With mike well have two senators working together to get our country headed back in the right direction. Join me in supporting mike rounds for the United States senate. Im mike rounds and i approved this message. Im larry press ler and i approved this message. Im on the farm i grew up on and have with my brother. The democrats are attacking me for Social Security votes from 30 years ago. The republicans are attacking me for background checks on guns when they know i supported the bob dole plan. On the keystone the press ler pipeline plan is dedicated to north dakota oil, not canadian tarsands oil. Thats south dakota jobs and independence. Its the time to do Something Different on election day youre going to vote for the candidate you really support. Not the one other people are saying is supposed to win. Youre going to make up your own mind and vote on principle, not on Blind Loyalty to politicians who arent loyal to you. My name is gordon uh howie and i i approved this message. With your support i will be your next senator from south dakota. South dakota has an open seat because of the retirement of democrat tim johnson. Polls list the race as leans republican. Watch the most recent debate online at cspan. Org. President obama said hell issue an executive order on immigration after the november elections. Instead of waiting for congress to act on pending legislation. A panel looked at what the executive action could entail and how the elections could impact the president s actions. This discussion was part of a Conference Held by Georgetown University law school. It is an hour and a half. Okay. Thank you very much and welcome now to our second session of the conference, which is on executive action, policy and political implications for the future. My name is doris meisner. Im a senior fellow at the immigration policy institute. Im very pleased to welcome an outstanding panel here today. We have ana navaro. Shes a contributor to cnn. Cnn in espanol. Abc news, lots of other places you will see ana popping up. And i owe her particular thanks because shes had a rugged schedule getting here. Thank you very much. I woke up at 5 00 in the morning. If im incoherent, lets blame it on that. In advance. And then norm orenstein who is a resident scholar and simon rosenberg, founder and president of the new Democratic Network and my colleague mark rosen bloom whos the Deputy Director of the Immigration Program at npi. Executive action is a very, very brood topic but the context for the topic today is the very specific issue of what the Current Administration and president might be doing to take further executive action building on other actions that have already been taken in this administration. The immediate back drop really began in the spring when the president called upon dhs to review its deportation policies in order to determine whether more could be done to create a more humane set of policies consistent with the responsibility, of course, to enforce the law. This came in the face of record high levels of deportations for which he has drawn very, very strong criticism from particularly latino constituency groups including protest marches and other forms of Political Action and thats, of course, a core constituency for the president and the Democratic Party so its been an important political issue. That dhs review soon became pretty much side lined by a real effort to give political space to republicans in the house in the hopes that there would be one more chance to move on some form of immigration legislation in the spring and in the summer. Reportedly the president was frustrated and angry and made very clear, very quick ly after that that he was prepared to take executive action in the face of congressional inaction. And at that time, announced that there would be an announcement with all suggestions that it would be a broad kind of relief that would be provided by by the end of the summer. Well, the end of the summer came, and in the meanwhile there had been a lot going on in immigration focused on Child Migrants and issues at the southwest border and issues of people fleeing violence in Central America and joining family members in the United States. The president had lost a pretty big appropriations effort with the congress by that time and so the announcement then was made in september that the end of summer would be postponed until the end of the year. Well, of course, were now in that period between almost an election and nearly the end of the year with a lot of speculation and continued discussion about the withers, the whethers, wuthers, whether an executive action. So thats what were going to be talking about in this panel, the ins and outs of that, substantive as well as political. The format will be questions. Im going to put questions to opening questions to each of our panelists and ask each of them to make some opening remarks and then hopefully that will put enough issues on the table for us to begin to do some cross talk among us as well as any followups that occur and then during the final section of the panel, the last half hour or so, we will open the floor to q a from the floor. So id like to begin with mark and ask him to give us 5 rundown of the possible actions that the president might take, what seemed to be the actions that are under consideration. Outline for us, if you would, the different measures and approaches that seem possible and the numbers and the groups of people who might be affected by them. Thanks, doris, im going to go up to the podium. Maybe ill well, whatever, im here. So thank you, doris, and thanks to the organizers for including me. So im going to jump right in because im going to try to cover a lot of ground. I think that mic was on, wasnt it . No. Okay, thank you. Okay. So im going to start by