In a primetime address to the nation last night, President Obama announced sweeping executive action on immigration. The president’s plans include a new deferred action program that will reportedly protect as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. “Our immigration system is broken, and everybody knows it,” Obama said.
The announcement belatedly fulfills the president’s promise to issue executive orders on immigration in the face of Congress’s failure to pass a comprehensive reform bill. “I continue to believe that the best way to solve this problem is by working together to pass that kind of common sense law. But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as president,” Obama said.
According to statements by the Republican congressional leadership, the president’s action may have put Congress’s stalled efforts to pass a bipartisan, comprehensive bill into deep-freeze. “With this action, the president has chosen to deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms that he claims to seek,” said John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House.
The action expands the scope of “administrative relief” first offered in June 2012 through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—an action that gave temporary legal status to 1.2 million undocumented youth brought to the U.S. as children. Protection from deportation will now also include the parents of U.S. citizen children and legal permanent residents who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, and expands eligibility of DACA by not including an age limit of those eligible, as long as they came to the U.S. before the age of 15. In addition to deferred action, Obama outlined plans to beef up border security efforts, recalibrate law-enforcement strategies around immigration violations, and reform specific authorizations and benefits associated with existing visa programs.
The president is due to attend an event at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas, Nevada on Friday afternoon to build support for his initiative. Obama unveiled plans for comprehensive immigration reform at Del Sol nearly two years ago.
