On thursday night. On the first night and the second night, hopports taking away private health insurance, which is notla po bernie and kamala put their hands up. Secondight warren and bill de blas on the first night. Elizabeth warren, if shes the j nominest cut her first attack ad when she said im with bernie. That may work well in the primary. It may work well in california but it may cause them problems in the general election. Im curious what you think about this. What were hearing from republicans is that this is exactly what they want, this is the socialist democratic party. You know, but i think theres obviously a lot of exciteme around these candidates as well. So thats a balance theyre going to ha to weigh in the coming months. Clearly t sll create excitement among one wing of the democratic party. Bernie sanders, savannah guthrin pr e pressed him on will your Health Care Plan raise taxes. He said yeah it itwill. Any pian when youre adm admitting that your plan is going to cost middle class taxpayers more money, that clearly is going to be in some attackgad al the way. He was asked how are you going to implement this with a divided congress, he said well theres going to be a political re lucia revolution. Lets talk about eric swalwell, congressman from the east bay. Hes 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. Talked strongly about guns. I dont s i dont see this is going to change the race for him. He used the zinger about biden being old twice. He basically took one for the team in terms of the other democrats by raising the specter of bidens age which is very difficult. Bernie sanders later called it ageism. He called it ageism and he said it dends on the virility of your ideas. I dont know if swalwell stood out. Remember, in september hes going to have twice as many donorsnd hes polling 2 . Its going to be a challenge. He better sharpen up his swalwell for congress sign. The other person that break out, however, was Julian Castro from texas. We really saw him go after some of the other folks on stage around immigration. Do you think this i little bit of gas for his campaign . S he hen somebody that is exciting some parts of the democratic pay but not getting that attention . Absolutely. After wednesday night he went afteris fellow texan beto orourke and he got the better of him in that exchanhe. Theg is, then we have thursday night and the kamala biden show. I have to think thatort of took all the action out of the room. If he had been maybe the second night i think he might have been able toeter use whatever momentum he got. Which speaks to how important it is to how the lineup is over the next debates in july. Ri ght. So quick, what do you expect next . Well, in terms ofbiden, i expect a lot of op research into his very, very long career. He was first elected before i was born. Were going toave a fundraising deadline or disclosures coming up soon. Thatill tell us a lot about how these candidates are doing and who has the resources for the long haul. People are talking about the win knowi iwi owing 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 mostm . Momen i think even overnight were seeing kamala hrris has a little bit of spike. Fundraising has spiked for Julian Castro. I think warren is going to be definitely helped by this. I think biden, youre going to see that big lead he has whittle down and down and then the narrative becomes bidens losing his lead and that kind of stuff feeds on itself. You know, who knows. Ngwere gto leave it there. Thank you both for being here. Thank you. Now to immigration. A team of lawyers revealed shocking conditions at a border facility in texas they visited last week where hundreds of miant children have be detained for weeks on end. The lawyers ieinted dozens of children there. They reported seeing up to 50 children confined in a single room withed ed ttoddlers being for by older children. Many of them hadnt bathed andr earing dirty clothes. Also yesterday the housese p a 4. 6 billion border aid bill backed by t Senate Despite objections from some democra de who say it lacked protections for migrants held in shelters. Jo thank you both foring 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 reallyequires certain conditions for children. Can you tell us a little bit about what you saw, maybeick a couple stories to tell us. What i saw was heartbreaking. Children as 2 young as years old who are left to take care of lv them. They were confined to rooms, sizes for 2050 people. Youre right, the younger the ild that i saw, the dirtier they were. I interviewed a 5yearold and a 4yearold. Their clothes were filthy. Their hair was dirty. When ialked in a large Conference Room to use a printer and one end of the rooman and ther interviewer was interviewing a 7yearold girl who started cryinat and t interviewer walked her across the room to what i thoughtas maybe her mother because it was another older teen with a o2ye in her lap. That 7yearold went over there to be comforted. I found o later on this teen was not a mother. The teen had just out of thedn kiss of her heart taken care of the 2yearold and the 7yearold and they had bonde its unbelievable. Ive been doing this work for decades and ivever seen anything like this. The fact that they were left to take care of tmselves was just heart wrenching. Weve heard 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 child at the border who is coming wit a nonparent. So the vast majority of kids that ier inewed came with their aunts and uncles or