Editor's note: Newt Gingrich is author of "Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- President Barack Obama's speech Thursday night was technically a fine speech. It sounded good. It was rhetorically impressive. Its problem -- or perhaps to the President its virtue -- is that very little of it was true.

President Obama described what sounded like a reasonable plan to prioritize the deportation of felons, criminals and gang members over the deportation of other people in the United States illegally. "We'll prioritize," he said, "just like law enforcement does every day." The whole proposal was entirely within his authority, he argued, because it amounted to a kind of prosecutorial discretion: "All we're saying is we're not going to deport you."

But the policy the White House actually announced, as opposed to the policy the President described in his speech, was not merely a directive to emphasize enforcement against those who have committed crimes, or even a simple pause on deportations for millions of Americans here illegally. The policy the White House actually announced, in a memo from its Office of Legislative Affairs hours before the President's speech, was a 17-point plan including several new programs without congressional approval, budget appropriation or spending authorization, and many of which the President either didn't mention or which bore only a faint resemblance to what he described in his speech.

The President, according to the White House, has directed the Department of Homeland Security to "create" a "new deferred action program" that will give millions of people here illegally "work authorizations" for at least three years. It establishes extensive new criteria by which people can register to be exempt from deportation. DHS will likely have to employ thousands of bureaucrats to process those who "come forward and register, submit biometric data, pass background checks, pay fees, and show that their child was born before the date of this announcement." Applicants supposedly will also have to prove they have been in the United States for at least five years and will have to pay taxes.

Well, a brand new program that hands out three-year work authorizations and processes more paperwork than many state Departments of Motor Vehicles is not merely saying, as the President put it in his speech, that "we're not going to deport you," and it is certainly not simple "prioritization" or "prosecutorial discretion," as many administration officials have been calling it before and after the announcement.

It is new law, created by the executive without constitutional authority.

The President said in his speech that the new program will allow people here illegally to "come out of the shadows and get right with the law." Meanwhile administration officials explained on the record that he wasn't really legalizing anyone, since he couldn't technically do that.

The President also said in his speech that his actions would offer relief only to people who met certain criteria he described, including having child dependents in the United States. But the actual policy memo makes clear that "DHS will direct all of its enforcement resources at pursuing" people who are "national security threats, serious criminals, and recent border crossers."

In other words, there will be one group, estimated at 4 million or so, who are eligible for the new work authorization program. But at the same time, there will be no resources directed at enforcing immigration law against the other 7 million people here illegally as long as they do not fall into a few narrow categories, according to the President's Office of Legislative Affairs. And indeed, a "senior administration official" told Roll Call that the administration "will order immigration agents to prioritize deportations of criminals and recent arrivals — and let people who are not on that priority list go free." This is not at all the program the President described in his speech.

The President assured us his actions "are not only lawful, they're the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every single Democratic president for the past half century." Except the primary examples his administration cites are cases of presidents implementing congressionally approved amnesties, narrowly expanding them to include cases Congress didn't anticipate, with no objection from Congress. The President has no such congressional sanction, and his actions are an order of magnitude larger.


(see CNN for full text)

When I hear people from the left saying the same thing, then I'll trust Newt