Boehner: Obama 'cemented legacy of lawlessness' with immigration action – as it happened

We’re going to wrap up our live blog coverage for the evening. We’ll resume tomorrow with further reaction to the speech and with coverage of the president’s rally in Las Vegas. Here’s a summary of where things stand:

• President Barack Obama announced the extension of protections against deportation for approximately 5m undocumented migrants in the United States, many of whom would become eligible for work permits but who would not receive green cards or citizenship.
• The measure encompassed migrant parents of children who are citizens or legal residents, as well as an expanded pool of migrants who arrived in the United States as children.
• Obama billed the actions as a step toward “accountability.” He said hundreds of border agents had been added in the southwest and that the new orders would clear backlogs in immigration courts.
• The actions included a program to prioritize deportation of known criminals, individuals believed to pose a national security threat and others.
• While Hillary Clinton and other Democrats welcomed the actions, Republicans decried the moves as a gross usurpation of power on the part of the president.
  
• House speaker John Boehner said Obama was acting like an “emperor” and had “cemented his legacy of lawlessness.”
• Incoming senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said Congress would take action to block the president.
• Obama described the actions as proceeding from a precedent established by presidents going back to Eisenhower. An opinion by the White House Office of Legal Counsel was released backing the executive.

We should mention that tomorrow President Barack Obama is headed to Las Vegas for a rally at Del Sol high school, where he’s scheduled to give a speech and meet with students, including Astrid Silva, whose story he told tonight.

Guardian Washington correspondent Paul Lewis (@PaulLewis) explains why Del Sol:

Las Vegas is a symbolic place for the president to talk about immigration. Del Sol high school was also the location the White House selected for a major speech Obama gave in January 2013 urging comprehensive immigration reform.

Nevada is also the state with the largest share of undocumented residents – 7.6%,according to research by Pew, compared with 6.3% in both California and Texas. Undocumented migrants comprise 10.2% of Nevada’s labour population, the only state in the country where their share of the working population reaches double digits.

And Nevada is the home state of the outgoing Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who in recent days has been urging Obama to do everything within his power to improve the immigration system.

“I think when the president decides to do his executive order, he should go big,”Reid told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. “As big as he can.”

Guardian Washington bureau chief Dan Roberts (@RobertsDan) sends this video, taken at a speech watching party in Virginia that is the subject of this earlier post. Some undocumented migrants at the party left with the promise of new protections against deportation – while others did not:

Twitter has produced an animated chart showing the number of times the president’s speech was mentioned on Twitter.

It looks like he peaked about a third of the way through at 9,594 tweets a minute. Judging by the reaction our correspondent Rory Carroll and others witnessed, that would probably be the “pass a bill” line:

And to those Members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill

Here’s a perspective you don’t see every day, via official White House photographer Pete Souza. Those lights seem like they’d be kind of distracting:

From the comments:

George W. Bush deported more people than any previous president, but Obama has already broken his record even though he still has two years left in the White House. Immigrants should be extremely skeptical of any immigration "reform" decreed by this man.

jdanforth21 November 2014 2:15am

What do you think? Is Obama putting together a respectable record on immigration?

Univision has now reverted to the Latin Grammy Awards broadcast, which was postponed on account of the president’s speech. Apparently no major categories have yet been awarded.

Earlier we looked at the nominees for Record of the Year. Here now are the nominees for Album of the Year:

3.0, by Marc Anthony; Tangos, by Rubén Blades; MultiViral, by Calle 13; Elypse, by Camila; Canción Andaluza, by Paco de Lucía; Raíz, by Lila Downs, Niña Pastori and Soledad; Bailar En La Cueva, by Jorge Drexler; Fonseca Sinfónico by Fonseca; Somos, by Jarabe De Palo; and Más + Corazón Profundo, by Carlos Vives.

Who should win? Tell us in the comments!

Here’s the video for MultiViral by Calle 13, featuring a voiceover by none other than Julian Assange:

Hillary Clinton thanks the president for his executive actions on immigration.

Will the next Democratic presidential nominee, whoever she may be, manage to take 70% of the Hispanic and Latino vote, as Obama did in 2012? Just idly wondering.

Update: Here’s a full statement from Clinton (h/t @rayajalabi). Clinton says Congress is guilty of an “abdication of responsibility” but “only Congress can finish the job.”

The full text of Obama’s address this evening now lives on our web site here.

