Defiant in the face of bristling opposition from Republicans, the White House confirmed that U.S. President Barack Obama would go ahead with his plan to reveal, on Thursday, proposals to fix the country’s “broken” immigration system through an executive order that would bypass the need for Congressional approval.
Unilateral actionStriking a balance between his intention to take unilateral action and yet keep the dialogue going with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the President said in a video on the White House Facebook page, “What I’m going to be laying out is the things I can do with my lawful authority as President to make the system work better even as I continue to work with Congress and encourage them to get a bipartisan, comprehensive bill that can solve the entire problem.”
His proposed action, to be unveiled on Tuesday evening here, comes after the Democrats lost control of the Senate in the November 4 midterm elections, thereby rendering a prior Senate bill on comprehensive immigration reform dead in the water.
This would not be the first occasion on which Mr. Obama opted to use his power to exercise executive orders for immigration policy. In June 2012, his administration implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an executive move allowing the immigration directorates of the Department for Homeland Security to practise “prosecutorial discretion” towards some individuals who immigrated to the U.S. as children and did not have papers supporting their stay in the country.
The stakes could not be higher for the 11 million or so undocumented workers in the U.S. Mr. Obama’s executive action could potentially accord a legal status to somewhere between four and five million of them though the conservative opposition has for years focussed on blocking any “path the citizenship” for such immigrants.
As it became known that the White House would seek to take direct action on stalled immigration reform, several Republican Governors —potential candidates for the 2016 presidential elections — expressed support for a lawsuit against Mr. Obama if he acted without Congress on immigrants.
Lawsuit against ObamaTexas Governor Rick Perry said there was a “very real possibility” of his State suing the federal government if Mr. Obama acted unilaterally on immigration, and the Governors of Wisconsin and Louisiana — Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal — made similar suggestions.
Earlier this month, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner was said to be considering expanding a proposed federal lawsuit over Mr. Obama’s executive orders to include his actions on immigration.
The President however appeared firm in his resolve to tackle the issue head-on, telling in a pre-announcement statement, “Everybody agrees that our immigration system is broken… Unfortunately, Washington has allowed the problem to fester for too long.”
