WASHINGTON — President Obama’s former top political adviser yesterday said the White House made a “mistake” in leaking its plan to overhaul immigration laws.
“I’m sure if they could, they’d take that back,” David Axelrod said on MSNBC.
The Obama administration has been rapidly backpedaling away from the plan that was leaked over the weekend and drew immediate scorn from Republicans working on a bipartisan immigration-reform bill.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a top Republican working on the legislation, called Obama’s blueprint “dead on arrival in Congress.”
The plan would hand out visas to some of the roughly 11 million illegal aliens currently in the United States and put them on an eight-year path to citizenship.
It also would give employers four years to implement a system that will verify the immigration status of new workers.
Those details are not particularly controversial and even mirror proposals in Congress. However, it alarmed Republicans who are already suspicious that Obama wants to undermine their efforts in favor of more liberal reforms.
For instance, the draft plan lacked a key GOP demand to make enhanced border security a prerequisite to granting citizenship to illegals.
The White House is now calling it a “backup plan” in case the effort in Congress falls apart.