President Barack Obama signals to his aides and staff that he will return to the White House because he forgot something before his departure on Marine One helicopter, Friday, Nov., 21, 2014, in Washington. Obama is traveling to Las Vegas to promote an executive order that would offer temporary legal status to millions of immigrants who are in the country illegally and set off a new fight with Republicans in Congress. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama, the onetime community organizer, is returning Tuesday to the city where he first forged his ties to the Latino community to pitch his new executive actions on immigration.
Obama is trying to seize the advantage in the heated dispute over the contentious issue while Congress is on a Thanksgiving recess and Republicans scramble to coalesce behind a unified opposition strategy.
The president was scheduled to speak to Chicago community leaders, part of an ongoing effort to defend and promote his decision to bypass Congress and direct sweeping executive actions that could spare millions of immigrants illegally in the United States from being deported.
Obama will speak at a center in the city's predominantly Polish-American far northwest side, underscoring how his immigration measures would affect more than Latino immigrants. Chicago has the largest population of Poles in the United States.
Under a series of measures Obama announced last week, nearly 5 million immigrants will be eligible to avoid deportation and sign up for work permits. The number who could benefit represents about 45 percent of the total number of immigrants who either entered the country illegally or have overstayed their visas.
Republicans have vowed to rein Obama in, but have not fallen behind any specific plan.
Chicago is Obama's hometown — he worked in the city as a community organizer in the 1980s — and its metropolitan area has the fifth largest Latino population in the country.
Obama is expected to highlight what the White House says are the economic advantages of his executive decision and to counter Republican criticism that his measures exceed his authority. The Chicago visit is his second trip out of Washington to draw attention to his actions since he announced them Thursday. Last Friday, the president spoke in Las Vegas, another city with a large Latino population.
Obama has a mixed history in Chicago over the question of immigration. He conceded in his 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope" that his experiences there led him to reflect on the meaning of citizenship and "my sometimes conflicted feelings about all the changes that are taking place."
In 2006, when he was a senator from Illinois, he denied a request from about 30 Mexican nationals living in Chicago for a special piece of legislation that would protect them from deportation. The decision infuriated immigration activists in the city.
But Obama has also backed an overhaul of immigration law, and while he initially angered advocacy groups by delaying his executive actions until after this month's midterm elections, last week's measures have generally been greeted with enthusiasm from immigration advocates and Latino groups.
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