President Barack Obama is set to announce Thursday night a sweeping plan to shield up to 5 million immigrants from deportation, revamp the government’s immigration enforcement efforts and overhaul the nation’s visa system, according to senior administration officials.
Obama is scheduled to outline his plans in an address from the White House, starting at 8 p.m. See it here at whitehouse.gov/live. White House officials gave reporters a preview during a conference call this afternoon.
A big part of the plan would provide work permits and three-year deportation deferrals for people who don’t have legal status but do have children who were born here or are legal permanent residents. To be eligible, they must have lived in the U.S. for more than five years, submit to background checks and pay taxes.
More than 4 million people would be eligible nationwide. It’s unknown how many of them are in Georgia. But in 2012 there were 116,000 immigrants living in Georgia without legal status but with U.S.-born children, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that evaluates migration policies.
Obama’s plan would also expand a program granting temporary deportation deferrals and work permits to immigrants who were illegally brought here as children. The move would eliminate the age cap in the program — now at 31 — and require them to have continually resided in the U.S. from January 2010 to the present, a change from June 2007.
The White House estimated 270,000 more people would qualify. It’s unknown how many people would be affected in Georgia. But since 2012, 18,150 Georgians have been approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Further, the Obama administration will sharpen the focus of its immigration enforcement on people with serious criminal convictions and those who have recently crossed the border illegally. Related to that, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has reworked a memo outlining immigration enforcement priorities for federal authorities.
Johnson is also preparing to replace a federal fingerprint-sharing program called Secure Communities with a system that matches the administration’s new enforcement priorities, according to the White House. The controversial program is operating in local jails in Georgia and across the country. Critics say it ensnares people who have not committed serious crimes and who have deep roots in the U.S. Supporters say it is a helpful tool in cracking down on illegal immigration.
Lastly, the Obama administration is preparing to revamp its legal immigration system. A new program would allow foreign entrepreneurs to come to the U.S. if they can demonstrate they are backed by investors and will create jobs here. There will also be new benefits for foreigners who are studying science and technology in the U.S. and who wish to stay here.
Bracing for a legal fight with critics, White House officials said Obama has consulted with the Justice and Homeland Security departments about his authority to act unilaterally in these areas.
“We are all confident that he is on extremely solid legal ground,” a senior administration official said, “consistent with Supreme Court precedent, consistent with things that Congress has said and consistent with the actions … presidents for over half a century have taken.”
Parts of Obama’s plan had already leaked out in the news media in recent days, drawing a mixture of praise and scorn in Georgia, a rapidly diversifying state where the battle over illegal immigration still rages inside and outside the state Capitol.
Gabriel Rodriguez Valladolid supports the president’s plan. He illegally entered the U.S. more than 20 years ago, got married, bought a house in Lawrenceville and started his own flooring business. He now has two U.S. citizen children, potentially making him eligible for a three-year reprieve from deportation under Obama’s plan.
“If they try to send me back to Mexico, I don’t know what I’m going to do there,” said Valladolid, who is facing deportation after a 2012 arrest for driving without a license. “I have nothing there. I have been living here for 20 years. My life is here.”
Steve Ramey, who lives nearby in Lilburn, adamantly opposes Obama’s plan. A co-chairman of the Gwinnett Tea Party, Ramey says anyone in the country illegally should be deported. One of his chief concerns: The strain immigrants without legal status are putting on Georgia’s public schools and other taxpayer-funded resources. He disagrees with the idea that Obama can act on his own in this area without Congress.
“He is defying the Constitution,” Ramey said. “He very much should wait until the new Congress comes in. That was the cry of the country — is to bring new people in to change things, not for him to go ahead and become a dictator to throw this on top of us.”
In a pre-emptive strike this week, Republican state Sen. Joshua McKoon of Columbus introduced legislation that would block some of the immigrants included in Obama’s plan — deferred action recipients — from obtaining Georgia driver’s licenses.
“It is outrageous that President Obama intends to take this unprecedented action in contradiction of his own clear and unambiguous statements about the limit of his own authority to act with regard to those in the United States illegally,” McKoon said in an email Thursday.
While they praised Obama’s plan, immigrant rights activists in Georgia called on him to expand it for more immigrants living without legal status in the U.S. They are planning to demonstrate Friday outside the Atlanta City Detention Center, which has held detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“What we are pushing for and hoping for is that President Obama uses the full extension of the law,” said Adelina Nicholls, executive director of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights. “If it is not like that, we will keep pushing.”
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