Obama, Daring Congress, Acts to Overhaul Immigration

WASHINGTON — President Obama chose confrontation over conciliation on Thursday as he asserted the powers of the Oval Office to reshape the nation’s immigration system and dared members of next year’s Republican-controlled Congress to reverse his actions on behalf of millions of immigrants.

In an address from the East Room of the White House that sought to appeal to a nation’s compassion, Mr. Obama told Americans that deporting millions is “not who we are” and quoted scripture that said “We shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too.”

He displayed years of frustration with congressional gridlock and a desire to frame the last years of his presidency with far-reaching executive actions. Mr. Obama’s directive will shield up to five million people from deportation and allow many to work legally, although it offers no path to citizenship.

“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,” Mr. Obama said. “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.”

In a series of rhetorical questions, he framed the immigration debate in emotional terms. “Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law?” he asked. Later he added, “Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in,”

Mr. Obama intends to underscore the schism between the parties on the issue of immigration during a campaign-like rally on Friday at a high school in Las Vegas, where Hispanics are a powerful and growing voting bloc.

The trip is part of a White House strategy to try to convince Americans in the next weeks and months that the president’s actions are legal and right. Immigration advocates plan to use that time to push for even more while Republicans are devising ways to defy the president and exercise their new authority.

Conservative lawmakers accused the president of a gross abuse of authority and promised a legislative fight when they take full control of Congress next year. But even before Mr. Obama’s speech, Republicans appeared divided about how to stop him and unsure about how to express their anger without severely damaging their standing with Latinos.

Mr. Obama’s actions will sharpen the focus of government enforcement on criminals and foreigners who pose security threats, vastly reducing the specter that many immigrants would be detained by federal agents. High-tech workers will have an easier time coming to the United States, and security on the border will be increased.

The centerpiece of the president’s announcement is a new program for undocumented people who are the parents of United States citizens. Most of those people — estimated by officials to number slightly more than four million — would be eligible for a new legal status that would defer their deportations and allow them to work legally in the country. They must pass background checks and pay taxes, but they will get Social Security cards, officials said.

An additional one million people will get protection from deportation through other parts of the president’s plan.

Mr. Obama’s actions will end a program called Secure Communities, which advocates had long criticized as a dragnet that swept up many undocumented immigrants arrested for minor offenses like traffic violations. Local police departments will continue to send fingerprints of foreign-born people they arrest for immigration status checks by the Department of Homeland Security. But police will no longer be asked routinely to detain immigrants without papers.

How Republicans choose to proceed in their opposition to the president’s directive will shape the final two years of Mr. Obama’s tenure and could help set the tone of the 2016 presidential campaign. Several Republicans on Thursday said they wanted to use a forthcoming spending bill and the threat of a government shutdown as leverage against Mr. Obama, while others in the party reached for ways that Congress might undercut the president’s actions by withholding money or threatening other priorities.

“By ignoring the will of the American people, President Obama has cemented his legacy of lawlessness and squandered what little credibility he had left,” House Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement after the speech. “Republicans are left with the serious responsibility of upholding our oath of office. We will not shrink from this duty, because our allegiance lies with the American people. We will listen to them, work with our members, and protect the Constitution.”

Even as Republican lawyers analyzed what the White House said was the legal basis of Mr. Obama’s actions, it remained unclear how they might undo them. The agency that will carry out most of the president’s executive actions, Citizenship and Immigration Services, is funded with application fees, and does not rely on a budget vote in Congress to keep operating.

But accusations of a presidential abuse of power appear to have gained some traction in recent days, as a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found just 38 percent support for Mr. Obama’s executive actions even as there is broad support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. In the poll, 48 percent said they oppose Mr. Obama’s actions. Even a few Democrats have expressed concern about the propriety of the president’s actions.

“I am as frustrated as anyone that Congress is not doing its job, but the president shouldn’t make such significant policy changes on his own,” Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana, a Democrat, said in a statement Thursday before the president’s speech. Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, told White House aides in a meeting on Thursday that he disagreed with Mr. Obama.

“To put it through now is the wrong thing to do,” Mr. Manchin said after the meeting. “I told them I wasn’t comfortable.”

White House aides said they are prepared to confront all of the accusations; one senior administration official said Thursday that dealing with Republicans on Capitol Hill was like participating in “a live-fire exercise.” Officials said that Mr. Obama’s actions would refocus federal agents on “deporting felons, not families” and they insisted that the move is consistent with powers that have been exercised by presidents in both parties for decades.

Immigration advocates and the president’s Democratic allies hailed the president’s announcement even as they insisted that more should be done to provide legal protections for millions of undocumented immigrants unaffected by Mr. Obama’s directives.

“Five million people will get to feel this country’s embrace,” said Lorella Praeli, the director of advocacy for United We Dream, a youth immigrant organization. “But I’m sad there are people who will be left out. For them in particular, I recommit to fight until we see the day that they are protected from deportation.”

Other immigration advocates said they were pleasantly surprised by the scope of the changes. Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, called them “a massive breakthrough for the immigrant rights movement.”

Fierce critics of the president’s actions described them in equally sweeping terms.

“President Obama today told millions of people, ‘If you broke our laws to enter this country, we will not prosecute you, we will not deport you.'” said Jenny Beth Martin, the president of the Tea Party Patriots. “This is a Constitutional Republic, not a banana republic. It’s time we all started acting like it.”

Who could be affected?

The president’s plan is expected to affect up to five million of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population, currently 11.4 million according to the Migration Policy Institute. It would create a new program of deferrals for approximately 3.7 undocumented parents of American citizens or legal permanent residents who have been in the country for at least five years. Deferrals would include authorization to work and would be granted for three years at a time.

It would also expand a program created by the administration in 2012 called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which allows young people who were brought into the country as children to apply for deportation deferrals and work permits. The plan would extend eligibility to people who entered the United States as children before January 2010 (the cutoff is currently June 15, 2007). It would also increase the deferral period to three years from two years and eliminate the requirement that applicants be under 31 years old. About 1.2 million young immigrants are currently eligible, and the new plan would expand eligibility to approximately 300,000 more.

It would not provide a path to full legal status or benefits under the Affordable Care Act. Officials have said that the president’s plan will not provide specific protection for farm workers or parents of DACA-eligible immigrants.