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President Obama says the window for passing immigration reform legislation is rapidly closing as midterm elections approach. Will he go it alone if the House doesn't pick up the ball?

President Obama said Tuesday he is still holding out hope that Congress will find time to pass some form of immigration reform before politicians become completely consumed with the upcoming midterm elections.

Staff writer

Noelle Swan writes for the national news desk at the Monitor. She previously worked on the Business and Family pages as a writer and editor.

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"We've got this narrow window. The closer we get to the midterm elections, the harder it is to get things done around here," Mr. Obama said at a White House meeting of top law enforcement officials, Reuters reported. "We've got maybe a window ... of two, three months to get the ball rolling in the House of Representatives.

The president reiterated that he would be willing to accept a compromise as long as the bill that reaches his desk affords some path to citizenship.

The Senate passed immigration legislation 11 months ago with bipartisan support, but the House has yet to introduce a corresponding bill.

House Speaker John Boehner has chided fellow Republicans for not taking action on the issue.

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Immigration reform: Congress can still act before midterms, Obama says

President Obama speaks to law enforcement leaders from across the country on immigration reforms at the White House in Washington May 13, 2014. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Despite the evidence that House Republicans have no intention of taking up immigration reform in the near future, President Obama predicted that there's still a "narrow window" to pass some kind of legislation before the midterm elections.

The president's remarks came during brief remarks to more than 40 law enforcement leaders ranging from the National Sheriffs Association to the Fraternal Order of Police. The president praised the work that the officials do, but also noted that they are diverted from pursuing "gang bangers and...violent criminals" by spending so much time enforcing immigration laws that are flawed.

"Our broken immigration system makes it harder for our law enforcement agencies to do their job," the president said. "Our system is not fair to workers, is not fair to businesses and is not fair to law enforcement agencies."

He blamed a "handful of House Republicans" for blocking the Senate's immigration bill, which passed in June 2013, from coming to the floor. Though Mr. Obama said he is not "hell bent" on signing that legislation in its original form, he argued that it still presents a good framework and concludes necessary components like creating a conditional pathway to citizenship for those living in the country illegally.

The president said that public opinion favors his view of reform, but that just two to three months remain in which a bill could feasibly be considered.

"The closer we get to midterm elections the harder it will be to get things done," he said.

Although House Republicans released a set of principles for an immigration overhaul at the beginning of the year including legal status, but not citizenship, for those in the country illegally, the leadership was quick to backtrack when it appeared there was insufficient support for any comprehensive proposal. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has repeatedly blamed Mr. Obama for the delay, saying members do not trust he will enforce any laws they pass.

Still, Boehner professes to hold out hope that immigration reform might happen.

"I need to work with my colleagues and bring them along. And while I feel strongly about the need to deal with immigration reform, I have got to bring these members along," he said in an event at the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce Monday.

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Obama: "Narrow window" for Congress to pass immigration reform

(Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jean Hill, government liaison for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, is joined by other area business leaders as she talks during a rally calling for Congress to enact immigration reform. The group of leaders held a press conference at the State Capitol in Salt Lake City, one of six press conferences happening at the same time in six Western states Tuesday, May 13, 2014.

Many immigration-reform rallies have crowds of immigrants pleading for a path to citizenship. A rally Tuesday at the State Capitol presented a different view, featuring business executives, some big-name politicians, top clergy and law-enforcement officers.

But their message was the same: Congress should pass reform this summer, and it should include "creating a road to lawful status and citizenship" for undocumented immigrants.

"For too long, Congress has kicked the immigration can down the road," said Lane Beattie, president of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. "This is the time to act on immigration reform, not next year or after the next election."

Similar rallies Tuesday in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico urged House members from Rocky Mountain states to act on Senate-passed reform, and use solutions from the region to guide debate including the "Utah Compact" for civil dialogue, keeping families together and recognizing immigrants economic role.

"If conservatives would just reflect on those principles within the Utah Compact, they would be much more comfortable at handling comprehensive immigration reform," said Paul Mero, president of the conservative Sutherland Institute.

In Washington, President Barack Obama met with law-enforcement officials including former Salt Lake County Sheriff Aaron Kennard, now executive director of the National Sheriffs Association and Utah Department of Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires to talk pressing for congressional action on immigration reform.

Speakers at the Utah rally spoke about how reform is needed to increase legal immigration quotas that local high-tech companies need to bring in talent; calm tension that worries police; and fulfill a moral obligation to help families.

"We have a serious talent shortage here in the state" among high-tech companies," said Richard Nelson, President & CEO of the Utah Technology Council. "Literally thousands of open positions are going unfilled in the range of $40,000 to $140,000 per job."

He said that make it difficult for local companies to expand and create more jobs. Todd Bingham, president of the Utah Manufacturers Association, made a similar argument.

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Utah leaders urge federal immigration reform

Only the federal government can grant amnesty. But cities and counties can effectively opt to stop deportationsand increasingly, they are.

Jim Young/Reuters

States and cities are taking immigration reform into their own hands. With prospects for comprehensive legislation bleak in Washington, local governments have begun making decisions about who gets deported and who doesnt by refusing to participate in a system that has come to rely on them. After a few years of slow but steady progress, local reform is now taking off.

