Setting up what promises to be a bitter fight with Republican opponents, President Barack Obama presented the most ambitious immigration reform plan decades during a nationally televised address on Thursday.

Obama cast aside Republican objections with his new policy lessening the threat of deportation for nearly 5 million undocumented immigrants. His decision to circumvent Congress and put policy in place by executive order set up an inevitable political clash with Republicans, who called the plan "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.

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Speaking from the White House, Obama said his only choice was to employ executive action to make much-needed changes to immigration law after the Republican-controlled Congress failed to act over a period of six years.

The move represented the president's most aggressive use of executive action even in a year during which he increasingly had to use those powers due to congressional gridlock.

"Our immigration system is broken and everybody knows it," Obama said he committed himself to fixing the broken system when he took office. Despite a compromise measure supported by Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate, the Republican House of Representatives had failed even to allow a vote despite its certainty of passage in the body, he said.

"We need more than politics as usual when it comes to immigration," Obama said. "We need reasoned, thoughtful, compassionate debate that focuses on our hopes, not our fears."

As outlined by the president, the plan would allow around 4.4 million undocumented immigrants who were parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents to be exempt from deportation while staying in the country temporarily. Only those in the U.S. since 2009 could participate in the program. They could apply legally for jobs, but not vote or qualify for the president's health care law.

New immigration rules also cleared the way for 270,000 more people to join a 2012 expansion of rules allowing people who were brought illegally as children by their parents to remain in the country.

Republican immediately jumped on the plan, saying Obama had overstepped his constitutional authority, Not surprising since House Speaker John Boehner, before Obama even spoke, said Obama was acting like the king or emperor he previously said he didn't want to be.

Democrats and Hispanic groups applauded the new immigration rules with California Gov. Jerry Brown saying on Twitter, "Tonight, in the face of Washington gridlock, the president stepped up for hard-working families across America."

Some legal analysts said a Republican lawsuit, as threatened by some party leaders, might be tough to win because presidents have wide-ranging executive authority concerning immigration.

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