Trump issues sweeping pardon of 1,500 Jan 6 defendants

After a full day of ceremony, Trump signed a series of executive actions curbing immigration and rolling back environmental regulations and racial and gender diversity initiatives.

Donald Trump pardoned some 1,500 of his supporters who attacked the US Capitol four years ago as he moved quickly to impose his will on the US government hours after reclaiming the presidency on Monday.

After a full day of ceremony, Trump signed a series of executive actions curbing immigration and rolling back environmental regulations and racial and gender diversity initiatives.

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He did not take immediate action to raise tariffs, a hallmark campaign promise, but said he could impose 25% duties on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1.

It will surely be an infuriating move from the police and lawmakers whose lives were put into peril during this unprecedented episode of modern US history-that he pardon supporters who attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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Around 140 policemen were attacked; some were hit with chemical irritants and others hit with pipes, poles, and other objects. In total, four people died as the violence subsided, one of them a supporter of Trump shot dead by the police.

Trump pardoned 14 leaders of the far-right militant groups Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who were serving long prison sentences, allowing them to leave prison early but not their convictions.

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Earlier in the day, Trump, 78, took the oath of office in the Capitol Rotunda, where a mob of his supporters had rampaged on Jan. 6 in an unsuccessful attempt to reverse his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

At the ceremony, Trump gave himself the role of a messiah anointed by God to save a failing nation. His inauguration is nothing but a triumphant return for a political disruptor who survived two attempts at assassination and won election despite a criminal conviction and a prosecution stemming from his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

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"I was saved by God to make America great again," he said.

Trump is the first president in more than a century to win a second term after losing the White House and the first felon to occupy the White House. The oldest president ever to be sworn in, he is backed by Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress.

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Trump moved fast to crack down on illegal immigration, a signature issue since he first entered politics in 2015.

Soon after he was sworn into office, US border authorities closed a program that allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter the US legally by scheduling an appointment through a smartphone. Existing appointments were canceled.

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Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the US government to resettle in the US - among them, family members of active-duty US military personnel-are having their flights canceled under a Trump order suspending US refugee programs, said a US official and a leading refugee resettlement advocate on Monday.

The order signed at the White House declares a national emergency at the US-Mexico border that unlocks funding and will allow Trump to dispatch troops there. He signed an order that would end a policy that confers citizenship to those born in the United States, which is certain to trigger a lengthy court fight.

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Another executive order designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

Trump once again withdrew the United States from the Paris climate deal, removing the world's biggest historic emitter from global efforts to fight climate change for the second time in a decade.

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"We're getting rid of all the cancer. caused by the Biden administration," Trump said as he signed a stack of executive orders in the Oval Office.

Other orders rolled back Biden administration policies on artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. He also froze federal hiring and instructed federal workers to go back to their offices, abandoning work-from-home arrangements. He also signed papers to establish a "Department of Government Efficiency," an outside advisory board led by billionaire Elon Musk aimed at reducing wide swaths of government spending.

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In the State Department, over a dozen of the nonpartisan senior diplomats were asked to resign as part of a broader plan to replace the nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists.

He said he would issue orders to abolish federal diversity programs and require the government to recognize only genders assigned at birth. While Trump portrayed himself as a peacemaker and unifier during his half-hour speech, his tone was often sharply partisan.

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He repeated false claims from his campaign that other countries were emptying their prisons into America and voiced familiar grievances over his criminal prosecutions.

With Biden seated nearby, Trump issued a stinging indictment of his predecessor's policies from immigration to foreign affairs.

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"We have a government that has given unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders, but refuses to defend American borders, or more importantly, its own people," Trump said.

Many tech executives have been trying to ingratiate themselves with the new administration - including the three richest men in the world, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg - who had front-row seats next to cabinet nominees and members of Trump's family. Trump vowed to send astronauts to Mars, prompting Musk - who has long talked about colonizing the planet - to raise his fists.

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Trump promised to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and again vowed to reclaim the Panama Canal, one of several foreign policy statements that have sent shockwaves through US allies.

Trump took the oath of office at 12:01 p.m. ET (1701 GMT) to "preserve, protect and defend" the US Constitution, which was administered by Chief Justice John Roberts. His vice president, JD Vance, had been sworn in just before.

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Outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November, sat beside Biden in a section with former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, sat with her husband Bill. Obama's wife, Michelle, declined to attend.

The ceremony was moved indoors because of extreme cold gripping much of the country.
Trump has boycotted Biden's inauguration and continues to make false claims that the 2020 election he lost to Biden was rigged.

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Biden, in one of his last official acts, pardoned several people whom Trump has threatened with retaliation, including General Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who Trump has suggested should be executed for holding back-channel talks with China.

Milley's portrait was removed from the Pentagon shortly after Trump's inauguration.He also pardoned five family members minutes before leaving office, citing fears that Trump would target them.

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Read also| Watch| EAM Jaishankar Joins International Leaders, Takes Prominent Seat at Trump's Inauguration

Read also| Trump Signs Executive Order to Safeguard Free Speech

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