President Barack Obama defended
his decision to use executive authority to enact changes to the U.S.
immigration system during an exclusive interview with "This Week,"
challenging Republican Speaker John Boehner to "pass a bill" if he was
not satisfied with the president's unilateral actions.
"Congress
has a responsibility to deal with these issues and there are some
things that I can't do on my own," the president told ABC News' chief
anchor George Stephanopoulos during an interview in Las Vegas on Friday.
"What I do have is the legal authority to try to make the system
better. Given the resource constraints that we have, we have to
prioritize."
During a primetime address on
Thursday from the White House, the president - expressing frustration
over a lack of Congressional action - announced he would be employing
executive action to circumvent Congress and offer temporary legal status
to approximately five million undocumented immigrants, among other
actions.
During the interview
with Stephanopoulos, the president pushed back against the argument
made by some of his detractors that he is taking action that he
previously said he did not have the authority to take.
"What
is absolutely true is that we couldn't solve the entire problem and
still can't solve the entire problem," Obama said. "But what we can do
is to prioritize felons, criminals, recent arrivals, folks who are
coming right at the border and acknowledge that if somebody's been here
for over five years - they may have an American child or a legal
permanent resident child - it doesn't make sense for us to prioritize
them when we know that we need more resources."
"If you look, every president -
Democrat and Republican - over decades has done the same thing as I
mentioned in my remarks," he added. "George H. W. Bush, about 40 percent
of the undocumented persons at the time were provided a similar kind of
relief as a consequence of executive action."
When asked about using executive action, the president said his view on the issue has not changed.
"If
you look - the history is that I have issued fewer executive actions
than most of my predecessors, by a longshot," Obama said. "The
difference is the response of Congress, and specifically the response of
some of the Republicans. But if you ask historians, take a look at the
track records of the modern presidency, I've actually been very
restrained, and I've been very restrained with respect to immigration. I
bent over backwards and will continue to do everything I can to get
Congress to work because that's my preference."