Obama to visit Las Vegas — immigration orders imminent?

President Obama plans to be in Las Vegas on Friday as he and aides put together the details on new executive orders that would transform the immigration system, and are likely to be released this week.

An e-mail circulated among Obama supporters in the AFL-CIO said the president planned to make the announcement in a Thursday speech, followed by a rally in Las Vegas on Friday.

White House officials declined to comment on either the Las Vegas trip or the prospect of an immigration speech.

Las Vegas was the site of a major immigration speech by Obama in January 2013. Nevada is also the home of the Senate's top Democrat, Harry Reid.

The president and his aides have been working on orders that would grant legal status to millions of migrants currently in the country illegally.

"The President is nearing a final decision on this," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Republicans, who will assume control of the Senate early next year and have expanded their majority in the House, have attacked the prospective orders as an abuse of executive authority.

One GOP spokesman even referred to the president as "Emperor Obama."

Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said: "If 'Emperor Obama' ignores the American people and announces an amnesty plan that he himself has said over and over again exceeds his Constitutional authority, he will cement his legacy of lawlessness and ruin the chances for Congressional action on this issue -- and many others."

Obama has said he will issue executive orders because the Republican-run House has refused to take up a Senate-approved immigration plan for more than a year.

Nevada is the state where the highest share of the population is undocumented.

The state's 210,000 undocumented immigrants make up 10.2% of the population, the only state in the double-digits, according to the Pew Research Center. That ranks Nevada ahead of immigrant-heavy states like California (9.4%), Texas (8.9%), New Jersey (8.2%) and Florida (6.9%).

Obama has argued that Republicans in Congress have forced his hand by refusing to pass any kind of bill that fixes the nation's broken immigration system.

The Senate passed a bill in the summer of 2013 that was co-authored by a group of eight senators — four Republicans and four Democrats. The bill would have allowed 8 million undocumented immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship after a 13-year legalization process, provided $38 billion to double the size of the Border Patrol and add new technology along the border, and revamp the legal immigration to allow more high-tech and lower-skilled workers to enter the country.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, refused to let his chamber consider that bill, saying he preferred a slower, step-by-step approach to immigration reform that started with border security. Boehner and other House leaders introduced a set of immigration "principles" in January that they said would guide their process. But over the summer, as more than 60,000 Central American children flooded the southwest border, Boehner declared the issue dead.

Obama, frustrated by that inaction, said he would respond by implementing a unilateral action. He indicated that it would represent an expansion of a program he created in 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, that has granted deportation protections to more than 580,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.

But the president missed his self-imposed deadline to act by the end of the summer. Democratic senators facing tight races pleaded with the White House to hold off, arguing that an executive action would rile up Republican opposition and kill their electoral chances. The president did so, but Democrats ended up losing the Senate anyway.

Some of the GOP critics have discussed a lawsuit against what they called Obama's "executive amnesty" for people who are in the country, noting that in past years that the presidents himself has questioned his legal authority in these matters.

Part of Obama's process has been a legal review of his options, aides said.

"What we'll be confidently able to do is to explain to you what legal authority the President is using to take these actions," Earnest said.