– Inside the Supreme Court, the justices pondered whether President Obama could order states to defer deportation of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. whose children are here legally, and let those parents apply for work permits.

Outside the court, Perla Ramos of St. Paul outlined her personal stake in the case.

Ramos, 33, is working in the U.S. illegally, cleaning houses. Her 17-year-old daughter is exempted from deportation by a program for children who entered the country illegally before June 2007.

Simply put, Ramos does not want people like her or her daughter deported.

"I've been here half my life," she said. "We come here for a dream. We are not criminals. Deport criminals. But children? There's something wrong with that. That's not acceptable."

Preserving families was the mission of 50 Minnesotans who traveled by bus to demonstrate outside the Supreme Court Monday. Mostly Latino, they represented the Asamblea de Derechos Civiles (Assembly for Civil Rights).

"Thousands of undocumented workers in Minnesota are supporting the economy," said Pablo Tapia, one of the group's leaders. The president's executive action "is the right thing to do for the USA, but it is also the right moral thing."

Legally, however, lower courts have questioned the constitutionality of Obama's actions in circumventing Congress, which has not acted on immigration reform. Petitioned by Texas and 25 other states, federal judges in trial and appeals courts have delayed implementation of the deferred deportation program.

A deadlock among the eight justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court would leave the lower court rulings in place and possibly kill the program.

That would be good news for some conservative constitutional scholars and groups like the Tea Party Patriots, which said in a statement Monday that the court "has the opportunity to push back against executive overreach and put an end to the radical leftist schemes of this president."

For young people like 14-year-old Karen Nacario Gazga, dumping the deferred deportation executive action is an act of prejudice, not legal interpretation.

Immigrants do jobs that Americans do not want to do, the high school freshman from Apple Valley said. Breaking up families or deporting children is not going to make the country better.

"My friend during my sixth grade year, her father was deported," Nacario Gazga said. "The family was already struggling financially. My friend was a U.S. citizen. Her mother and brothers were not. They went back to Mexico. She entered the foster care ­system."