talking just for a moment about what we mean by executive action in general and in the context of immigration policy and then ill briefly review how president obama and his predecessors have already shaped immigration policy through their executive authority and then ill as doris asked, ill describe some potential scenarios for what executive action might look like and Say Something about how many people would be affected and what some of the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches might be. So im a political scientist and when i used to teach my intro to American Government classes, there was no section on the syllabus called executive action. So what do we mean by this term . The answer is that in a separate power system . Which Congress Writes the laws and the president implements the laws, a lot of policy gets made in the second half of that sentence. And on a general level, executive action describes any policy made by the executive branch outside the legislative process. So that includes formal president ial powers like executive orders and regulatory rule making and it also includes Implementation Authority that gets delegated to the president through the statutory process, through laws, and then also less formal policy tools like signing statements, statements of policy, Agency Guidelines so this term, you know, encompasses a lot of different things. One point i want to emphasize is that these types of executive actions, everything i just rattled off, have been very important on immigration policy forever because the underlying policy debates in immigration are so complex and they encompass both complex domestic issues and Foreign Policy issues that president s have weighed in on and also because congress has always struggled to pass immigration laws. So its often been left to president s to do things on their own. So im going to not go through the details of all these examples, but i do want to mention five different tools that president s have used over time to set immigration numbers and to shape enforcement policy sort of inside the legislative process. And the first one ill mention is humanitarian parole. Parole is explicitly authorized by the ina, so its a delegate powder and it refers to the executive branchs authority to permit the temporary admission of someone outside the normal visa process for urgent humanitarian reasons. So people can be paroled individually, and thats also a long history, as you can see on this slide, of president s paroling whole groups of people into the United States on humanitarian and Foreign Policy grounds. Humanitarian parole permits is admission of people outside the visa process. President s have also grant red leaf from removal to unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Prior to 1990, the main tool for granting this type of relief on a categorical basis was extended voluntary departure. Lots of cases where e. V. D. Has been granted. Extended voluntary departure was not explicitly authorized by the ina and some members of congress objected to how it was used, seeing it as being sort of politicized. So in 1990, congress eliminated evd and established a new procedure called temporary protective status, tps, and tps lays out more clearlydefined conditions under which dhs can, acting alone, suspend deportations for groups of unauthorized immigrants categorically in response to an armed conflict, a natural disaster, other extraordinary and temporary conditions. So examples of tps, despite the fact that congress got rid of evd and created tps, president s have continued to grant categorical relief outside of tps under a procedure called deferred enforced departure. Ded looks a lot like extended voluntary departure with the difference being that, you know, after congress got rid of ebd, president s have continued to assume the authority to grant deferred enforced departure generally by issuing executive orders to create ded categories. And then the fifth thing ill mention is that every modern president has also assumed a more General Authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion on a case by cases by us outside of all these programs. Prosecutorial discretion refers to the power of a Law Enforcement agency or Law Enforcement official, rather, to decide whether or not to commence or proceed with official action against a possible law violator. In the immigration context, one form of discretion is to defer deportation or defer action to suspend deportation proceedings against an individual. So when we talk about deferred action, thats a forof prosecutorial discretion that the executive branch takes. One reason Law Enforcement agencies exercise discretion generally and in the immigration context is to ensure theyre using reforces efficiently to pursue their Top Priorities but it bears emphasis that i. N. S. And dhs has also emphasized discretion by identifying groups of people who may qualify for deferred action, as in the examples on this slide. And all of these cases, the primary justification for deferred action was humanitarian. Either instead of or in addition to sort of practical arguments about the efficient use of resources. So the Obama Administration has taken has already taken a series of actions that follow on this history. The first three bullets on this slide are uncontroversial and im not gong to talk about them unless people are want to get into it in q a. The last three have been somewhat controversial. In 2010 and 2011 then ice director john morton issued a series of mem randa describing when ice officers should exercise discretion and how ice should prioritize its enforcement resources. Then the august of 2011 a dhs doj working group was formed to review cases on the docket and administratively close some cases as a form of discretion