NBC NEWS — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that it is “not an option” for his administration to take executive action to freeze the deportations of parents of children brought to the United States illegally, a move that immigrant rights advocates have pushed him to take if Congress fails to pass immigration reform legislation this year.
In an interview with Telemundo, Obama said the legal underpinning of a 2012 executive action to defer deportations for those brought to the United States as children was “absolutely right” but that expanding exemptions to a larger population of undocumented immigrants would go too far.
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“What we can do is then carve out the DREAM Act, saying that young people who have basically grown up here are Americans that we should welcome,” Obama said. “We’re not going to have them operate under a cloud, under a shadow. But if we start broadening that, then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally. So that’s not an option.”
Read more at NBC News.
