The White House is in full-out sales pitch mode for President Barack Obama’s announcement Thursday that he will shield about 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, circumventing Congress to provide the most sweeping changes to immigration policy in decades.

Obama is meeting with key Democratic lawmakers. Aides are speaking with advocates and lining up surrogates who will help promote the plan. A Facebook video with the president released Wednesday afternoon drew more than 1 million viewers and was shared more than 23,000 times, reaching the feeds of more than 5.5 million people.


The White House even managed to get Univision to delay its live telecast of the Latin Grammy Awards, with its audience of about 10 million viewers, for Obama’s speech at 8 p.m. Eastern time — although it won’t be aired by the four major broadcast networks.

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All this for an announcement that’s going to set off a political firestorm. The White House has said the executive actions are needed because Congress won’t act, while GOP leaders say the president is going beyond his authority and poisoning the well for any future immigration talks.

The executive actions will cover 4 million undocumented immigrants who would qualify for deferred deportations by using criteria such as longevity in the United States and family ties, according to sources briefed on the discussions. An additional 1 million would receive protection through other means, two sources said.

There will be no special protections for farm workers or parents of Dreamers because there were concerns about those pieces clearing the legal bars, sources said. But, administration officials said in their calls, many people who fall into those categories would qualify if they have children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Dreamers, by contrast, are undocumented immigrants who were brought as minors to this country by their parents.

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A controversial enforcement program known as Secure Communities will be scrapped and replaced with a new program, the sources said. The executive actions also are expected to make modest changes to allow technology companies to keep high-skilled workers.

“Everybody agrees our immigration system is broken,” Obama said in the Facebook post. “Unfortunately, Washington has allowed the problem to fester for too long. What I am going to be laying out are the things I can do with my lawful authority as president to make the system work better, even as I continue to work with Congress.”

Senior administration officials began calling immigration reform proponents and lawmakers Wednesday to fill them in on plans for the rollout and the details of the proposal. Obama was set to host 18 Democratic lawmakers for dinner at the White House on Wednesday evening to brief them on his immigration plans. Invitees include Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid of Nevada, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New York; lawmakers involved in immigration policy such as New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez and California Rep. Xavier Becerra ; Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Rubén Hinojosa of Texas and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chairwoman Judy Chu of California, according to multiple congressional aides.

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During the dinner, Obama outlined the general contours of the plan he is set to announce, according to a lawmaker who attended and another source familiar with the gathering. His remarks were in keeping with reports of what the administration has been planning: between four to five million immigrants here illegally would be affected, and parents of Dreamers wouldn’t be included. There would be some changes in dealing with the border and programs for the high-tech industry.

As for the agricultural industry, Obama said he could not find a way legally to sanction a farm-worker program along the lines of what was written in the Senate immigration bill, Chu said in a phone interview after the dinner. But the president added that the expanded deferred action program will benefit a good portion of such undocumented immigrants.

Obama “was very serious about his commitment to immigration reform,” Chu said after the dinner, where attendees ate fennel salad and a beef main course. “He said that there were those that said he should wait until after the budget bill … but he just felt that he owed it to all of those who have been waiting all this time to do something.”

White House officials who attended the dinner included chief of staff Denis McDonough, domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz, and David Simas, the director of the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach.

Top aides say the president will go big, but the White House has not yet detailed its legal justifications for the forthcoming actions.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Wednesday that the reforms the president puts forward will be “comprehensive.” Speaking at an event hosted by the New Democrat Network, a left-leaning think tank, Johnson said the president has “fairly wide latitude” to act under the law.

The outreach doesn’t include Republicans, who have been preparing to respond in large part by accusing Obama of overreach and by pointing to his repeated statements last year that he did not have the authority to act on certain pieces of immigration reform.

“If ‘Emperor Obama’ ignores the American people and announces an amnesty plan that he, himself, has said over and over again exceeds his constitutional authority, he will cement his legacy of lawlessness and ruin the chances for congressional action on this issue — and many others,” Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel said Wednesday.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote in a POLITICO op-ed on Wednesday that if Obama takes action, he “will not be acting as a president, he will be acting as a monarch” and that the Senate should respond by refusing to confirm all his nominees except those for critical national security positions. Congress should also limit the administration’s ability to enforce the president’s actions by funding agencies individually and restricting any spending related to immigration laws, he said.

“If the president is unwilling to accepting funding for, say, the Department of Homeland Security without his being able to unilaterally defy the law, he alone will be responsible for the consequences,” Cruz wrote

The president’s turn to executive action comes after pushing House Republicans for more than a year to take up the immigration bill passed by the Senate in June 2013. Obama had long held out hope that Boehner would bring the bill to the floor, but when the speaker told the president that he would not be holding a vote on it in 2014, Obama vowed in a Rose Garden speech to act on his own.

M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Obama initially planned to announce executive actions on immigration at the end of the summer, but in September, the White House said he would put off a final decision until after Election Day, amid Democrats’ concerns that it would create another complication on the campaign trail ahead of the midterm elections.

With a nine-day trip to Asia and Australia behind him and Thanksgiving on the horizon, Obama has spent this week working out the final details of his announcement. The trip to Las Vegas brings him full circle from January 2013, when he launched a push pressuring Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, repeating the mantra, “now is the time.”

He spoke then at Del Sol High School, the same venue the White House has chosen for Friday’s announcement.

Initial Democratic responses were relatively positive.

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Wednesday that Obama’s action would put him in the company of “great” presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman, who both used their executive authorities to expand rights for African-Americans. “I think that President Obama ought to put himself alongside these … great presidents and use [an] executive order to do something big on immigration,” he said on MSNBC.

The legality of the president’s actions, Clyburn added, is up to the courts and not Congress. “Let’s let the courts decide whether it’s constitutional. That’s not for Congress to decide, that’s why we have courts to make that decision,” he said.

Josh Gerstein and Kendall Breitman contributed to this report.