White House Says President WILL Act on Immigration Before Year-End

President Barack Obama intends to take executive action on immigration before the end of the year, the White House said Monday, two days after the president announced that he would take no action on the matter before the November mid-term elections.

“The most important thing is that he does intend to act and he’ll do it by the end of the year,” White House domestic policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz said in an interview on MSNBC.

The president, she said, “wants to wait until the political season ends because it will be clearer to the American public, it will be easier to protect the action that he takes.”

Muñoz thus established a new timetable after Obama had backed off from his plan to fix the immigration system by means of executive action before the end of summer.

That retreat, the result of pressure by several Democrats afraid of losing their seats in the Senate if Obama should announce that he was taking strong measures, disillusioned many pro-immigrant groups that were calling on the president to stop the deportations.

Waiting until after the elections “will also ensure that we’re still on a course to try to get the Congress to act and actually fulfill their responsibility here and pass a bipartisan immigration reform like the Senate did over a year ago,” Muñoz told MSNBC.

Muñoz maintained that the situation on the southern border, where tens of thousands of unaccompanied, undocumented children, mostly from Central America, has been “exploited by the Republicans in the debate over immigration.

Published in Latino Daily News