From immigration to the environment, progressive organizers have offered their holiday wish list for Obama in his final weeks before Donald Trump takes over

Dear Obama: progressives share what they want done before president leaves

Barack Obama has less than one month left in the White House, and progressive activists are hoping he makes the most of it.

While Donald Trump and his cabinet nominees have threatened to undo many of Obama’s signature achievements, advocates across fields have argued that there are a number of bold, irreversible steps the White House could take to protect vulnerable Americans from the Republican president-elect.

The outgoing administration’s surprise decision this month to deny a permit to the Dakota Access oil pipeline has offered a glimmer of hope to liberals, who are preparing for the worst. From immigration to the environment, progressive organizers have offered their holiday wishlist for Obama in his final weeks.

Immigration

Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, a greater number than any other president, and activists are pushing him to fix his record by saving hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Trump.



The most widely discussed option is pardoning undocumented immigrants, focusing on the more than 750,000 youth who entered the US as children and are known as Dreamers. The pardons, supported by some House Democrats, wouldn’t grant them legal status but would offer deportation protection.

“It would create a very difficult situation for President Trump trying to remove somebody from the country who has been pardoned,” added Kevin Johnson, dean of the University of California, Davis law school.

Others have argued that Obama could also pardon 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants who are legal permanent residents with green cards but have minor criminal records and thus could face deportation.

Obama has said these immigrants are not a priority for deportation, but they could be targeted by Trump. Pardons wouldn’t remove the underlying crimes but would make the immigrants no longer deportable, according to Peter Markowitz, a Cardozo School of Law professor who has written on the subject.

“These are people he said it makes no sense to rip out of their American families,” he said. “It’s really a moment where we are going to see whether he lives up to the commitment to those communities.”

David Leopold, immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said this would protect people convicted of low-level offenses, such as misdemeanor marijuana possession.

Advocates have argued that there are hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants with legal status who also deserve pardons, even though they were convicted of more serious crimes, such as non-violent drug felonies.

Mass incarceration

On Monday, Obama commuted the sentences of 153 federal inmates, the most on a single day by any US president. Some activists are hoping that the announcement, which included 78 presidential pardons, is just the start of a steady stream of clemency orders.

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“The president has untethered clemency power,” said Brittany Byrd, campaign director of the #ClemencyNOW initiative. “There’s no limit as to what he could do.”

Byrd’s organization has argued that Obama could adopt a “categorical approach”, meaning granting clemency to groups of prisoners who are “extremely low-risk” without doing individual reviews of each case. That could include inmates who have not retroactively benefited from recent sentencing reforms, meaning they would face lighter punishments if convicted today.

If the administration doesn’t aggressively process applications for pardons, some older inmates could die behind bars under Trump.

Corey Jacobs, one of Byrd’s clients who is serving his 17th year of life without parole as a non-violent drug offender, was granted clemency this week, but others with similar stories are running out of time.



“It’s always bittersweet, because we know there are many more Corey Jacobs that are still waiting,” she said.

Political prisoners

Last-minute presidential pardons got a bad name under Bill Clinton, who used his final day in office to grant mercy to fugitive tax evader Marc Rich. But there are a host of high-profile political prisoners and exiles who merit Obama’s mercy on his final day in office, starting with Chelsea Manning.

Manning is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking documents to WikiLeaks. Her treatment by the military before her conviction has been widely described as “torture”, and she has since been denied gender-affirming medical treatment and punished with solitary confinement for a suicide attempt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chelsea Manning is one of the many political prisoners who merit Obama’s mercy. Photograph: Uncredited/AP

The whistleblower’s mistreatment is thrown into sharp relief by the two years of probation meted out to David Petraeus, the former CIA director, for disclosing classified information to a lover.

Other dissidents worthy of Obama’s mercy include NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden; Oscar López Rivera, the Puerto Rican independence activist who is one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners; and Leonard Peltier, who has served more than 40 years in prison for the murder of two FBI agents. Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement, and Amnesty International has raised serious concerns about the fairness of his trial and conviction.

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Environment

Obama has protected more land and water than any other president and has recently cancelled oil and gas leases on indigenous sacred grounds and banned drilling in large areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

But advocacy groups have argued that there is a lot more he could do to shield the environment from the incoming administration, which has very close ties to the oil industry.

Activists are eager to see Obama finalize national monument protections in three areas in the west – Bears Ears in Utah (considered sacred by surrounding Native American tribes); the greater Grand Canyon area (where a designation would bar uranium mining); and Gold Butte in Nevada (which has been at the center of the high-profile cattle grazing dispute involving rancher Cliven Bundy).

Those monuments would be permanent, said Aaron Weiss, media director of the Center for Western Priorities.

“It would be absolutely unprecedented for a president to try to reverse a national monument declaration by a previous president.”

Advocates are also pushing for the Obama administration to finalize a proposed oil shale rule that would increase environmental reporting requirements to better protect air, water, wildlife and other resources in commercial development leases.

The supreme court

It has been 10 months since supreme court Justice Antonin Scalia died, and nine months since Obama nominated a qualified if unexciting replacement, Merrick Garland.

The Senate Republicans’ unprecedented intransigence in refusing to allow Garland a hearing, let alone a confirmation vote, could be rewarded by allowing Trump to fill the seat.

On 3 January 2017, Congress will go into recess, allowing Obama to make recess appointments. He can appoint Garland to the supreme court, and even push through the other 58 federal judicial nominees that are pending.

The appointments would only last for one year and would certainly be cause for partisan outrage – but so has the Senate’s refusal to consider Garland.

Transparency

As a candidate, Obama pledged that he would run the most transparent administration in history. While his eight years in office offered up a mixed bag of open government reforms and crackdowns on whistleblowers, the outgoing president does have an opportunity to finish strong.

On 21 November, a coalition of civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sent the Obama administration a list of steps he can take to improve transparency and accountability in his final days in office.

These include declassifying and releasing opinions by the foreign intelligence surveillance court and ensuring that the Senate’s “torture report” is preserved for future administrations.

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Muslim surveillance

Trump’s threats to ban all Muslims from entering the US and to introduce “extreme vetting” of newcomers have inspired widespread fears of unprecedented surveillance and a Muslim registry.

Obama can’t control his successor’s policies, but he could dismantle the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERs), an openly discriminatory registry that was introduced in the wake of 9/11.

The system was used to track people from majority Arab or Muslim countries and has been widely criticized as an ineffective racial profiling tool. It did not lead to a single terrorism conviction.

The president effectively halted the program in 2011, but the NSEERs regulatory framework remains in place. If Obama rescinded the system altogether, it would make it significantly harder for Trump to build a Muslim registry.