We hope you’ll join us in urging the Biden administration to tackle these key priorities to advance health and human rights.Soon enough, however, Trump disavowed his own self-proclaimed three-month deadline as a “ridiculous standard,” while at the same time insisting: “I’ve done more than any other president in the first 100 days.”īiden, too, pledged quick action. Especially as we fight a global pandemic, we need global cooperation. Leadership in the International Communityįinally, the Biden administration has illustrated its willingness to recommit the United States to multilateral engagement, by re-engaging with the United Nations and World Health Organization and reversing sanctions on the International Criminal Court. The administration continues to build influx facilities, instead of scaling up the humane alternatives, and continues to detain families at the border. This must change – immediately. We are also pushing Biden to end child and family detention, and scale up community-based alternatives to detention. The administration is also tasked with reunifying families separated by the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. PHR is encouraged by Biden’s family separation task force, and we will continue seeking justice and accountability for separated migrant families. Borderīecause of the Trump-era Title 42 order, hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers are denied the chance to have their cases heard and are, instead, expelled to dangerous border towns. Biden must end Title 42 immediately and restore access to seek asylum at the border. However, we have yet to see significant action to ban dangerous crowd-control weapons that can cause serious injury, disability, or even death. While there has been promising movement on state and local levels, we urge the Biden administration to step up limits at the federal level.īiden must not only promote accountability and transparency around police killings and excessive force by law enforcement, but promote alternative models of crisis response, and support communities by increasing investments in social services, health, employment, and education. The administration should also enforce and strengthen national standards on reporting deaths in police custody and end dangerous and discriminatory practices in police encounters. We are hopeful about the administration’s work to set national guidelines for police use of force and to end qualified immunity, as seen in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that passed the House, and we encourage Biden to pursue steps through other federal offices. The 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, MN shone a bright light on the structural racism and gaping disparities in policing that have existed for decades. PHR has called for significant action from the Biden administration to restrict excessive force in policing. The last year of the pandemic also revealed the attacks and dangerous conditions that frontline health care workers have too often faced. We need to see more action from the Biden administration to restore trust in public health experts and strengthen worker protections in U.S. Next, vaccines began to roll out in the United States. While the country has successfully administered hundreds of millions of vaccine doses, equity is still lagging badly. Biden must ensure vaccines are accessible for all and commit to the People’s Vaccine Campaign (of which PHR is a convener), whose mission is to make vaccines available to everyone, everywhere, free of charge. The first step was to mitigate the spread of the virus. We were proud to see Biden position science at the forefront of his administration and answer our call to implement a national mask mandate, following the recommendation by public health experts. With the pandemic raging at the beginning of President Biden’s term, we called on his administration to act urgently on COVID-19.
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