White House officials said on Friday that President Barack Obama will enact “very significant” executive actions on immigration at the end of summer.
Obama had previously announced that he had asked Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to give him recommendations on executive actions by the end of summer. Obama said he wanted to change as much of the country’s immigration laws as he could unilaterally.
At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Obama would enact the executive actions at the end of summer. On MSNBC’s Daily Rundown on Friday, White House domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz also said the timeline for the executive actions is still “by the end of summer.”
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has said that Obama promised the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that he would enact significant executive actions to stop the “deportation of our people,” and he estimated that as many as 5 million more illegal immigrants could get amnesty.
While referencing bills in the House and Senate that would preclude Obama from awarding more grants of temporary amnesty, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) declared on Friday that “how Congress chooses to act in the coming hours and days will determine whether the President succeeds in his plan to nullify the immigration laws of the United States.”