The newly inaugurated President of the United States, President Joe Biden has used his first day in office to issue executive orders undoing some of former President Donald Trump’s policies on climate change and immigration. Notable among the 17 executive orders and presidential directives were an order to end a travel ban from countries including Nigeria, Eritrea, Yemen, Sudan and others.
“There’s no time to waste,” Biden said before signing executive orders in the White House. These are just all starting points,” he added.
The order cancels the entry ban on citizens from over a dozen countries, including Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, and Sudan. The American Civil Liberties Union, a non-profit civil rights organisation, applauded the move calling the travel policy a “cruel Muslim ban that targeted Africans.”
Critics had called the policy – one of the first moves by Donald Trump when he became president in 2017 – a “Muslim ban.” However, the ban was changed, in part due to legal challenges, and included some non-majority-Muslim nations.
Biden has described the policy as discriminatory and an affront to the country’s values. The president has also sent a bill to US Congress to overhaul the country’s immigration system, his team said earlier. The legislation aims to provide pathways to US citizenship for undocumented people address the causes of migration and speed up the reunification of families after children were separated from parents at the US border with Mexico.