Vox Explains Trump’s Proposed “Muslim Registry”

Yesterday, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (who is part of Trump’s transition team) said that the Trump administration is considering reinstating a database of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries — something the federal government did from 2002 to 2011 under a program called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System or NSEERS.

According to vox, “the Kobach proposal isn’t the same thing as the database of Muslim US citizens that Trump briefly floated (and then walked back) last year. It’s subtler — and that makes it a lot more plausible. The difference between a ‘Muslim database’ and a ‘database of particular people in the US from particular countries, which happen to be majority Muslim’ might seem like a meaningless distinction, something to give a gloss of neutrality to something clearly discriminatory. But that gloss of neutrality matters a lot. It’s the reason the federal government was able to keep a database for a decade. And it’s probably the reason you might not have known that database existed at all.”