MIAMI: President Donald Trump said Friday he would soon issue an executive order on immigration that includes a path to citizenship for people brought to America illegally as children.

But the White House quickly seemed to walk back the idea, saying hours later this was just a possibility in talks with Congress on immigration reform.

"I'm going to do a big executive order. I have the power to do it as president and I'm going to make DACA a part of it," Trump said in an interview with Telemundo Noticias.

DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

It began in 2012 under then-president Barack Obama and has allowed some 700,000 people brought without papers to the United States as children to live, work and study without danger of being deported. Most of them are Latin American.

In 2017, Trump tried to cancel the program but the Supreme Court ruled last week that the administration had acted with weak legal justification and it let DACA stand for now.