Story highlights Leon Fresco: Administration has an opportunity to unite Republican, Democrats around comprehensive immigration reform

Republicans can win on the enforcement front and Democrats can secure amnesty for illegal immigrants currently living in the US

Leon Fresco was the head of the US Department of Justice's Office of Immigration Litigation under President Barack Obama from 2014-2016 and one of the key Senate staff negotiators who drafted the immigration reform act of 2013. The opinions expressed are his own.

(CNN) After campaigning on a promise to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, White House officials now say that placing over 700,000 young people in immigration limbo is no longer a top priority. Instead, they will focus limited enforcement resources on criminals and national security threats.

This sensible change in focus, for as long as it might endure, provides an opportunity to contemplate what else may be possible regarding immigration policy during the next four years.

Leon Fresco

The new administration has made several promises on immigration that everyone is familiar with by now, including building a border wall and making Mexico pay for it; addressing existing legal impediments to removing criminal noncitizens; strengthening the process for screening and vetting foreign nationals for terrorism concerns; and ending abuses of foreign worker programs.

Conventional wisdom says that each of these issues will soon be subject to contentious debate in Congress, likely resulting in a legislative stalemate. Lack of progress on these fights might then lead the administration to take unilateral action on these issues ( some of which it has already started to take), which would then lead civil rights groups and corporations to file federal litigation challenging these actions. And this would result in a lot of effort being expended in return for very little progress.

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But it doesn't have to be this way.

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