Scary Xenophobic Policies Hastily Emerging From Trump Camp

 It is with a heavy heart that I must resurrect my “Immigrant Roundups” category (started after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the xenophobic policies that emerged soon after). I fear that the policies of Bush’s GOP will be nothing compared to President Trump’s GOP.

President-elect Donald Trump is calling for the reinstatement of a national registry of immigrants and visitors who enter the United States. It’s turning a few heads.

Kris Kobach, a Trump supporter rumored to be on Trumps transition team (that’s all we get is rumors folks!) who helped design President Bush’s “National Security Entry-Exit Registration System” (NSEERS) (which was implemented after the September 11, 2001 attacks) was on Fox news defending the concept to Megan Kelly.

I remember these NSEERS registrations, as people were going in to the registration offices in various cities across the country, and weren’t ever coming back out. The National Lawyers Guild started taking a list of names of everyone going in to the immigration offices every day, just to make sure people were making it back out okay.

These were scary, scary times, and I remember going to the protests at the San Francisco Immigration Building on Washington Street in San Francisco, and my immigrant friends thanking me for going, because they were too afraid to go themselves.

As this Reuters article explains: “NSEERS was abandoned in 2011 after it was deemed redundant by the Department of Homeland Security and criticized by civil rights groups for unfairly targeting immigrants from Muslim-majority nations.”

I think it’s easy to talk about Japanese Internment in the abstract, but I have a poster on my wall from 1942, so I will never forget.

I feel it’s important to clarify exactly WTF happened in 1942.

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