Biden will also likely institute a 100-day freeze on deportations. There is no good policy reason to do so, but it was a popular pledge on the Democratic campaign trail, and Biden committed to it back in March. Also, the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, the effort to reconcile Biden’s programs with rival Bernie Sanders’ at the end of the Democratic campaign, committed to a 100-day deportation moratorium.

Trump failed in his effort to end DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, begun by President Obama. Even though Obama instituted the program using only his executive authority, courts stopped Trump from using his executive authority to end it, arguing that the Trump administration had not done all the paperwork, had not dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, to get it done. That was clearly an act of judicial activism, but it has kept DACA alive for the next Democratic administration to revive. The Biden team has said it will reinstate the full DACA “on day one” of the new administration.

Then there is the wall. Trump was elected in 2016 partly on a promise to build a wall on roughly 1,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. He got a very slow start, but finally got going despite the opposition of a Democratic House of Representatives. Right now, Customs and Border Protection says that 402 miles of the wall have been completed. That number is expected to rise to 450 miles by the end of next month, with around 200 more miles under construction. Much of that involves the replacement of dilapidated and inadequate old barriers, but some also involves putting new wall where none has been before. It is not all that Trump promised, but it is a significant accomplishment.