It took a few hours for Republicans in Congress and Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, to blast President Biden’s use of his presidential say-so to benefit an estimated half a million undocumented people living in the U.S. for a decade or more.
The Hill: Republicans slam Biden’s immigration order as election ploy.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) predicted that courts will block Biden’s newest immigration policy, announced Tuesday, which offers legal status to some undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens currently in this country.
Johnson said the president granted “amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens” as part of “an election-year charade.” Biden argues that Congress has failed multiple times to legislatively overhaul immigration law and fortify border security, most recently when Trump and the Speaker scuttled a bipartisan proposal that GOP senators privately believed could have passed if not for Trump’s public objections.
The incumbent president, who is preparing to debate Trump next week, knows that voters’ assessments of his record on immigration put his reelection chances at risk.
“I’m not interested in playing politics with the border or immigration. I’m interested in fixing it,” Biden said during a White House event marking another executive-invented program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), created with a deportation waiver by former President Obama in 2012.
