Multiple news outlets have reported that President Barack Obama will announce his unprecedented executive power grab on immigration on Thursday evening. He’ll then head to Las Vegas to campaign for his initiative. Unfortunately for the president, who, by the way, refused to do anything on immigration when he and his party controlled every lever of power in Washington, a very powerful individual within his own party said that his new executive order power grab is illegal.
The name of that individual? Barack Obama.
In a 2011 town hall with the Univision network, Obama was directly asked whether he could use an executive order to halt deportations.
Here’s the clip of the question and Obama’s answer (a full transcript of the exchange is below):
UNIVISION: Mr. President, my question will be as follows: With an executive order could you be able to stop deportations of the students? And if that’s so, that links to another question that we have received through Univision.com. We have received hundreds, thousands, all related to immigration.
Obama’s answer is unequivocal. Here’s what he said: “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.” And followed that up with: “There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, to ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
Obama’s upcoming executive order on immigration is almost certainly illegal. How do we know? Because Obama told us so in 2011.
