The New York Times, 8/13/12
With their expectations soaring, young illegal immigrants across the country are preparing to apply for a temporary reprieve from deportation that the Obama administration is offering. For the first time, as many as 1.7 million of them could be allowed to work legally and live openly in this country without fear of being expelled.
The program is President Obama’s most ambitious immigrationinitiative by far, a sweeping exercise of executive authority after Congress failed to pass the Dream Act, legislation he supported that would have given legal status to the young immigrants. It is a major bid by Mr. Obama to win back Latino voters who were souring on him after his administration deported nearly 1.2 million immigrants, most of them Latinos, in the last three years.
The initiative to defer deportations, which Mr. Obama announced in June, officially starts on Wednesday, when a federal immigration agency will begin accepting requests.
