President Barack Obama expressed disappointment and frustration at the Supreme Court’s deadlock on immigration today, which effectively killed the administration's late 2014 efforts to protect 4.5 million immigrants from deportation.
"For more than two decades now our immigration system, everybody acknowledges, has been broken," Obama said. "And the fact that the Supreme Court wasn't able to issue a decision today doesn't just set the system back even further, it takes us further from the country that we aspire to be."
"This is in part the consequence of the Republican failure so far to give a fair hearing to Mr. Merrick Garland, my nominee to the Supreme Court," he noted. "Republicans in Congress are currently willfully preventing the Supreme Court from being fully staffed and functioning as our founders intended, and today's situation underscores the degree to which the court is not able to function the way it's supposed to. The court’s inability to reach a decision in this case is a very clear reminder of why it’s so important for the Supreme Court to have a full bench."
Watch the full statement above.
