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Obama announces immigration plans

President sets stage for battle with GOP
President Barack Obama Thursday unveils plans to take executive action that will protect millions of people in the United States illegally from being deported. He urged Republicans to concentrate, not on opposing his actions, but on reforming the nation’s immigration laws.

WASHINGTON – Spurning furious Republicans, President Barack Obama unveiled expansive executive actions on immigration Thursday night to spare nearly 5 million people in the U.S. illegally from deportation and refocus enforcement efforts on “felons, not families.”

The moves, affecting mostly parents and young people, marked the most sweeping changes to the nation’s fractured immigration laws in nearly three decades and set off a fierce fight with Republicans over the limits of presidential powers.

In a televised address to the nation, Obama defended the legality of his actions and challenged GOP lawmakers to focus their energy not on blocking his actions, but on approving long-stalled legislation to take its place.

“To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill,” Obama said, flexing his presidential powers just two weeks after his political standing was challenged in the midterm elections.

Still, Obama’s actions and the angry Republican response could largely stamp out prospects for Congress passing comprehensive immigration legislation under the current administration, ensuring that the contentious debate will carry on into the 2016 presidential campaign.

Republicans, emboldened by their sweeping victories in the midterms, are weighing responses to the president’s actions that include lawsuits, a government shutdown, and in rare instances, even impeachment.

“The president will come to regret the chapter history writes if he does move forward,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is soon to become the Senate majority leader, said before Obama’s address.

While Obama’s measures are sweeping in scope, they still leave more than half of the 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally in limbo. The president announced new deportation priorities that would compel law enforcement to focus its efforts on tracking down serious criminals and people who have recently crossed the border, while specifically placing a low priority on those who have been in the U.S. for more than 10 years.

He insisted that his actions did not amount to amnesty.

“Amnesty is the immigration system we have today – millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time,” he said.

The main beneficiaries of the president’s actions are immigrants who have been in the U.S. illegally for more than five years but whose children are citizens or lawful permanent residents. After passing background checks and paying fees, those individuals can now be granted relief from deportation for three years and get work permits. The administration expects about 4.1 million people to qualify.

Obama is also broadening his 2012 directive that deferred deportation for some young immigrants who entered the country illegally.

Obama will expand eligibility to people who arrived in the U.S. as minors before 2010, instead of the current cutoff of 2007, and will lift the requirement that applicants be under 31. The expansion is expected to affect about 300,000 people.

Applications for the new deportation deferrals will begin in the spring.

Will Obama’s changes stand up legally?

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s announcement of sweeping changes to the nation’s immigration system is likely to lead to a battle over their legality. Is he on solid legal ground?

For months the White House and Obama’s supporters have insisted that he has the authority to direct immigration authorities to exercise discretion in deciding which immigrants in the country illegally will face deportation and which won’t.

“The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every Democratic president for the past half century,” Obama said in speech prepared for delivery Thursday night.

But Republicans in Congress disagree with the White House view. They’re calling Obama’s plan an unconstitutional power grab.

“The president seems intent on provoking a constitutional crisis by adopting policies that he previously said were illegal,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Congress will act to stop the president’s executive actions when his party takes control of the Senate in January.

Among those being protected from deportation under Obama’s plan are the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, roughly 4.1 million people.

A senior administration official said Thursday that the decision to protect this group is in line with existing law that allows adult citizens to sponsor their parents for immigration. Obama’s plan goes a step further because the sponsoring citizen doesn’t have to be an adult. And in such cases, the protection from deportation would be temporary – three years. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to be identified by name.

A year after Ronald Reagan and Congress enacted an overhaul that gave legal status to up to 3 million immigrants who had no authorization to be in the country in 1986, Reagan’s Immigration and Naturalization Service expanded the program to cover minor children of parents granted amnesty. Spouses and children of couples in which one parent qualified for amnesty but the other did not remained subject to deportation, leading to efforts to amend the 1986 law.

President George H.W. Bush in 1990 established a “family fairness” program in which family members who were living with a legalizing immigrant and who had been in the U.S. before passage of the 1986 law were granted protection from deportation and authorized to seek employment. The administration estimated that up to 1.5 million people would be covered by the policy. Congress later made the protections permanent.

At issue is how far Obama can go on his own to shield from deportation immigrants who are in the country illegally. The administration and its supporters have argued that the use of prosecutorial discretion – the ability to decide which cases will be pursued by prosecutors, either in immigration or criminal court – allows the president to decide which groups of immigrants should be a priority. Obama has argued that he can go one step further and use a provision in immigration law called “deferred action” to formally protect particular immigrants from deportation.

Immigrants granted deferred action are also eligible for work permits.

What the president can’t do is halt all deportations, or permanently change the immigration status of any specific group of immigrants. Only Congress has that power.

While Obama’s proposals have been cleared by lawyers from both the Homeland Security and Justice departments, some of the Republican governors meeting in Florida this week said they were weighing a lawsuit to block the president’s action.

Outgoing Texas Gov. Rick Perry said a lawsuit was “very likely,” and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal suggested they’d be willing to join the legal challenge.

“It should be immediately challenged in court and we should seek an immediate stay,” Pence said in an interview.

It’s unclear how such a challenge would fare. A lawsuit challenging the 2012 program that protects many young immigrants from deportation was filed in federal court in Texas, but was dismissed on technical grounds.

Associated Press writer Steve Peoples in Boca Raton, Florida, contributed to this report.



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