He literally signed an executive order blocking people from six (primarily Muslim) countries from entering the United States a week after he took office. A week after he took office, we had people on airplanes back to the States getting turned away. We had people with legitimate visas getting turned away. Permanent residents were being detained at airports for days. People with dual citizenship didn't know what the fuck to do. There were lawyers camped out at airports. There were protests. We went from taking 1800 refugees a week to taking 2. 2 refugees. The entire time the executive order was in effect.
A week after he took office he did this. A fucking week.
Here is a list of what Joe Biden did on his first day in office
Require masks on federal property.
Rejoin the World Health Organization
Set up a COVID office that reported directly to him.
Extend the foreclosure/eviction moratoriums.
Freeze student debt collection.
Rejoin the Paris Climate Accords
Revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, ban drilling in national parks (where Trump had issued orders permitting it), and setting stricter fuel economy standards for vehicles
Terminating the 1776 Commission.
Revoking Trump's changes to the Census that would have shortened the time Census takers had to work and excluded undocumented immigrants from the Census
Strengthened protections for kids here under the DACA (Dream) act, which Trump had tried to eliminate. (Note: This program is currently suspended due to a suit from the Texas 5th district court, although the current federal government maintains its legality.)
Abolished Executive Order 13780, aka the revised version of the Muslim Ban.
Canceled the Trump Administration's Interior Enforcement Rules, and I'm just gonna quote from Politico here because I can't seem to find a good way to summarize: "Biden revoked a Trump executive order that massively expanded immigration officialsâ interior enforcement work and broadened the categories of who they should try to detain and deport. His acting DHS secretary then issued a memo pausing deportations for 100 days beginning on Jan. 22."
Stopped work on the border wall
Expanded deportation protection for Liberians
Banned workplace discrimination against LGBT employees
Signed an ethics pledge and ordered every employee in the executive branch to do likewise.
Froze every Trump administration regulation that was currently in progress, requiring that they be reviewed by his administration before any of them could be enacted. (These included rules to speed up processing at chicken factories, despite concerns that this could lead to increased worker injuries and salmonella outbreaks. They also included a rule that would have reintroduced firing squads for federal executions. I'm finding it difficult to see if any of those frozen regulations were ever allowed to take place. You'd think at least the firing squad one would be easy to track down).
It's a lot of smaller, occasionally kind of policy wonk-ish stuff. He didn't save the world and create an eternal paradise in his first hundred days. But a lot of people could breathe a little easier, whether or not they knew the work that went into it.
And, you know, people weren't being held indefinitely at airports while Trump fought to revoke their visas for being the wrong kind of Muslim (aka the poor kind), so there's that.
