The Hill News

President Obama hasn't broken his promise to seek immigration reform, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said Sunday in defense of the president.

Pelosi said that Republicans were to blame for the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and, barring that, the DREAM Act.

"Well I don't think he broke his promise, what he found is that it is almost impossible with the resistance in the Senate of the Republicans to pass it," Pelosi said Sunday in an interview on Univision. "But that doesn't mean we don't keep on trying and keep coming up with new ways to do it."

Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress had talked consistently over the past two years about their intention to push forward with immigration reform, as they'd promised to do on the campaign trail in 2008. But the protracted healthcare battle and stagnant economy deprived Congress of the time and political capital to tackle comprehensive reform.
Instead, in the lame-duck Congress, the House passed the DREAM Act, a more limited bill providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. But even this measure failed in the Senate, when most Republicans and some Democrats joined together to sustain a filibuster of the legislation. 

That failure was seen as a disappointment to Hispanic voters, who tend Democratic and had favored immigration reform. Elected Democrats are hoping the inaction won't hurt Obama and the party at the polls in the 2012 election.

Democrats have vowed to return again to the DREAM Act and immigration reform, but it's tough to see how such legislation would advance through the now-Republican House.

"Well, our commitment had always been to comprehensive immigration reform, in order for that to happen we needed to have bipartisan support to have that done," Pelosi said.

The former Speaker, who's now in charge of ! Democrats as House minority leader, also hammered Republicans ! for slas hing some border security funding as part of their budget cuts.

"Right now you see a contradiction on the part of the Republicans because securing our borders had always been part of comprehensive; securing our borders, unifying our families, path to legalization, well you know, protecting our workers, you know what the provisions are, but right now, just last week what they did was slashed the funding for security at the border," she said.