We’re going to bring you now a scene that Guardian Washington bureau chief Dan Roberts (@RobertsDan) has witnessed in the Andrade house in Arlington, Virginia, where family and friends gathered to watch the president’s speech.

Some family members present were undocumented migrants. Some are eligible to receive protection from deportation under the new actions announced tonight. Some are not.

View image in fullscreen

Betty Andrade is one of the lucky ones,” Dan writes:

As the mother of an US-born daughter, this 46 year-old nanny from Arlington, Virginia is eligible for relief under Obama’s plan. She knows she won’t have to relive the nightmare that hit her family last year when her husband Mario was pulled over for a drink-driving offence. He faced deportation back to Bolivia until a local campaign brought a temporary suspension to proceedings last year. But the president’s action brings more permanent security and crucially the chance for Betty and Mario, who trained as an architect but instead works illegally in construction, to gain work permits.

View image in fullscreen

“I feel a big relief,” says Betty. “I have always lived in fear. I used to rarely leave the house.” It also gives her a chance to rekindle her career as an accountant which she was forced to drop when she left Bolivia a decade ago. “We have dreams too,” she says. “I hope to do a conversion course to build on the volunteer bookkeeping I have been doing at our local church. But first I want to see my father in La Paz who have I haven’t seen in 10 years.”

Also in the room, but uncovered by tonight’s actions, was Ingrid Vaca.

“I am very happy for my friends but this is not fair,” says Ingrid Vaca, choking back tears after watching president Obama’s speech sitting next to neighbours whose lives who have been transformed by his words:

View image in fullscreen

A single mother, who works in Washington DC cleaning up to three houses a day alone, Vaca is one of the six million undocumented immigrants who won’t benefit from the executive action. Although her two Bolivian-born sons, Gustavo and Diego, had their lives transformed by Obama’s deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) scheme in 2012, their mother cannot benefit from similar protection from deportation because she is not the parent of a citizen or green card holder. She must continue to fear being pulled over by police, or go back to carrying her vacuum cleaner from house to house in a rucksack. “We are coming out from the shadows, but we don’t want to go back there,” said Vaca. We want to see the light.”

View image in fullscreen

The NYT Archives Twitter just happens to unearth a story about immigration reform from 1986, in which a president and a Congress got past their differences to pass landmark immigration reform. And lived happily ever after:

(h/t @kaylaepstein)

House speaker John Boehner expands on his earlier comments, in which he said Obama was acting like an “emperor” and a “king”.

“That is not how American democracy works,” Boehner says. “... By ignoring the will of the American people, President Obama has cemented his legacy of lawlessness and squandered what little credibility he had left”.

Rep. Steve King of Iowa is on CNN saying Obama has “torn Article 1 out of the constitution.” He’s a consistent critic of the White House on this and every other issue.

King says “only two or three of us are here” in Washington. Most everyone in Congress is home for the holiday.

Maybe because he was only one in town?

The Guardian’s social media editor Kayla Epstein (@kaylaepstein), to which this blog owes much, contributes another block. “Shonda Rhimes’ show Grey’s Anatomy might be going up against Obama’s speech (and in ABC’s eyes, winning) but she made a point to draw her followers to the president’s speech tonight,” Kayla writes:

Rhimes juggles multiple TV shows, so she was more than capable of live tweeting both Grey’s and Obama’s address at the same time.

Immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is 33, was left out of the round of DACA deferrals the president announced in 2012, which set an age limit of 31.

Tonight that age limit has been removed.

Astrid Silva, who Obama name-checked in the speech, was in attendance at the watch party at Las Vegas’ Hermandad Mexicana.

Here’s what the president said about Silva:

Tomorrow, I’ll travel to Las Vegas and meet with some of these students, including a young woman named Astrid Silva. Astrid was brought to America when she was four years old. Her only possessions were a cross, her doll, and the frilly dress she had on. When she started school, she didn’t speak any English. She caught up to the other kids by reading newspapers and watching PBS, and became a good student. Her father worked in landscaping. Her mother cleaned other people’s homes. They wouldn’t let Astrid apply to a technology magnet school for fear the paperwork would out her as an undocumented immigrant – so she applied behind their back and got in. Still, she mostly lived in the shadows – until her grandmother, who visited every year from Mexico, passed away, and she couldn’t travel to the funeral without risk of being found out and deported. It was around that time she decided to begin advocating for herself and others like her, and today, Astrid Silva is a college student working on her third degree.