His executive order halting deportations thinks otherwise.

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — President Barack Obama on Friday bashed Republicans for blocking immigration reform and took a victory lap here before a national conference of Hispanic politicians.

One week after announcing he would stop deporting many young undocumented immigrants, Obama said that change is just the beginning of his work on immigration and called on Congress to find a permanent, bipartisan solution to fix the broken immigration system.

“We should have passed the DREAM Act a long time ago; it was written by members of both parties,” Obama said. When the bill — which creates a path to citizenship for some young documented illegal immigrants who served in the military or went to college — came up for a vote a year-and-a-half ago, Republican members of Congress blocked it.

“The bill hadn’t changed. The need hadn’t changed,” Obama said. “The only thing that had changed was politics. And I refused to keep looking young people in the eye, deserving young people in the eye and tell them, ‘Tough luck, the politics is too hard.’”