'Come out of the shadows'

Congressional options include cutting off funding to the Department of Homeland Security, shutting down the government, blocking the confirmation of the president’s nominees and initiating impeachment proceedings against the president.

Among Democrats, meanwhile, Obama has wide, but not universal, support. 

Writing on Twitter, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered her appreciation to the president for moving forward “in the face of inaction” and said, “now let’s turn to permanent bipartisan reform.”

Some conservative Democrats — and even, at one point, former Obama White House senior adviser David Axelrod — have urged the president to give the new Congress at least a few months to act on immigration. But, aides said, the president had already waited long enough and took a dim view on the prospects of ever seeing movement from House Republicans. 

“If we were ever going to consider it, that went out the window,” a senior administration official said, when Boehner refused in a post-midterm election press conference to commit to holding a vote on the 2013 Senate immigration bill once the new Congress convenes. “I don’t think there will be a moment where Republicans will not say, ‘just wait, just wait one more day.’”

A smattering of congressional Republicans including potential 2016 presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have suggested trying to stop Obama in his tracks by refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security. But because Obama’s actions target the work of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within DHS that is funded by application fees, senior administration officials argue that his actions can’t be reined in by limits on congressional appropriations.

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) confirmed as much in a statement Thursday, saying it would be “impossible” for Congress to block funding for the president’s actions, but some in the GOP, including Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) argue they will be able to find a way.

“I’m sure that there will be all of the brainpower of the Republican Party in the House” trying to figure out a way to defund or otherwise obstruct Obama’s actions, the White House official said. “It’s all an irrelevant point because … the president will veto” any bill that reaches his desk.

Republicans are also weighing legal challenges, but administration officials are confident in their legal standing.

A senior administration official said lawyers concluded that actions like protection for parents of Dreamers were “not legally available” to the president, largely because it would be building one set of executive actions upon another. 

“We were influenced by the fact that Congress already recognized the relationship between child citizens and parents as a relationship Congress wants to protect,” the official said. “This was a sort of implementation of that congressional policy as opposed to the parents of Dreamers, which would be … slightly different …. We thought it was important to tie it to a congressional policy.”

Some Dreamer parents would be eligible for deferred action because they have other children who are U.S. citizens, the official added. In addition, most Dreamer parents who’ve been in the country for years are at little risk of deportation unless they have a criminal record.

“Assuming they don’t have criminal convictions, they would in all likelihood not be deported,” the official said. “They are unlikely to be a priority to be deported.”

That treatment arises from the basic theory of prosecutorial discretion, but administration lawyers decided that wasn’t enough to take the next step and offer Dreamer parents work permits and formal deferred deportation.

“What we decided was that we had to tie the creation of a particular subgroup to something more than just prosecutorial discretion,” the official said. ”We didn’t think it appropriate to apply just general prosecutorial discretion and exclude a class …. We just determined legally that we could not grant parents of Dreamers status essentially as a class.”

If they’ve been in the country for more than five years, the parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents will be able to apply to a new deferred action program , giving them a three-year work permit and protection from deportation in exchange for submitting biometric data, passing background checks and paying fees. Offering work authorization to these people, totaling as many as 4 million, will also help the administration crack down on companies that hire undocumented workers. 

The administration will also expand the Deferred Action for Children Arrivals program that was initiated by Obama and then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in June 2012, giving an estimated 270,000 people brought into the country as children before Jan. 1, 2010, the opportunity to be granted temporary protection from deportation. It had initially applied only to those born after 1981 who entered the country before June 15, 2007.

Obama will direct Johnson to prioritize its deployment of enforcement resources, focusing on “deporting felons, not families.” Johnson, in turn, will issue a memo detailing categories of people — including felons, gang members and potential terrorists, as well as people who crossed the border after Jan. 1, 2014 — who should bear the brunt of DHS’s enforcement activities.

The actions also aim to boost the administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration at the border by continuing the shift of resources that began this summer with the deployment of hundreds of Border Patrol agents and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees to the southern border. The Justice Department will also initiate immigration court reforms aimed at easing the backlog of pending cases.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report....