WASHINGTON – President Biden signed executive orders on Tuesday to end Justice Department contracts with private prisons and increase the government’s enforcement of a law designed to combat discrimination in the housing market, part of the new government’s continued focus on equity racial.
Mr. Biden also signed orders that make the federal government’s policy “condemn and denounce” discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who have faced persecution since the coronavirus pandemic spread from China to the United States, and to strengthen relations between government and Native American tribes.
The changes are incremental pieces of Biden’s broader push for racial equality – an initiative that is expected to be a centerpiece of his administration and that follows an executive order last week directing federal agencies to review policies to eradicate systemic racism. The government’s effort is led by Susan E. Rice, who heads the Domestic Policy Council.
“I am not promising that we can end this tomorrow, but I promise you that we will continue to make progress to eliminate systemic racism,” said Biden before signing the requests. He added that “all branches of the White House and the federal government will be part of that effort.”
The orders are a growing rejection of President Donald J. Trump’s policies and attitudes toward race relations. In separate executive orders last week, Biden overturned a Trump administration ban on diversity training at federal agencies and dissolved a historic commission created by Trump that issued a report aimed at putting a more positive view on the nation’s founders who they were slave owners.
In a conference call with reporters, a senior White House official described the Trump administration’s “heinous” Muslim ban and said certain minority groups were treated with “a deep level of disrespect by political leaders and the White House”.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, blamed the Trump administration for exacerbating racial inequalities in health. “The actions taken by the previous government, for all purposes and purposes of destroying the Affordable Care Act, have not helped any American and certainly have not helped communities of color,” she said.
In the same briefing, Ms. Rice made it clear that the government was taking a new direction by highlighting these disparities instead of ignoring them – and that appointing a woman of color to oversee the initiative was part of that approach.
“Americans of color are being infected and dying for Covid at higher rates,” she said, noting that “40% of black-owned companies were forced to close too much forever during the Covid crisis.”
A descendant of immigrants from Jamaica, Ms. Rice called herself the living embodiment of the American dream and noted that “investing in capital is good for economic growth” and “creates jobs for all Americans”.
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One of the orders signed on Tuesday calls on the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prisons, reverting to a policy initially adopted in the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president, and which Trump reversed.
The order does not end all government contracts with private prisons – administration officials confirmed that it would not apply to other agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which hires private companies to detain thousands of undocumented immigrants.
“There is a broad consensus that our current system of mass incarceration imposes significant costs and difficulties on our society and communities and does not make us any safer,” says the order. “To lower levels of incarceration, we must reduce profit-based incentives to incarceration, gradually eliminating the federal government’s dependence on privately operated criminal detention facilities.”
The housing order guides the Department of Housing and Urban Development to more vigorously apply the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which aims at discrimination in the purchase of houses. This includes asking the department to review Mr. Trump’s actions that sought to weaken part of that application. Last year, as part of Trump’s calls to white voters in the suburbs, the department canceled an Obama-era program aimed at combating racial segregation in housing, known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.
“This represents a clear change of direction that puts us back on track to comply with the Fair Housing Act,” said Julián Castro, who served as Secretary for Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama. “He is sending out a very strong signal that it is a new day when it comes to fair housing and that the HUD will be aggressive again. In a way, this is the easy part, but it is a strong first step. “
Castro said the housing department is still far behind in terms of the number of employees needed to enforce the Fair Housing Act and that nonprofit groups across the country working on fair housing issues should receive federal funding and other resources. . But given that the action came on the 6th of the new government, he said, it served as a “clear repudiation of Trump’s fear” about the invasion of white suburbs by low-income housing.
Biden’s prison order received praise from the American Federation of Government Officials, Council of Local Prisoners, which represents 30,000 federal prison workers across the country, and from groups working to reduce the mass incarceration of blacks and other Americans.
“Eliminating the use of for-profit prisons is just a first step,” said Holly Harris, executive director of the Justice Action Network, a bipartisan organization that works with criminal justice – but a step with implications beyond the small percentage of federal prisoners who are held in private prisons. “Everyone is missing out that they are a major obstacle to reform, because they give millions to elected officials who write our criminal law.
Ms. Harris, who said she was a Republican, added that she was “extending a little grace to the Democratic government and applauding this first step.”