Border wall construction will be halted, the travel ban will be erased, and the 1776 Commission celebrating America’s founding will be disbanded all within hours after President-elect Joseph R. Biden is sworn in Wednesday.
Mr. Biden also said he will issue a series of executive orders, memos and other directives to recommit the U.S. to international climate obligations and to re-engage with the World Health Organization.
With several strokes of his pen, Mr. Biden promised to forge a new government focused heavily on constraining the coronavirus pandemic, forging a new focus on the dangers of climate change as an overriding concern for the entire federal bureaucracy, and demanding more attention be paid to racial equality.
That includes a review of more than 100 Trump-era rules and regulations.
“President-elect Biden will take action — not just to reverse the gravest damages of the Trump administration — but also to start moving our country forward,” the Biden transition team said. “These actions are bold, begin the work of following through on President-elect Biden’s promises to the American people, and, importantly, fall within the constitutional role for the president.”
As expansive as the directives were, they did not go as far as Mr. Biden had suggested during the campaign.
While he will announce new steps to erase some of the president’s strict immigration enforcement policies within the interior of the U.S., there is no indication he will undo the border blockade President Trump oversaw, with a network of policies to end catch-and-release and allow newly arrived illegal immigrants to be pushed back across the border.
Despite campaign promises to erase those, the Biden team has recently signaled it fears it would invite a new border crisis if it moved too quickly.
Mr. Biden will, however, halt border wall construction immediately by revoking the national emergency Mr. Trump declared and used to siphon money from Pentagon accounts toward wall construction.
He said he’ll also ask for a legal review to see if he can stop construction with the money Congress did specifically allocate for the purpose.
The travel ban, Mr. Trump’s own inauguration week initiative from 2017, will be wiped away — though Mr. Biden does say he’ll call for stricter vetting of travelers, which was the stated purpose of the current ban.
And he will put the DACA program on firmer legal footing, directing the Justice and Homeland Security departments to undo Mr. Trump’s attempts to roll back the deportation protections for illegal immigrant “Dreamers.”
On racial justice, Mr. Biden will announce a “whole-of-government initiative,” led by his domestic policy adviser, Susan Rice, to study where changes need to be made.
And he said he will cancel Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission, created last year to counter the movement that was tearing down statues of famous Americans.
The Biden team said that commission had “sought to erase America’s history of racial injustice.”
Sign up for Daily Newsletters
Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC.
Click
here for reprint permission.