older siblings. The policy the Trump Administration is doing is if youre notoming with yo parents, youre going to be separated. This 2yearold, this 5yearold that i interviewed that come with an au anduncle. I cant imagine the trauma. I also understand there were with theirnts this teen mothers, is that right . I interview three teen mothers with infants as young as 5 months old. Two of the children had experienced diarrhea, vomiting, chilled. Ere 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 that customs and Border Protection especially and this is something the agencylv them will tell you, theyre not equipped or resourced or designed to deal with the kindof migrant flows that were seeing these days compared to what we s earlier like in the 90s or 2000s when it was mostly mexican men coming to the u. S. Looking for work. And now the changec is mostly tral American Families with children, children who come with relatives but are still separated because its not their parents. Were seeing a lot of migrants that are just in border towns mexico and the Administration Implementing this metering policy where they only allow a few people in at a time tot requ asylum, which is why were seeing more people turn across the border between official points of entry and unfortunaly seeing the cases of the deaths of migrants. The heartbreaking photo of th father and the young child. To get to the point where youre tryings to c the rio grande with your 23 month old kid as youre her was where willing to go into these situations, i mean they mus fleeing heartbreaking situations. Frida, can you explai to briefly why people say theyre willing to take these risks . This is a very dangerous trek that people in Central America are taking through mexico. And every potential Asylum Seeker ive spoken to on the mexican side of the border says theyre fleeing crushing violence, extreme poverty and impunity and corruption in the eovernment because peoont even have the basic they cant go to school, they cant go to work, they cant start a business. Re we have seen co this week attempt to respond. They passed this humanitarianll aid quickly, whats in it . And bill, i want to talk to you abo whether you think its going to make a difference. So the bill that the senatep ed first and then the house approved just recently,it gives more about 800 million to expand thef capacity customs and Border Protection to be able to handle the surge of migrants. And also gives moneyea toth and Human Services so that they can open up more space shelters for kids that the overnment halabels as unaccompanied minors but many of them really came with relatives. Theres also other provisions in there that sort of like scratch the sface of trying to get these agencies to meet their own standards they have already in the treatment of migrants. C but rse it doesnt have as many restrictions as the house bill. Do you have any confidence that this will make a difference children . I dont. Its not addressing the problem. The problem is the separation of the kids at the border from their relatives they dont need to be in detention in the first place. Yes, its true th o. R. R. Is running out of bed space, but theyresling processing of those children that are in their detention right now. Thereis term thats become pejorative, catch and release, but worked before. Its you process them, you send them on their way to wherever theyre headed and there was a 98 appearance rate. These folks are n absconding. They have eve incentive to pursue their asylum claims. Do you think anything will happen in the flates case could change the situation on the ground . I do. Given what we aw, children way beyond 72 hours were kept for three weeks. That was the agreement government had made. Exactly. That will end, im pretty confident, soon, within the next month, i hope. What wont end is detention, because the moneyhat the senate and congress appropriated yesterday is to bud mo bed space. And frida, i mean, given the fact that liberal democrats are pretty ary over this compromise, do you think that this bill is sort of the end of the story in congress for now . Its such an uetractable i in d. C. I dont think so. Think this was a lot of more liberal and hispanic caucus saw this bill ni an oppor to put more strings on that, on those funds that theyre pproving, like billions of dollars for this aid. So i dont think its going to be the last wll hear this. And i also wanted to point out that somke lawmakers l california lawmakers just mtroduced a bill yesterday to try to pute attention on the root causes of migration and what the u. S. Can do to try slow down this flow of migrants in the home countries to address the issues that are making people flee. Thank you so much for joinin. Thank you. Yesterday the supreme cour nded its term with two big the court ruled 54 that federal courts cant hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering wher p thearty in the majority draws voting district maps unfairly favoring their candidates. Also chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberal wing in rejecting the reason given by the Trump Administration for adding a Citizenship Question to the ugn. S. Form. Professor, thanks f joining us. Can the Trump Administration now include or not include this question on the 2020 census . Its actually unclear because the Court Remanded this to the district urt for further explanation from the commercde rtment as to why they want this question. I think as it stands right now, ey could not