The Republican Party next year will be working to implement comprehensive immigration reform, and it is ready to accept that millions of undocumented immigrants in the country should not be deported, said House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions.
According
ABC News, his comments came even as the House voted to block President Barack
Obama's executive action on immigration which would grant temporary amnesty to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants.
"There is no one in responsible Republican leadership, elected officials, who has said we should deport 13 or 11 million people," Sessions, a congressman from Texas, said Thursday at a hearing on the president's executive actions on immigration, according to ABC. "That is not what this effort is about."
Sessions was fiercely opposed to the president's executive action, believing it to be an overreach of power.
However, he has emphasized that there is a need to enact reform that will take into account that undocumented immigrants are already integrated into American society.
"To have a well-understood agreement about what the law should be and how we should as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work," he said.
"And where not one person is, quote, 'thrown out or deported.' Where we do keep families together, but we do so under a rule of law of understanding."
Sessions said that he and Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would be working on a reform bill next year.
During the hearing Sessions called on Illinois Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez to work with him in a bipartisan effort.
"I'd ask you to come back to the table … and work on this, and I think you will find reasonableness will abound," he said, according to ABC.
Gutierrez, however, expressed doubt about the intentions of Republicans.
"Every time we have another vote to deport all 11 million immigrants and their families someone on the Republican side says, 'Oh, Luis, just wait. The day when Republicans seriously address immigration, visas, border security, and legal status is coming someday soon.' But it never seems to come," Gutierrez told ABC.
"It is always a higher priority to send a symbolic but meaningless message to the base that they are 'getting tough' rather than a serious message to the American people that they are getting serious about the immigration issue."
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