Immigration Reform News 2015 Latest: Obama Tells Undocumented Immigrants 'Be Ready With Your Papers'

President Obama has announced that people who are eligible for protection from deportation under the immigration programs he announced last November should be ready with their papers even as his administration is fighting a decision made by a Texas judge blocking his executive actions.

"We're gonna be in a position, I think, going through the legal process over the next several months," he told a town hall meeting hosted by cable channel MSNBC and the Spanish-language TV network Telemundo on Wednesday evening.

"In the meantime, what people who would qualify for executive action should be doing is gathering up your papers, making sure that you can show that you are a long-standing resident in the United States," the President said. "You should be making sure that you got the documents so that when we have cleared out all the legal problems and the application process is ready to go, then you're ready to go."

Last Feb. 16, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen issued a temporary court order against Obama's Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, and expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

The justice department on Monday asked the Texas court for an emergency stay of the preliminary injunction. It also asked the court to allow the government to implement the immigration executive actions outside of Texas.

"And that is why the documents that have been filed with the court today first seek a stay of his injunction so that we can move forward while the case is being appealed at the Fifth Circuit. So these two things are essentially operating on parallel tracks," Press Secretary Josh Earnest told White House reporters in a briefing.

He added, "So the other alternative here that has been put forward in the filing is consistent with the judge's finding that Texas -- the state of Texas claimed some harm that he said he was sympathetic to. Now, he did not find that other states necessarily would be harmed by this ruling. So that's why we suggest -- and this is consistent with the way that the law has been explained to me, which is that when an injunction is issued by a judge, that it should be narrowly tailored."

Obama expects to win in the U.S. Circuit Court regarding his programs but said they are ready to "take it up from there" if the appeal fails.