Progressives to Obama: Please do this before you go

Progressives have a wish list they hope President Obama will fulfill.

Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, a greater number than any other president, and activists are pushing him to fix his record by saving hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Trump.

The most widely discussed option is pardoning undocumented immigrants, focusing on the more than 750,000 youth who entered the US as children and are known as Dreamers. The pardons, supported by some House Democrats, wouldn’t grant them legal status but would offer deportation protection…

On Monday, Obama commuted the sentences of 153 federal inmates, the most on a single day by any US president. Some activists are hoping that the announcement, which included 78 presidential steady stream of clemency orders“The president has untethered clemency power,” said Brittany Byrd, campaign director of the #ClemencyNOW initiative. “There’s no limit as to what he could do.”

…Obama has protected more land and water than any other president and has recently cancelled oil and gas leases on indigenous sacred grounds and banned drilling in large areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

But advocacy groups have argued that there is a lot more he could do to shield the environment from the incoming administration, which has very close ties to the oil industry.

Activists are eager to see Obama finalize national monument protections in three areas in the west – Bears Ears in Utah (considered sacred by surrounding Native American tribes); the greater Grand Canyon area (where a designation would bar uranium mining); and Gold Butte in Nevada (which has been at the center of the high-profile cattle grazing dispute involving rancher Cliven Bundy).

Those monuments would be permanent, said Aaron Weiss, media director of the Center for Western Priorities.

“It would be absolutely unprecedented for a president to try to reverse a national monument declaration by a previous president.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.