Joe Biden has the power to save lives ahead of Trump's inauguration and we, the signers of this petition, demand action on three key critical issues in the coming weeks. 

Commute every federal death sentence
Donald Trump loves state-sanctioned murder so much that he was the first president in 130 years to carry out federal executions on his way out of office. Biden imposed a total moratorium on federal executions during his presidency, and no one has been executed on his watch. Now is the time for President Biden to follow through on his campaign promise to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.

As of the time of this video, there are 40 people with outstanding execution warrants on federal death row. Joe Biden can literally save their lives by commuting their death sentences to life in prison.

Terminate every ICE detention contract
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has hundreds of contracts with facilities which hold immigrants who are facing deportation. As of the end of 2023, these facilities held around 37,000 people each day.

Thanks to a regulatory provision at 8 CFR 49, any one of those contracts can be terminated at any time "for the government's convenience." It’s long past time to end mass immigration detention, and more important than ever to do so ahead of Trump's promised mass deportation campaign.

Obviously we assume that Trump would reinstate all of these contracts, but forcing his lawyers to spend time undoing this action would slow things down and buy people time to protect themselves.

Pardon every single undocumented person in the United States
Donald Trump has explicitly promised that he will declare a national emergency to justify putting military and National Guard service members in the streets of American cities to round up non-citizens in the largest mass deportation campaign this country has seen in at least 70 years. Trump has even promised to bypass the immigration courts by using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, specifically intended to circumvent due process rights. Whether or not any of this turns out to be legally or logistically possible, Joe Biden has a responsibility to protect undocumented people from civil rights abuses, family separation, and threats of danger in their home countries. 

More Americans are opposed to mass deportation than support it, especially when it comes to those who have been in the US for many years. And there is good reason to believe that even those who think that they want strict enforcement of our immigration laws will feel differently when their family, friends, neighbors, local business owners, and many others are swept up in the raids and given no chance to make a case to a judge. Donald Trump has praised President Eisenhower's "Operation Wetback" (yes it was really called that), the largest mass deportation in US history, as his model for what he has planned. This maneuver was a stain on our country’s legacy that was described as “a publicity stunt with horrific humanitarian side effects” by Vox.

To avoid this catastrophe, we propose one simple solution: a presidential pardon. Although unlawful presence in the United States is not a crime, Joe Biden's pardon power broadly extends to civil offenses including violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act. He could easily limit the pardon to people who were deportable only for certain minor immigration violations present in the US as of the day of the announcement, leaving future presidents free to deport people convicted of serious deportable criminal offenses, known gang members, or anyone who has already received an order of deportation and never left.

As radical as this proposition sounds, it's not totally unprecedented! Pardons can be granted to people who have never been charged with a crime—like how Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for Watergate. They can also be extended to entire classes of people, as Jimmy Carter did for hundreds of thousands of Vietnam draft dodgers in 1977. 

In your final weeks as a public servant, we implore you to fulfill your duty to the American people and keep your word to fight for the soul of this nation. We believe that you are in a unique position to act with unconventional bravery to meet this moment and hope that you will choose to champion resolute compassion in the face of fear. 

Signed,

The Opening Arguments Community