President Barack Obama will announce today his plan to use executive authority to move on immigration reform.
Obama has said the immigration system is broken and that he will use administrative powers to move on issues where Congress has not acted.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will announce on Monday his intention to take executive action to address the “broken” U.S. immigration system after hopes of passing a broad reform bill in Congress officially died.
Republican John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, informed Obama last week that the House would not vote on immigration reform this year, a White House official said, killing chances that a wide-ranging bill passed by the Senate would become law.
Obama will direct Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Eric Holder to “move available and appropriate enforcement resources from our interior to the border” to promote public safety, the official said.
Administration officials in the meantime will make recommendations on what the president can do unilaterally without congressional approval to address problems with the immigration system.
“The president looks forward to the recommendations from his team by the end of the summer,” the official said.
Obama has pushed for years for reform that would create a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants within the United States. The U.S. Senate bill had such provisions, but Republicans in the House largely opposed them on the argument that they amounted to amnesty for people who had entered the country illegally.
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