Biden plans executive orders to reverse Trump plans on immigration, climate, pandemic

According to a Saturday report by The Washington Post, the Biden camp plans to immediately repeal the ban on immigration targeting many Muslim-majority countries.

Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela, North Korea, Nigeria and Myanmar are among the US president’s 2017 ban list. Sudan was also on the list but later was delisted due to its participation in Western-backed Saudi war on Yemen.

The Trump travel ban triggered criticism as it amounted to unlawful religious discrimination.

Biden also wants to reinstate the program permitting “Dreamers” brought to the US illegally as children to stay in the country, the report said.

In September 2017, the Trump administration announced it would end the program that had provided protection from deportation and the right to work legally to nearly 800,000 young people since it was authorized by his predecessor Barack Obama in 2012.

Biden further intends to rejoin the Paris climate accord the US exited formally last week. In November 2019, the United States presented its withdrawal letter to the United Nations, saying it would be officially out of the Paris accord on November 4, 2020, one day after the US election.

Trump has labeled climate change a “hoax,” defying widening international support for the Paris agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He has argued that the concept of global warming has been “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

The former vice president also wants to reverse Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization set to take effect in July 2021.

In April, Trump halted funding to the WHO amid the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the international body of mishandling the deadly flu-like pathogen.

“Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” Trump said in a news briefing in Washington on April 14.

The report by the Post comes the same day Biden’s win was declared, however, his advisers have spent months working on how to pursue his agenda and compiled a book of his campaign commitments as a guide for their early administration moves.

Meanwhile, people close to Biden have acknowledged that he may need to lean on executive actions and that it would not be easy to push major legislation through Congress especially if Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

“The policy team, the transition policy teams, are focusing now very much on executive power,” an anonymous Biden ally told the Washington Post.

“I expect that to be freely used in a Biden administration at this point, if the Senate becomes a roadblock.”