Obama crafts legal rationale for immigration steps

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is crafting a blame-it-on-Congress legal justification to back up President Barack Obama's impending executive actions on immigration.

Obama's self-imposed, end-of-summer deadline to act on immigration is rapidly approaching. Administration officials say the goal had been to announce Obama's decision around Labor Day. But a host of national security crises that interrupted Obama's August vacation have pushed back the announcement, likely until mid-September.

Obama faces an onslaught of opposition from conservatives to one option under consideration: broadening a 2012 deferred prosecution program to include millions more people.

If Obama chooses that option, the administration plans to argue that Congress failed to provide enough resources to fully enforce U.S. laws, therefore ceding wide latitude to the White House to prioritize which individuals should be deported.