President Obama is giving interviews to two Spanish-language television stations to make the case for immigration reform legislation.
In interview set to air Tuesday on Univision and Telemundo, Obama will make the case for moving legislation on immigration through a GOP House and Senate.
{mosads}Obama last month announced executive actions that will provide legal status and work permits for up to 5 million illegal immigrants, infuriating many Republicans. Obama took the action because he said the House had failed to move on the issue.
The two interviews are slated for one day after Republican lawmakers are expected to unveil a spending package that would fund the government through the remainder of the fiscal year — with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for implementing the president’s immigration plans.
The House GOP’s spending package would only fund that agency for a few months, in the hope of creating leverage to force the president to roll back his executive actions next year.
During a roundtable discussion with business leaders last week, Obama acknowledged that “certainly there will be pressure initially within Republican caucuses to try to reverse what I’ve done.”
And despite his repeated calls for frustrated Republicans to respond by passing a bill, Obama also said he suspected “that temperatures need to cool a little bit in the wake of my executive action.”
The interviews with the Spanish-language networks are the latest in a series of specialty media interviews conducted by the president in recent days.
On Monday, BET was slated to air an interview taped with the president last week on race relations in the wake of a pair of grand jury decisions in which white police officers were not indicted after killing unarmed black men. Obama also taped an interview with Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert, slated to air late Monday night.