In his final days in office, President Joe Biden should defend Donald Trump’s most vulnerable targets.

The pardon phase of a lame-duck presidency is never a pretty thing. Bill Clinton extended criminal pardons to big-ticket donors such as Marc Rich and political allies such as Susan McDougal, Mel Reynolds and Dan Rostenkowski, as well as his brother Roger. George W. Bush was far stingier in his exercise of the pardon power, but still maximized its political returns, with a pardon for former GOP representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham, and a commuted sentence for former Dick Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

In the waning days of the Biden presidency, the pardoning power is again being stretched to potentially take in a group that might be called “imaginary henchmen” – lawmakers and officials deemed enemies of the MAGA movement. This comes in the wake of Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter on gun and tax charges, after pledging he’d do no such thing.

The threat of legal harassment is far from idle – yet the use of preemptive pardons to defuse it is both too passive in conception and too narrow in focus. Pardons, after all, traditionally cover people who’ve been convicted of crimes, wrongfully or otherwise – and using pardons to shield people raising legitimate issues and criticisms legally, in the service of the public weal, abets rather than arrests the criminalization of politics that all sides in our corrupt system claim to abhor.

“The threat of legal harassment is far from idle.”

So let me float a modest proposal: To redeem the use of the pardon power, Biden should disburse it far and wide. One obvious use of it, which would yield robust moral and political benefits, would be to grant a preemptive pardon to undocumented (and documented) immigrants now facing the prospect of indiscriminate mass deportation when Donald Trump takes office next month – people who entered the country illegally within the last 20 years, who are currently awaiting an asylum decision, or are under the age of 12.

The strategy could prove legally fruitless over the long haul, particularly as Trump can count on a MAGA-fied federal court system to shore up his phony argument that an immigrant “invasion” warrants expansive war-power measures from the executive. But an imminent plan to legally target and repatriate a non-white population is a first-order political exigency.

A mass pardon for immigrants would mark a long-overdue clean break with the Democrats’ craven and unimaginative collaboration with draconian border policies designed to stoke unfounded moral panics and political revenge fantasies on the right.

It’s no doubt far too late in the game for Biden to be bold and imaginative under his own steam in the cause of immigration justice – so let him cite the old Beltway saw of bipartisan accord in the spirit of an immigration reform he voted for nearly 40 years ago. But most of all, let him use the long-discredited power of the pardon for the democratic protection of a huge population poised to be unjustly demonized and banished from the country in a burst of fascist retribution.

CHRIS LEHMANN is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation, where this story was originally published.