until next spring, and that means daca undoubtedly will be an issue in the presidential campaign, hallie. pete williams outside the supreme court. we are joined now by two daca recipients that are out there as part of the protest. perez came to the united states when she was 8 years old from mexico and became a licensed attorney in connecticut last year. she s now an immigration attorney for make the road, new york s deportation defense team. angelica came to the u.s. at the age of 11. she runs a trans wa language bu and all of them u.s. citizens between 19 and 20 months old. perez and angelica, thank you for being with us. forgive me if i have a repeat a question or two. can you talk a little bit over the uncertainty over the last couple of years with the trump administration s push to do away with these protections? yeah, i think that in the
here is the thing, time is running out. the 2020 census forms have to be printed in just a few weeks. let s bring in nbc s pete williams outside the supreme court. he has been covering the supreme court for nbc news. are you ready for it? for 26 years. that means but who is counting. he knows what he s talking about. also joining us maya wiley senior vice president for social justice at the new school. pete, bra he can this down for us. the court s decision, it s not that you can t ask the question, it s the way the administration handled it? reporter: precisely. the court said, for example, that it would not violate the constitution s command that you have to enumerate the population if you added this question. that was one of the arguments that the challengers made, that this would so skew the process that you would never get an accurate count. the supreme court rejected that argument. so i think you all have framed it precisely. what happens now is the supreme court said the
today that is potentially another obstacle to the census bureau getting this question on the form. so i don t know how that s going to play out, either, but that is very much a lurking problem for the administration. pete, dig into this for us, this other decision that came on partisan gerrymandering. explain it all. reporter: sure. so this is the question, it was from two states, one in which the republicans in north carolina did everything they could to minimize the number of seats in congress, the democrats could get, and just the opposite in maryland where the democrats were trying to limit republicans in congress from their state. in both states the claim was that the state legislatures engaged were so partisan, was engaged in such blatant partisan gerrymandering that it crossed a constitutional line. today the supreme court said in two separate rulings that s not a question we can answer because we don t know where that constitutional line is. gerrymandering, drawing these
boundaries, is a quintessential political partisan political act and we don t know what the standard is. it s in the for us as judges to answer that question. so that would seem to shut the door. you know, this is, i think, the third or fourth time somebody has tried to get one of these partisan gerrymandering cases, the closest they came was a case from pennsylvania about i think ten years ago in which anthony kennedy said, do you know what, i think maybe there is something to this idea, i just don t know what the test is, and other cases have come along trying to lay down such a test, but today the supreme court said forget it. we just can t decide this fundamentally partisan question, political question, and this one was a 5-4 vote along the traditional ideological lines. the census decision was not, it was the chief justice plus the four liberals. pete, i can t believe stephanie said, yeah, just explain the whole thing to us and you did. pete williams and maya wiley, thank you
environment in which people feel like they can t safely answer the question, meaning it might be used against them in some way, whether legally legitimate or not and results in them not answering it, the reality is we will see states losing potentially congressional seats because of an undercount of population. in fact, new york state, for example, lost two seats in the last round. traditionally low income people of color and rural communities are undercounted. that means both political voice but it also means dollars, things like how much money is allocated, for instance, for school lunch. that impacts everyone. so the most important issue here is not making people afraid, but enabling them to count. that s why the careerists in the census bureau did not want this question. pete, i want to go back to this case because you and i and maya and stephanie and i had