For months Washington has been trying to guess what President Obama’s promised executive action on immigration will entail. The suspense has now driven the White House press corps to pepper the press secretary with a barrage of questions over what color paper immigration services has been buying.
Breitbart News first reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had ordered supplies for 34 million green cards and work permits, allowing for four million cards a year and five million in a “surge scenario” “to support possible future immigration reform initiative requirements.” Currently USCIS processes only 3 million of these permits a year.
This has spurred the expectation that the White House will offer some sort of broad amnesty to undocumented workers currently in the U.S.
At the White House press briefing Wednesday, CBS reporter Major Garrett plied Press Secretary Josh Earnest with questions about this order, but received only flippant responses from Earnest.
“Those sorts of decisions are not micro-managed by the administration,” Earnest said.
“Don’t be absurd with us,” Garrett snapped. “That’s not just an ordinary colored piece of paper. It is central to what the president has promised in public to do.”
“This is crazy!” Earnest exclaimed, laughing.
“You would not want to be in a position…to have the legal work that DHS has gone through and the Department of Justice has gone through to propound an executive order that the president signs and someone looks up and says ‘Oh Christ we don’t have any paper for this,” Garrett pointed out. “That would be irresponsible, that would be malpractice at a procedural level.”
Earnest continued to laugh at the inquiries, and maintained that the White House had nothing to do with “their procurement of green paper.”
“I am really not trying to be clever,” he said. “I’m really trying to just be like as really straight-forward as I can, which is: the White House does not make specific direction to agencies about which supplies they should order.”
The White House has remained silent about the content of Obama’s action, which they have promised since the summer. Initially Obama claimed he would take action by the end of the summer, but he later changed that deadline to the end of the year—in other words, until after the midterm elections. Democrats had been demanding that he delay action, fearing a backlash against their party in the elections should his action prove unpopular.
A USCIS spokesperson told the Associated Press that they were prepared for a spike in immigration applications “for any number of any reasons.”
Whether USCIS knows something the press does not, or whether they are just guessing like everyone else, the fact that green paper is all anyone has to go on says something about “the most transparent administration in history.”
Watch Major Garrett and Earnest battle it out below, via the Daily Caller:
