Defiant in the face of a Supreme Court rebuke, President Obama warned Thursday that immigration reform is at stake in the November election and called on Americans to reject Donald Trump’s “fantasy” approach to the contentious issue.

Obama also admitted explicitly for the first time that his nominee to the high court, Judge Merrick Garland, would not be confirmed before the country has a new president-elect.

The president, speaking after a 4-4 high court ruling that blocked his sweeping plan to protect some 5 million immigrants from deportation, never spoke Trump’s name but alluded to the presumptive GOP nominee’s proposals to force Mexico to pay for a border wall and to freeze Muslim immigration to the U.S.

“That’s the real amnesty — pretending we can deport 11 million people or build a wall without spending tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” Obama said in the White House briefing room. “It’s not going to work, and it’s not good for this country. It’s a fantasy that offers nothing to help the middle class, and it demeans our tradition of being both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.”

And, the president underlined, “we don’t have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now or pray like we do, or have a different last name, because being an American is about something more than that.

“What makes us American is our shared commitment to an ideal that all of us are created equal, all of us have a chance to make of our lives what we will,” he continued.

Ninety-nine days after picking Garland to succeed the late Antonin Scalia, Obama acknowledged that the nomination would not advance until after the election.

“We are going to have to abide by that ruling until an election, and a confirmation of a ninth justice of the Supreme Court, so they can break this tie,” the president said.

And he seemed to suggest that the Republican strategy to deny Garland confirmation hearings may have envisioned outcomes like the deadlocked immigration ruling all along.

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“If you keep on blocking judges from getting on the bench, then courts can’t issue decisions. And what that means is, then, you are going to have the status quo frozen and we are not able to make progress on some very important issues,” he said.

“Now, that may have been their strategy from the start. But it’s not a sustainable strategy, and it is certainly a strategy that will be broken by this election — unless their basic theory is, is that we will never confirm judges again,” Obama said.