Many of President Joe Biden’s priorities in his first months in office have been driven by two things: the coronavirus pandemic, and undoing the damage that Donald Trump did. Tuesday, Biden is taking executive action to address an existing problem made worse by both of those things: lack of access to legal representation for low-income people.
“As President Biden knows from his experience as a public defender, timely and affordable access to the legal system can make all the difference in a person’s life—including by keeping an individual out of poverty, keeping an individual in his or her home, helping an unaccompanied child seek asylum, helping someone fight a consumer scam, or ensuring that an individual charged with a crime can mount a strong defense and receive a fair trial,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “But low-income people have long struggled to secure quality access to the legal system.”
Biden is signing a presidential memorandum to expand that access. Specifically, he’s directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to come up with a plan to expand the Justice Department’s access to justice work, and reestablishing the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable, which, according to a White House fact sheet, “was initially established in 2015 to raise federal agencies’ awareness of how civil legal aid could increase employment, family stability, housing security, consumer protection, and public safety” only to be shut down by Team Trump. That roundtable will pull together efforts from across federal agencies.
Garland, the fact sheet said, “will make clear in a memorandum that he will issue today, [that] the Justice Department will start this work immediately.”
The White House highlighted this initiative as part of Biden’s broader push to improve racial equity throughout the federal government and to reform the justice system. The Justice Department has also resumed “pattern or practice” investigations into police departments, launching such investigations into the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But there’s much more to be done. Among many other things, Congress needs to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act—with an end to qualified immunity.