A member of the Trump transition team explains the “Muslim database” Trump talked about during the campaign will be restarting a government program that ran from 2002-2011. The program registers men over the age of 16 who immigrate from countries that the president marks as “havens for terrorists.” Under Obama, the program was suspended, but he did not dismantle it.
Donald Trump rode into office on a promise to step up scrutiny of immigrants who might come to the US to commit terrorist acts — especially Muslims. Now, thanks to transition team member and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, we’re getting a sense of what that might look like.
Kobach told Reuters that the Trump administration-in-waiting is considering reinstating a database of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries — something the federal government did from 2002 to 2011.
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.
Read more over at Vox.