“But if anybody wants to know where my heart is or whether I want to have this fight, let me put those questions to rest right now. I am not going to give up this fight until it gets done,” Obama said. “I know the pain of families torn apart because we live with a system that’s broken.”

Obama laid blame squarely at the feet of congressional Republicans, who he said exploited a crisis of undocumented children at the southern border for political gain this summer and refuse to act with the president on immigration reform. However, he said, he ultimately needs Congress to pass an immigration law, because anything he does by executive action can be reversed by the next president.

“So the point I want to make is the progress we’ve made has been hard, sometimes it’s been slower than we want, but that progress has been steady and it has been real,” he said. “I want to make something clear: Fixing our broken immigration system is one more, big thing that we have to do and that we will do.”