By Using Executive Order on Immigration, Obama Would Reverse Long-Held Stance
By MICHAEL D. SHEARNOV. 17, 2014
WASHINGTON — President Obama is poised to ignore stark warnings that executive action on immigration would amount to “violating our laws” and would be “very difficult to defend legally.”
Those warnings came not from Republican lawmakers but from Mr. Obama himself.
For years, the president has repeatedly waved aside the demands of Latino activists and Democratic allies who begged him to take action on his own, and he insisted publicly that a decision to shield millions of immigrants from deportation without an act of Congress would amount to nothing less than the dictates of a king, not a president.
But Mr. Obama has reversed position and now said he believes that such actions can be “legally unassailable,” as a senior White House official put it last week. As early as this week, officials said, Mr. Obama is expected to announce plans to shield up to five million people from deportation and provide work permits for many of them.
The change comes after a concerted lobbying campaign by immigration advocates demanding presidential action in the face of 400,000 deportations every year. And it reflects the president’s mounting frustration that Republicans have blocked all efforts to pass immigration legislation.
At a news conference in Australia over the weekend, Mr. Obama implored Congress to pass a bill that would secure the border, revamp the legal immigration system and legalize many of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States.
“Give me a bill that addresses those issues,” Mr. Obama said at the conclusion of the G-20 summit in Brisbane, Australia. “I’ll be the first one to sign it and, metaphorically, I’ll crumple up whatever executive actions that we take and we’ll toss them in the wastebasket.”
White House officials said they did not believe that Republicans, who will control both chambers in Congress next year, have any intention of passing a bill that the president could sign. They note that Mr. Obama delayed any executive action throughout 2013 and 2014, hoping that Speaker John A. Boehner would allow a vote in the House on a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate.
When that did not happen by the summer, officials said, Mr. Obama decided he should act on his own.
That decision puts the president in a drastically different posture than the one he took in numerous interviews and speeches since 2010. In those settings, Mr. Obama was repeatedly urged to act on his own to reduce the number of families that were being separated by deportations. In each of the appearances, he rejected the idea and urged people to pressure Republicans in Congress to pass a bill.
In a Telemundo interview in September 2013, Mr. Obama said he was proud of having protected the “Dreamers” — people who came to the United States illegally as young children — from deportation. But he said at the time that he could not apply that same action to other groups of people; the very thing he is soon expected to announce.
“If we start broadening that, then essentially, I’ll be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally,” Mr. Obama told Jose Diaz-Balart in the interview. “So that’s not an option.”
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In an immigration speech in San Francisco last November, several protesters repeatedly interrupted the president, yelling “Stop deportations! Stop deportations!” Mr. Obama told the protesters that he respected their “passion,” but insisted that only Congress had the authority to do what they wanted.
“The easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws,” he said. “And what I’m proposing is the harder path.”
The president was also pressed on the issue during a Google Hangout in February 2013. An activist asked whether he could do more to keep families from being “broken apart” while Congress remained gridlocked on immigration legislation.
“This is something that I have struggled with throughout my presidency,” Mr. Obama said. “The problem is, is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed.”
And at a Town Hall in March of 2011, months before taking action to keep the dreamers from being deported, Mr. Obama said the nation’s laws would not allow him to do that.
“There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president,” he said.
Republicans have seized on Mr. Obama’s past statements as evidence of what they call a shaky legal foundation for the president’s expected actions. In an email to reporters, the Republican National Committee on Monday asked, “When did we add a “politically convenient clause” to the Constitution in the last four years?”
But Mr. Obama insisted over the weekend that he had not changed his position. During the news conference in Australia, the president said that his answers about the limits of executive authority in the past were aimed at people who thought he should simply enact the Senate-passed bill even though it had not passed the House.
“Their interest was in me, through executive action, duplicating the legislation that was stalled in Congress,” Mr. Obama said. “And getting a comprehensive deal of the sort that is in the Senate legislation, for example, does extend beyond my legal authorities. There are certain things I cannot do.”
He said the actions that he would take soon will fall short of the overhaul envisioned by the Senate bill, which would have provided a path to legalization for more of the 11 million unauthorized people in the United States. “What’s within our authority to do is reallocating resources and reprioritizing since we can’t do everything,” he said.
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Mr. Obama said that in recent months, he had received legal advice from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. about the limits of what he can do to reshape the immigration system. The president declined to describe that advice, but said that he would reveal it when he made an announcement.
What seems clear is that the legal advice will support Mr. Obama’s current views about his executive powers, not his previous views.
“I can’t wait in perpetuity when I have authorities that, at least for the next two years, can improve the system, can allow us to shift more resources to the border rather than separating families; improve the legal immigration system,” Mr. Obama said in Australia. “I would be derelict in my duties if I did not try to improve the system that everybody acknowledges is broken.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/us/by-using-executive-order-on-immigration-obama-would-reverse-long-held-stance.html?_r=0
