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Obama to Latinos: Press GOP on immigration

http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshge...migration.html

President Barack Obama is urging Latino voters to spend less time pressing him to ease the enforcement of immigration laws and more time pressing Republican lawmakers to get behind immigration reform legislation.

"The problem right now is not on the Democratic side....Everybody for some reason is letting the Republican Party off the hook on this issue, either by hoping that I can take a unilateral action or that somehow Democrats can change the way Congress works," Obama said during a roundtable Monday with journalists for American Spanish-language newspapers. "The fact is, is if Latinos all across the country said, 'Until the Republican Party is willing to cooperate on bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform, we can’t support the Republican Party,” I promise you that’s something that would get the attention of the Republican Party."

"But that’s not where the energy is. So much time has been spent trying to see if we can do something administrative," Obama complained, according to*an account*by Antonieta Cadiz in*La Opinion.*"It’s as if people just give up on the idea of ever changing Republicans’ minds and, as a consequence, they don’t feel any pressure to try to do the right thing when it comes to immigration reform. That’s where the pressure needs to be applied."

During the discussion with Latino reporters, he was also asked about reports that, despite an Obama administration policy to focus deportation efforts on violent criminals, thousands of illegal immigrants have been deported due to traffic violations and drug offenses.

"One of the things that*[Immigration and Customs Enforcement]*has done is to provide more direction to its agents out on the field, in terms of what are the priorities; how are we focusing on the most serious criminals," Obama said. "That does not mean that that has all embedded itself at the operational level. So there may be still situations where there are resources being used, in terms of deporting somebody who had a DUI or had some other minor traffic violation. But overall, the direction that's being moved in is to say, look, you should prioritize."

Obama also said the administration is trying to limit the impact of immigration enforcement on families, but some of that is inevitable in the absence of legislation that would legalize some of the millions of*illegal immigrants in the U.S.

"We’re going to keep on trying to improve our administrative functions so that we’re minimizing the separation of families, so that people who are basically decent hardworking people don't get caught up in the system when we’re not focusing, when we haven’t done as good of a job as we need to, focusing on criminals who definitely need to be deported," Obama said. "But in the absence of Congress acting, there’s going to continue to be this tension and these problems."*

Here are links to*other Spanish-language*accounts of the president's roundtable, which did not appear on his public schedule but was featured briefly in a video the White House released Friday: El Nuevo Herald, Washington Hispanic*and El Tiempo Latino.