During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump has talked about coming down hard on Muslims. At one point, he mentioned that he thinks Muslims in the US should be put in a database.
Now, that Trump has won the election, many people are wondering if he still plans on doing that. His incoming Chief of Staff, current head of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, said that the database wouldn’t be happening.
During the campaign, when asked if we should have a database, Trump said:
“There should be a lot of systems. Beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems.”
Census data doesn’t show religion, so it’s hard to tell how many Muslims are in the country. Also, singling them out would be discrimination.
https://twitter.com/goldupevent/status/799426582683074560
The only precedent we have is an immigrant registry that President George W. Bush enacted right after the 9/11 attacks. It was called National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), and it kept track of immigrants from certain countries, including North Korea.
The Muslim countries in the database included: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
The program was phased out in 2011.
Unfortunately, the Muslim registry would be legal. The NSEERS system was never struck down in any courts during the nine years it was in use, regardless of the condemnation it received. If Trump brought it back, it likely wouldn’t be challenged.
The American Civil Rights Union (ACLU’s) Immigrants’ Rights Project directo,r Cecillia Wang, said:
“President-elect Trump and his immigration advisers have taken an illegal and long-ago abandoned post-9/11 program, the National Security Entry-Exit System, and now threaten to reignite it. Let’s be clear: Trump is talking about a federal dragnet that targets people for registration, surveillance, interrogation, or detention because of their religion. Such a dragnet would be unconstitutional.”
Trump really shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against any minorities. Not all terrorists are Muslims, and there have been plenty of white Christian terrorist attacks in history. There is no need to single out the entire group.
For a bit of comedy relief, here is the Daily Show’s informative segment on the subject:
Featured image via Twitter.
