On Immigration, Obama Goes It Alone

With immigration reform dead on Capitol Hill, President Obama says he will use his executive authority to make changes to the law himself. “I’m beginning a new effort to fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own,” Obama said in June. “If Congress will not do their job, at least we can do ours.”

How much can he do without congressional approval? Actually, quite a bit. The president has the power to grant many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. relief from deportation simply by instructing the Department of Homeland Security not to pursue their cases. In 2012, after Congress repeatedly declined to pass the Dream Act, which would have offered citizenship to immigrants whose parents brought them to the U.S. illegally as children, Obama said he would offer the immigrants “deferred action”—essentially a two-year stay on deportation proceedings. More than 550,000 people have qualified.