The Obama administration is readying executive orders that would benefit as many as 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, the new head of the Citizenship and Immigration Services said on Tuesday.
"We're going to be ready," Leon Rodríguez told a session on immigration law and policy at Georgetown University in Washington,
NBC News Latino reports. "Our agency will be shouldering the primary responsibility for executing whatever it is."
Rodríguez, who was sworn into the position in July, declined to elaborate further on the administration's plans, NBC News reports. The agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
His comments come amid a report that USCIS
has published a draft solicitation seeking a contractor to produce
4 million green cards a year for the next five years. The cards would allow immigrants to live and work in the United States.
The contract also would include 9 million in the early stages — and one estimate suggests that as many as 34 million cards will be produced in total.
The plan was developed "in case the president makes the move we think he will," an agency official told the
Daily Mail on Monday, even though USCIS' Document Management Division is not yet committing to buying the materials.
Immigration advocates have pressed the Obama administration to grant green cards to hundreds of thousands of illegals as part of President Barack Obama's broad unilateral actions he plans to announce on the issue after next month's elections.
He also could expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Obama created by executive order in 2012, and
could grant work permits to as many as 6 million illegals.
Republicans fear that Obama will move boldly with the orders in light of widespread disappointment among Hispanics over his inaction on the issue. The situation has been exasperated by the hundreds of thousands of illegals, primarily minors traveling alone, who have been apprehended at the South Texas border in recent months.
DHS said earlier this month that 479,377 illegals were arrested at the border in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, up from 414,397 last fiscal year. About 53 percent of those taken into custody by Border Patrol officers were caught in South Texas after crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico.
Obama had planned to announce his orders not long after Labor Day, but did an about-face last month and postponed it until after the election to protect vulnerable Democrats.
"Overall, the feeling is going to be they've been sucker-punched, because the timetable for the end of the summer had been really clear," Angela Kelley, an immigration policy expert at the Center for American Progress,
said last month after the postponement.
The group is close to the White House. Obama has since promised to move boldly on immigration by the end of the year.
"If you expect a guy to ask you to marry him, and then he keeps putting off the proposal, you're going to want a two-carat ring instead of a one-carat ring," Kelley said.
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