Ahead of President Biden's Wednesday inauguration, his incoming team unveiled the details of a massive immigration reform bill he'll bring to Congress before the day ends. It includes a path to citizenship for undocumented people and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, as well as provisions that are meant to address Central American migration in the first place.
Biden had promised to reverse former President Donald Trump's restrictionist immigration agenda as soon as he stepped into office. And while it will take time to completely unravel Trump's web of executive orders, Biden will sign at least a dozen of his own orders as soon as he arrives in the White House Wednesday evening, NBC News reports. Those orders include stopping construction of Trump's southern border wall and a repeal of his Muslim travel ban.
Also on Wednesday, Biden will present Congress with his immigration reform bill that will propose an eight-year path to citizenship, allowing millions of undocumented immigrants in the country as of Jan. 1 to quickly apply for temporary legal status. They'll be granted a green card after passing certain requirements, and after three years of legal permanent residency, will be allowed to apply for citizenship, The Washington Post reports. Meanwhile a proposed increase of aid to Central American countries is meant to repair economic conditions that drive people to immigrate to America in the first place. Also proposed is a major increase in refugee admissions, a program that will reunite Central Americans and their U.S. citizen relatives, and a pivot to using technology to curb illegal border crossings instead of a physical wall.
During the 2020 race, Biden faced criticism and questions over the Obama administration's record deportations and failure to overhaul America's immigration system. This day-one proposal seems to show Biden wants to address those shortcomings as soon as possible. Kathryn Krawczyk
Millions of viewers on Wednesday were astonished at the size of the aging leather-bound Bible used when President Joe Biden took the oath of office, a volume substantially larger than the common pocket-sized editions of Holy Writ.
But in Biden's childhood the book would have been a somewhat more familiar sight. Biden was sworn in with a late 19th-century edition of the Douay Rheims translation of the Bible with extensive commentary by Fr. George Leo Haydock, the scion of an old recusant family who spent much of his life serving in Catholic missions in rural England.
Haydock's commentary, which is still considered among the most authoritative in the English speaking world, is among the reasons that Biden's Bible (which appears to have been in his family since 1893) is so large. Most Haydock editions, including one nearly identical to Biden's owned by this columnist, also include introductory essays, extensive illustrations, glossaries, biographies of the popes, pages for recording the dates of births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, and priestly ordinations.
Haydock editions of the Douay would remain the most common among English-speaking Catholics in both the United States and the British Empire until the 1940s, when the so-called Confraternity edition was published, removing much of the archaic syntax and Latinate vocabulary to which readers had been accustomed. Matthew Walther