In the last three weeks, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver, and counties in Oregon, Colorado, Washington, and California have announced they will no longer help federal immigration police carry out deportations. These decisions, spurred by recent federal-court rulings, add to the growing chorus of state and local governments that have recently backed away from the deportation system: dozens of major cities and counties, two states, and counting.

Think Nationally, Act Locally: How Americans Are Working for Change

This movement is a big deal, because local jails have become the frontline for immigration enforcement during the Obama Administration. As the wait for administrative action from the White House continues, local resistance is already stopping thousands of deportations every month. Even if Congress is able to pass a comprehensive reform bill, the current wave of local policy changes and judicial decisions will have altered the structure of immigration enforcement by making it much harder for federal officials to rely on local police and sheriffs. National reform is still crucial. But once you understand the depths of federal-local collaborationand the recent pattern of resistanceits clear that the backbone of the immigration-enforcement dragnet is starting to weaken. Pushback is coming from places with some of the largest undocumented populations, and yet many outside the immigration policy world have overlooked it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leans heavily on local law enforcement to help identify and arrest deportable immigrants. Every day, ICE sends local jails across the country thousands of detainers, which are requests to hold people after theyve bailed out, been acquitted, or served their sentences, to give ICE time to pick them up. The agency also uses local jails to identify potential candidates for deportation. Through a program called Secure Communities, jails send fingerprints to ICE after every arrest nationwide, which led the agency to identify more than 1.5 million people between 2009 and 2013. Less well known but perhaps more consequential is the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), in which ICE agents interrogate foreign-born inmates in local jails. Between 2007 and 2011, CAP facilitated 2.5 million such interrogations. If either Secure Communities or CAP leads ICE to think a person could be deported, the agency issues a detainer to facilitate their arrest.

These federal-local programs have been crucial to the sharp rise in deportations in recent years. Federal agents cant police every corner of the country, but local law enforcement can. (One supportive scholar calls local police a massive force multiplier.) The impact has been powerful. The Obama Administration is on pace to deport more immigrants than any before it. (Recent statistical quibbling should not obscure that fact. While removal orders through immigration courts are down, thats largely because of new strategies to deport people without a hearing before an immigration judge.) More than 300,000 of the 2 million people deported under Obama were identified through Secure Communities, a number that doesnt even account for CAP.

The governments that are now refusing detainer requests have identified a number of problems with participating in immigration enforcement. For one, deportations in recent years have expanded in arbitrary ways. ICE has used local governments to help deport record numbers of immigrants with no criminal records or only extremely minor offenses, despite professing an intention to devote its limited resources to violent criminals and other public-safety threats. Many of these deportees have U.S. citizen children and would have a path to legal status under a bill the President supports. Relying on jails might seem to zero in on criminals, but in practice, that has largely not been the result. In racing to meet its apparent 400,000-per-year target, ICE has swept up any and all who come into contact with the criminal-justice system, including victims, witnesses, and others who should not have been arrested in the first place. There is also evidence that connecting immigration consequences to normal law enforcement encourages racial profiling.

Another consequence of local collaboration has been to effectively remove police protection from many immigrant communities: Crime victims dont call the police when local officers carry the banner of immigration enforcement. Anyone who is fingerprinted can end up on ICEs radar through Secure Communities, and every foreign-born person who enters a jail can be interrogated through CAP. Domestic-violence victims, who are often erroneously arrested alongside the perpetrator, have been particularly vulnerable. As many law-enforcement officials have now pointed out, the public-safety consequences can be dire.

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How Local Governments Are Hacking Immigration Reform

President Obama signaled Tuesday that he is open to compromise on immigration reform, saying he is not "hell-bent" on getting everything from the Senate immigration bill into the version that finally hits his desk.

But Obama said the measure that finally passes must hew to some "core principles," including some sort of "pathway to citizenship" for immigrants in the country illegally, a point of contention in the debate.

In remarks to law enforcement officers visiting the White House, Obama argued that comprehensive immigration reform would make their work easier because it would undermine criminal enterprises and help police focus on their jobs.

The remarks come as the Obama administration presses forward with a full review of its deportation practices, with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson charged with making sure they're "humane."

Even as the agency tries to clean up the current practices, though, senior advisors to the president say they aren't planning to make major changes through the use of his administrative powers. Rather, they say, the president plans to keep pressing House Republicans to either pass the Senate bill or to come up with something acceptable in its stead.

On Monday, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told business leaders in Texas that he is working with his colleagues to "bring them along" on immigration reform. The same day, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said immigration reform is crucial for the Republican Party and its prospects of winning the White House.

If they don't pass something, Chamber President Tom Donohue said, "they shouldn't bother to run a candidate in 2016."

In his remarks on Tuesday, Obama said reform advocates have public opinion on their side, and suggested that more and more Republican opinion leaders are coming to the conclusion that some kind of reform is necessary.

"The closer we get to the midterm elections, the harder it is to get things done around here," Obama said. "So we've got maybe a window of two, three months to get the ball rolling in the House of Representatives."

Police, business leaders and evangelical Christians will be crucial to passing a reform measure, Obama said.

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Obama not 'hell-bent' on Senate immigration bill