Is Obama secretly planning an immigrant amnesty by ordering 34 million work permits and green cards?

Is the White House quietly preparing to issue an executive order after the November midterm elections that would provide amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants – including work permits and green cards for up to 34 million immigrants?

According to rumors first reported by Breitbart.com, President Obama will release an immigration bombshell in the form of an executive order later this year.

The conservative site first discovered a draft of an online solicitation by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services that seeks vendors that can produce up to 34 million blank work permits and green cards over the next five years.

President Obama appears “to be getting his ducks in a row” before legalizing illegal residents by executive order, Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a politically conservative immigration group that seeks to stop most immigration, told Watchdog.org.

Specifically, the draft solicitation seeks vendors that can produce a minimum of 4 million cards per year for five years, and 9 million in the early stages – larger than the official estimates of 12 million illegal immigrants in the US.

The draft solicitation “seems to indicate that the president is contemplating an enormous executive action that is even more expansive than the plan that Congress rejected in the 'Gang of Eight' bill,” Jessica Vaughan, an immigration expert at the Center for Immigration Studies and former State Department official, told Breitbart.com.

How likely is it that the rumors are true, and Obama is indeed planning executive action on immigration?

President Obama will go ahead with a “very significant” executive action on immigration after the summer, Senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer told reporters at a Monitor breakfast in July. He added that the action would be so significant it may well trigger impeachment proceedings against the President.

Indeed, Obama has vowed to make a move on immigration reform this year. He had planned to reach a decision by summer's end, but postponed action until after the November midterms.

What's more, even the draft solicitation document hints at major changes in immigration reform, mandating potential vendors must be capable of handling a “surge” scenario of 9 million identity cards in one year “to support possible future immigration reform initiative requirements.”

A USCIS official also told the UK's Daily Mail that the draft was published "in case the president makes the move we think he will." 

However, it's also possible the rumor mill is in overdrive.

For starters, it's common for federal agencies to plan for contingencies.

“Solicitations of this nature are frequent practice for all USCIS contracts and allow the Agency to be prepared for fluctuations in the number of immigration applications received, which can arise for any number of reasons,” Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for USCIS said in a statement.

And another USCIS official told the Daily Mail that the solicitation was drafted in case immigration reform legislation passes in Congress, not in anticipation of action from the White House.

But Breitbart.com finds such a scenario unlikely.

"A year ago, such a plan might have been attributed to a forthcoming immigration bill," reports the conservative site. "Now, following the summer's border crisis, the chances of such a new law are extremely low, giving additional credence to the possibility the move is in preparation for an executive amnesty by Obama."

If conjecture about an executive order on amnesty is true, it would represent a change of astonishing breadth.

According to data on its website, the USCIS processed 862,000 Employment Authorization Documentation (EAD) cards, or work permits, overall between January and June of this year. But according to the draft solicitation, "the guaranteed minimum for each ordering period is 4,000,000 cards," and "the estimated maximum for the entire contract is 34,000,000 cards." (The draft solicitation seeks vendors to produce both work permits and Permanent Residency Cards (PRCs), or green cards.)

As Dane, of the anti-immigration  Federation for American Immigration Reform, told Watchdog.org, “There aren’t enough federal employees from here to Pluto to do adequate background checks on 34 million."