print t forms with that question on it. But theyre just not going to print the f and were going to see what happens in the trial court in the next couple weeks. The Trump Administrations argument for asking the Supreme Court to weigh in quicklywas they needed to start printing those forms by this comin monday. Will that undercut their argument with the court if they sort of do areverse course on that . It definitely undercuts their argument. The court said this is a pretext,ts not real. Theres a disconnect between the evidence and what you said. If they then say, well, actually we dont need t print the forms on july 1st like we said we hadg to, thats go further undercut it. Theres probably a huge fight happening right now in the wthte house an solicitor geoerals office as what to do to noter fur lose credibility. One of those cases were going to get to in a minute was gerrymandering. There was a trove of emails on a deceased gop strategists hard drive that revealed the origins of the Citizenship Questions and sort of indicated that it was a political consideration. Do you think that influenced how this court ruled . Well they read the newspapers and we know they read the newspapers. Theyre human beings. They didnt mention this at all, this further evidence that suggests that actuallye ths a racial motive, a biassed motive to under count latinos and ntundocu people. That evidence has come out in the last 30 days but it wasnt mentioned in any court opinion. Chi Justice Roberts, though, many people think may have changed his socievote in the la days. I think it has some impact. They do know whats going o in the real world, not just the courtroom. In this other gerrymanderin case the court said it could not overrule districts drawn by politicians for political purposes. Were you surprised by this ruliy . Im vpr ssed and disap oppone disappointed. Justice kagan said wth deep sadness i dissent. They say its a political question that is beyond their competence or beyo their proper role of authority, which is just not consistent with the last 60 years of jurisprudence. They review all sorts of uestions that are sensitive questions, difficult questions. To s theres no standard to do gerrymandering when they already do racial gerrymandering. I guess within that ctext does this like impact past Court Decisions aroundym gendering or are we just talking about moving forward . Well, i thk itot going to impact anything thats final but if theres pending lawsuits they twook these cases from maryland and North Carolina yesterday and ordered the District Court to dismiss those cases. This impacts a lot of litigation. And by the way, these same s, stat maryland and North Carolina, they could go back and start analyzing where actually a racial motive behind this. So there could be furtherle chaes based on these same exact districts . I think tre could be. In North Carolina there have been other challenges based on race. In california we ha an independent redistricting commission. Does this have any impact here . It doesnt have any direct impact because we do have this nonpartisan commission that does the job for the last 20 yers or so. First of all, that could be repealed if one party decided they wanted to. Second of all theres an indirect effect if other states germander so their legislatures are dramatically overpowered by one party, theres kind of Ripple Effect back to california. Or what happens in congre obviously. Weve been watching chief Justice Roberts closely since Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed. What do these rulings tell you about whes he s on the court . I have a lot of respect for chief Justice Roberts. He is a conservative. Eres no doubout it but he doesnt always play directly to that band. Rememberca the healt decision, he was the vote that actually upheld obamacare some conservatives now call it robertscare. This was another vote where he iid ill go so far with the conservatives bu not going to take a pretext reason in the census case. Gerrymandering he s were just not going to get involved. Hes not a liberal bute hes Center Justice in a nine Justice Court and hes exerting that power. He seems to be very aware of what it means both politically and legally. Finally Justice Kavanaugh, what are your takeaways with this irst term . Heted with the chief justice more often than any other justice. Thats pretty normal for your first term juvo to with the boss. The other is hes definitely conservative. Hat voted conseely in a number of cases but he also split with gorsuch a couple of times. So theyre not twins. Theyre not voting exact the same. And he did a couple of opinioer that actually pretty liberal, the flowers versus mississippi, he ruled for a capital defendant,aced the death penalty. I guess id say dont lose hope yet. People evolve. That will do it for us. You can find more of our coverage at kqed. Org newsroom. Thanks for joi ing us. [music] the border crisis jolts congress. And the democrats debate. Im robert costa. Welcome to washington week. Fractures in t democratic asrty, at the opening debate. Joe bidenight when he said it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of ago. Cans, 32 years hes still right today. Im Still Holding on to that torch. Many contenders movet. L health care is a human right, not something to make huge profit off of. And take on President Trump amid a migrant crisis. I would sign an executive order that would get rid of trumps zero tolerance policy. The debate and the president at the g20 summit, next