Atlanta Mayor to travel to NYC for Cities United for Immigration Action summit

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will travel to New York City next week as a member of the Cities United for Immigration Action coalition, a group of 25 mayors from across the country who support President Barack Obama's recent immigration executive orders. The coalition will meet in NYC on December 8 to discuss an implementation plan for the immigration changes. 

Aside from deportation protection for about 5 million of undocumented immigrants, Obama's orders also authorize work permits for immigrants who were brought into U.S. illegally as children and for parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents.  

”As mayors, we know first-hand that alleviating the challenges faced by our most marginalized residents strengthens our community as a whole, said Reed shortly after the coalition was announced in November. ”The City of Atlanta is committed to working with cities across the country to implement President Obama’s Administrative Relief order to provide millions of aspiring citizens the opportunity to rightfully and legally contribute to our nation’s economy and strengthen our cities’ cultural fabric, economic growth and global competitiveness.

At this point, the coalition includes mayors from majority of large U.S. cities, such as Baltimore, Dayton, Detroit, Hartford, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, Houston, Providence, and Washington D.C. For the full list of all cities click here.

"The president's action on immigration will strengthen our cities. It will keep families together, grow our economies and foster additional community trust in law enforcement and govement," the coalition said in a statement out Monday. "We are ready — and together we're rolling up our sleeves to tu this policy into a better reality for millions of hardworking people in the communities we serve."

The coalition will also use the December meeting to send a message to Congress that more permanent legislation is needed to address illegal immigration. Obama's actions expire in three years.

President's unilateral action on immigration angered a lot of congressional Republicans who have vowed to pass a bill that would stop the executive orders. However, the legislation will be only symbolic since Obama would never sign it into law, even if it did manage to get through the Senate.

Conservative voices across the country insist that the president's actions were unconstitutional, while some Democrats maintain that the president used his "prosecutorial discretion" which would allow him to make a decision to not prosecute certain violators of federal law. There's been much debate about this issue among the constitutional scholars, but Obama is definitely not the first president to use executive orders to tweak immigration laws. Both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush used executive privilege to defer deportation of undocumented immigrants, and smaller immigration relief orders were issued by Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy, Carter and Clinton.