because they werent cases that are not consistent with the administrations enforcement priorities. And then in june, 2012, secretary napolitano, then secretary napolitano announced a policy to defer enforcement in cases involving certain unauthorized immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children and who met certain education and background checks departments. The taca, deferred action for childhood arrivals. So i want to say a little bit more about how these programs could be expanded consistent with the president s pledge to consider additional executive actions. So first with respect top dhss enforcement priorities, one point i want to make generally is that the morton memos shouldnt have been particularly controversial because they didnt represent a major shift in how dhs already did immigration enforcement. Npi published a report last week showing that 93 of removals under the Bush Administration were consistent with the obama enforcement priorities. So this was not a radical change. Overall, 95 of all removals since 2003 have fallen within dhs current formal enforcement priorities, and this includes 99 of removals in fy2013. So one way to interpret those findings is that the Obama Administration has been successful at implementing its priorities, and i think that thats an accurate interpretation. But we can also look at those data and it suggests that the morton memos, the current enforcement priorities, define priorities pretty broadly in a way that lots of unauthorized immigrants fall into the priority categories. Wand that in mind, one strategy for executive action that the administration could pursue would be to change dhs enforcement priorities to make them more narrowly defined so that fewer immigrants fall within the priorities. For example, current priorities include any one ever convicted of any crime. So the administration could instead define its Public Safety priority or its criminal alien priority to prioritize people who have been convicted of Violent Crimes or people who have been convicted of felonies or recently been convicted of crimes or felonies. Or it could deprioritize people whose only criminal offense was for an immigration crime. The administration could also narrow its definition of its other two enforcement priorities, recent Border Crossers, which is currently defined as anybody who entered many the last three years, or people to who disregard deportation orders, which currently includes somebody who was deported 20 years ago. So in this report that we issued last week, we go through a lot of detail about different scenarios and im not going to go through all the numbers. I just want to tell you that the bottom line is that when you look at interior enforcement, playing with the enforcement priorities in the ways that i just described would not have a huge impact on the number of people removed. I would say 30,000 is an optimistic you know, thats a very farreaching change to the enforcement priorities. The likely impact on current removals from the interior would be much smaller. And the reason is, is that most people who would potentially benefit from such changes, unauthorized immigrants who are settled in the United States and who arent committing crimes, already have a low probability of being apprehended and deported. Thats not who the system is focusing on. Theres a popular image of ice agents rounding people up and detaining them or finding people who have been pulled over for a traffic crime and putting them in deportation proceedings. The data suggests that these are pretty unusual cases, particularly in the last few years. By far, the largest category of removals today is people apprehended at the border. Some of these Border Crossers are returning immigrants. Many Border Crossers have limited ties to the United States. Reducing border removals have reducing the proportion of people apprehended at the boarder who are formally removed would have the largest impact on reducing removal numbers, but that would be a fundamental challenge to how cbp does business. So a second possible approach would be to expand the existing daca program, the childhood arrivals program, to cover a larger number of unauthorized youth. Its currently limited to how old people were when they entered, how old they were in 2012 and their education requirements. In a report we issued last month, a different report, we found that about 1. 2 Million People potentially meet the daca criteria, are potentially eligible for the current version of the program and about half of them have successfully applied and been enrolled in the program. Those numbers would go up to about 1. 9 million potentially eligible applicants if the administration decided to sort of play with the timing requirements, the age requirements, the age at arrival requirements and they would go up to about 3. 1 million if the administration were also to relax the education requirement. You get a big bump for that. An advantage to focusing on the daca population is that theres a basic fairness argument about offering enforcement relief to people who arrived in the United States as children. And daca youth also have strong ties to the United States from having been raised here and in many cases they lack ties to the countries that they originally immigrated from. But a limitation to this approach, as indicated here, is that its difficult to substantially grow the daca numbers without relaxing the education requirement. The current version of daca has been promoted in part based on the idea that daca youth have overcome their status to become higheducation achievers, and thats a description that applies to some unauthorized youth but definitely not to all of them so its a challenge with using daca as the major tool for a large executive action. A third