SALT LAKE CITY — Members of Utah's congressional delegation reacted Wednesday to President Barack Obama’s plan to use executive action to change immigration policy.

Sen. Orrin Hatch said the president rightly recognized as recently as last year that "there is a path to get this done and that is through Congress."

"President Obama’s promised executive action and his refusal to work with Congress isn’t just legally and constitutionally problematic, it will also ultimately hurt the millions of legal and illegal immigrants who need real, lasting immigration reform," the Republican senator said in a statement.

Obama is scheduled to announce Thursday that he is providing temporary protections for up to 5 million undocumented immigrants, a senior Democrat familiar with the plans told the Washington Post. His orders would make up to 4 million undocumented immigrants eligible for temporary protective status and provide relief to another 1 million through other means.

There are an estimated 11 million people unauthorized to be in the United States, including about 125,000 in Utah.

An estimated 48,000 unauthorized immigrants in the state who are parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents could apply for temporary relief from deportation under the program Obama is anticipated to unveil, according to the Migration Policy Intstitute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

Hatch said the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill, and the House is poised to consider several immigration reform efforts. "But rather than work with Congress, the president has instead chosen to foster mistrust, polarization and gridlock," he said.

Related:

Obama to announce immigration action Thursday

In a broad test of his executive powers, President Barack Obama declared Wednesday he will sidestep Congress and order his own federal action on immigration — in measures that could spare from deportation as many as 5 million people illegally in the U.S. and set up one of the most pitched partisan confrontations of his presidency.

Rep. Chris Stewart joined 34 other Republican House members in a letter urging the president to abandon his plan.

"Like most Utahns, I recognize that our immigration system is broken and must be reformed, but the president's threat of executive orders and a call for amnesty isn’t the answer," Stewart said in a statement. "It goes against the will of the people and of Congress. If the president wants to reform immigration it must happen through the proper channels within Congress."

The letter notes that Obama said in his post-election news conference earlier this month that he planned to reach out to Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress to see what they want to do on immigration.

"And if they want to get a bill done — whether it's during the lame duck (session) or next year — I'm eager to see what they have to offer," the letter quotes Obama as saying.

The letter asks the president to let Congress debate and vote on a bill that he would sign. Republicans won control of the Senate in the November election and already have a majority in the House.

Immigration court records

Also Wednesday, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University released its latest analysis of immigration court records.

The Department of Homeland Security filed 222,956 applications for removal orders in the federal budget year that ended Sept. 30, up 12.2 percent from the previous year.

Despite an overall increase, there was a large drop in the number of applications that were based on allegations of criminal activity, the university reported.

Only 20,217 out of the total filings involved a criminal offense. That is down from 27,671 people out of the 198,723 total filings in 2013 that were based on allegations of criminal activity.

The court's backlog of pending cases reached 421,972 cases at the end of October 2014, a rise of 22.6 percent since September 2013, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Related topics