Donald Trump’s presidential transition team is reportedly discussing a national registry of Muslims.
Reuters reports that anti-immigrant leader and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is part of the Trump presidential transition team “said in an interview that Trump’s policy advisers had also discussed drafting a proposal for his consideration to reinstate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.”
Kobach told the news service he has been “in regular conference calls with about a dozen Trump immigration advisers“ for months.
Trump discussed the possibility of a Muslim registry during the presidential campaign.
Kobach cited a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, as his preferred model for the Trump Muslim registry system. NSEERS, which was created by George W. Bush and dismantled by the Obama administration, was described by Chris Rickerd, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, as “An executive branch post-9/11 reaction that made people from predominantly Muslim countries to go through an arcane series of registration and other screening mechanisms. if they didn’t, they were punished. Thousands were hit with civil deportation consequences.
Not a single person was ever prosecuted for terrorist charges while the system was in place.
Rickerd pointed out that NSEERS was an enormous waste of time and resources leading to “countless hours of law enforcement time spent on people who had no individual reason to be on the authorities’ radar.”
Bookmarks