Obama: ‘Disservice’ for Univision To Say He Could Have Enacted Amnesty Earlier

RAMOS: "Mr. President, let me ask you about immigration. Seventeen governors filed a lawsuit against you trying to block your executive decision —"
OBAMA: "Yeah."
RAMOS: "— on immigration. They say, and I’ll quote, that you are “abdicating your responsibility to faithfully enforce the laws and that you are violating your Constitutional duty.” Are you concerned about being impeached?"
OBAMA: "No, because what we’ve done is not only lawful, based on the evaluations of the Office of Legal Counsel, but is of the same type of action that was taken by every Democratic and Republican president over the last 20, 30 years."
RAMOS: "I understand that. But many times you said that you didn’t have the legal authority to go ahead — you said, “I’m not the king. I’m not the emperor of the United States.”
OBAMA: "Yeah."
RAMOS: "Even on March 2011 on a Univision town hall meeting you told us, and I quote, “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.” That’s exactly what you did."
OBAMA: "No, no, no."
RAMOS: "Why did you change your mind?"
OBAMA: "No, because, Jorge, at the time, and I can run back the tape on your questions and some of the questions of that town hall, the notion was that we could just stop deportations period, and we can’t do that. What I’ve said very clearly, consistently is that we have to enforce our immigration laws, but that we have prosecutorial discretion given the limited resources, and we can’t deport 11 million people."
RAMOS: "So it’s not that you changed your mind on this?"
OBAMA: "What was —"
RAMOS: "Or that you were convinced otherwise?"
OBAMA: "— what was clear was that we could reprioritize how we deploy the limited resources we have to focus on the borders, to focus on criminals. We began that process as soon as I came into office. We amplified that approach through the DACA program that we instituted, and then we continued to see what else we could do. And Jay Johnson, I think, has done a terrific job in saying, here are our priorities. We’re not going to separate families. We’re going to focus on criminals. We’re going to focus on borders. We’re going to focus on new arrivals. Because one of the things that I think is important to understand is that although we are reprioritizing to make sure that we’re not in the business of separating families, we are still sending a message to people who have not yet come here, we’re going to be enforcing those immigration laws so that newcomers, people who just arrived, you are likely to be sent back. And we’re going to still be focused on making sure that, not just from Mexico but anywhere around the world, that we can actually enforce better the laws that we have. In the meantime, the people who have lived here, let’s make sure that they’re treated as the members of our community that they truly are."
RAMOS: "But if you — as you were saying, you always had the legal authority to stop deportations, then why did you deport two million people?"
OBAMA: "Jorge, we’re not going to —"
RAMOS: "For six years you did it."
OBAMA: "No.  Listen, Jorge —"
RAMOS: "You destroyed many families. They called you deporter-in-chief."
OBAMA: "You called me deporter-in-chief."
RAMOS: "It was Janet Murguia from La Raza."
OBAMA: "Yeah, but let me say this, Jorge —"
RAMOS: "Well, you could have stopped deportations."
OBAMA: "No, no, no."
RAMOS: "That’s the whole idea."
OBAMA: "That is not true. Listen, here’s the fact of the matter."
RAMOS: "You could have stopped them."
OBAMA: "Jorge, here’s the fact of the matter. As President of the United States I’m always responsible for problems that aren’t solved right away. I regret millions of people who didn’t get health insurance before I passed health insurance and before I implemented it. I regret the fact that there are kids who should’ve been going to college during my presidency, but because we didn’t get to them fast enough, they gave up on college. The question is, are we doing the right thing, and have we consistently tried to move this country in a better direction. And those, like you sometimes, Jorge, who suggests that there are simple quick answers to these problems, I think —"
RAMOS: "I never said that though."
OBAMA: "Yes, you do, because that’s how you present it, and I think when you — when you present it—"
RAMOS: "But you had the authority —"
OBAMA: "— when you present it in that way, it does a disservice, because it makes the assumption that the political process is one that can easily be moved around, depending on the will of one person and that’s now how things work."
RAMOS: "What I’m just saying —"
OBAMA: "We spent that entire time trying to get a comprehensive immigration reform bill done that would solve the problem for all the people. So right now, by the actions that I’ve taken, I still have five million people who do not have the ability to get registered and be confident that they’re not deported. In fact, what’s going to happen, sometime over the next two days, week, month is that that they’re going to be some folks who are still caught up in the system because we have to go and train ICE workers so that they are responding in a different way. And so the question I have for you, Jorge, because you’re going to have a big voice, is are you going to do a good job in, now that we’ve taken these actions, making sure that people understand what their opportunities are, how we can take advantage of it, and how we can build to make sure that going forward, not only as many people register as possible, if you’ve been here for five years, if you have a child who’s an American citizen or a legal permanent resident, that you are likely to end up signing up — so that we build up that capacity, and we lay the groundwork for passing comprehensive immigration reform. Because if we don’t do that, then it is true that there are going to be a whole bunch of folks who try to push back, and this is necessarily a temporary measure designed to help as many people as we can right now, but we’ve still got a big fight that we’re going to have to take in the future."
RAMOS: "I could continued on immigration, but —"