Trump adviser wants to register Muslim immigrants
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach thinks it would be fine to register people by religion.
Muslim immigrants coming into the United States from “terror-prone” countries may soon have to register and check in regularly with the government, said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.
Kobach — architect of anti-immigration legislation in Arizona and Alabama, as well as cities in Pennsylvania and Texas — recommended that the incoming administration could enact Trump’s call for “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants by reinstating a national registry that targets people from largely Arab- and Muslim- majority countries, Reuters reported.
Known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), that program allowed the U.S. government to record the arrival, length of stay, and departure of certain individuals from 25 countries believed to possess “possible national security threats.” Those countries included Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Lybia, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. Only one country on the NSEERS list, North Korea, is not majority-Muslim…
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Human rights groups criticized NSEERS and called out the government for being able to track the whereabouts of these immigrants within the country, which sometimes resulted in racial profiling. Under the guise of immigration enforcement of visa violations, the program was “a proxy to target Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities,” Margaret Huang, the then-executive director of the Rights Working Group said in 2009.
Before it disbanded in 2011, the NSEERS program registered 93,000 people, of whom 13,740 immigrants were placed in deportation proceedings. The number of people prosecuted on terrorism charges under the program amounted to zero.
Prior to the NSEERS program, the USA PATRIOT Act also allowed the government to detain and arrest more than 1,2000 Muslim and Arab men who were often denied legal representation and contact with their families.
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