The sky above the White House was cold and gray. Joe Biden greeted the championship-winning Boston Celtics basketball team, joked about his Irish heritage and tossed a basketball into the crowd. But the US president couldn’t resist drawing a broader lesson.
“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to continue and keep faith, that is the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that is America.”
Such events remain part of the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with declining influence. Biden has fallen in recent months. First he gave up his bid for re-election, only to be sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice president, Kamala Harris.
But with his legacy under threat from Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to ease the gathering storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take action in his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and health care, safeguard civil liberties and Trump-proof at least some tenets of American democracy.
Related: US refugee groups are expanding their staff as Trump’s return sows uncertainty
Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has appointed officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and pledged to use the U.S. military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
The plans include mandatory detention, potentially keeping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those containing records of human rights abuses.
Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prisons Project, said ice detention facilities “characterized by poor conditions, widespread neglect and total disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” are key to Trump’s logistics plan.
According to the ACLU, dozens of people have died in Ice detention centers — largely owned or operated by private prison companies — over the past four years, and 95% were likely preventable if appropriate medical care had been provided. Yet the Biden administration has supported new Ice detention centers in states where they previously did not exist, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.
“We call on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to end all efforts to expand immigration detention and specifically close abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters at a Zoom call. week. “We don’t need to give the Trump administration a runway to deploy these massive detention and deportation machines.”
She warned: “We know that a second administration’s anti-immigrant policies will be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and that mass arrests and detention may become the norm to create and perpetuate these practices. feed. deportation operations unless we can do everything we can to stop them.”
Another crucial area for Biden to make a final stand is criminal justice. During his first term, Trump oversaw the executions of more people than the 10 previous presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, subsequently imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.
Trump has indicated he plans to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement official after she tried to delay the execution of a convicted murderer because it conflicted with a fundraising campaign for her re-election campaign .
Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Death Penalty Project, told reporters via Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who don’t even commit murder. He calls for the death penalty to be extended to his political opponents.
“But perhaps most dangerous in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of this is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason we should believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, thirteen executions carried out.”
The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressuring Biden to commute the sentences of all people on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing possible executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart the executions,” Stubbs added.
Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if prisoners under the Biden administration receive a death sentence. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.
Biden has also received 8,000 clemency requests from federal prisoners serving sentences without the death penalty that he can reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticized for his role in crafting a 1994 crime bill that led to the incarceration of thousands of black men and women for drug offenses.
This week, members of Congress, including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn, joined 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden, urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our justice system, and strengthen our nation on the path to ending mass crimes. confinement”.
At a news conference on Capitol Hill, they were joined by Maria Garza, 50, of Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because many of the people waiting for clemency are people who have been given de facto life sentences and who will die in prison if they don’t. [receive clemency]. A large proportion of their wrongful convictions were due to the 1994 crime law that he helped author.
Mitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is jailed on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to fulfill a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent crimes. cannabis crimes.
“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we ask him to do nothing but keep his promise.”
Wall, 63, of Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that drove families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and that he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I appeal to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very well go to jail.”
In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all warrantless purchases of Americans’ personal information by the federal government. It also asks Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential misuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to revoke unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and health care law and halt clean energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to distribute billions of dollars in grants for existing programs to minimize Trump’s ability to withdraw or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced more than $3.4 billion in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.
Wendy Schiller, a professor of political science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power to block the flow of money from the government and order revocations of programs funded by Congress.
“The extraordinary thing that Joe Biden can do is accelerate the flow of federal dollars into all programs,” Schiller said.
“All the money that should leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety and environmental protection – everything that hasn’t already been distributed needs to be distributed. It’s like literally emptying the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden must literally get as much money out the door into the hands of state, local and community organizations.”
Another priority for the White House is to obtain Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging the Trump administration’s policies. The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization, noted: “Federal judges have restricted hundreds of Trump policies during his first term and will likely play a major role in determining the trajectory of his second term.”
Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in an effort to stop the confirmations. Ultimately, a deal was struck that will put Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred during Trump’s first term — but four of Biden’s nominees to the appeals court will not be considered.
The outgoing president could also work with Democratic-led states and localities to strengthen protections and build “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, especially in areas like immigration. This collaboration could include strengthening sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states likely to come under pressure from the Trump administration.
Chris Scott, Harris’ former coalition director, said: “What will be interesting is how and what President Biden can work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protections. We already have places like Michigan or Illinois where governors are promising to make sure they get protection — even during Trump’s presidency.”
But as Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come to power with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time.
Bill Galston, a former adviser in Bill Clinton’s administration, said: “On January 20, Donald Trump will control all the tools of government and at that point it will be up to the courts – and the public – to rein him in.” . ”
