Yesterday, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about ideas for actions to improve our immigration system. The President reaffirmed that he is focused on fixing as much of our broken immigration system as he can within the confines of the law, and has asked Secretary Johnson and the Attorney General to conduct a thorough review that produces recommendations before the end of the summer. The President made clear that regardless of the steps he takes through administrative action, nothing replaces the need for Congress to pass commonsense immigration reform, and he will continue to make the case for swift action by Congress on a comprehensive bill.
The President also emphasized the urgency for Congress to approve supplemental funding to aid the government response to the influx of migrants at the Rio Grande Valley. The supplemental request represents a balanced approach to increasing our law enforcement capacity, ensuring we have resources to offer migrants due process as required by law, and also helping our Central American partners deal with some of the challenges they face back home.
The situation in the Rio Grande Valley underscores how our immigration system is broken, and the President believes that Republicans in Congress need to stop blocking comprehensive immigration reform to enable the system to be fixed now. In the absence of Republican action, the President has mounted a significant effort to deal with this urgent humanitarian situation in an efficient and timely way and confronting the root of the problem with top-level diplomatic efforts in Central America.
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