Here’s Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who wants to run the Department of Homeland Security, just carrying around sensitive internal documents where everyone can see, like a huge goober. There’s some speculation that Kobach did it on purpose, but that gives him a lot of credit, I think.
The photo was taken by the Associated Press’s Carolyn Kaster. Reporters at the Topeka Capital-Journal quickly realized, hey, Kris, bud, we can read that:
As you would expect for someone wishing to serve in Trump’s cabinet, the proposals on page one of that paper are predictably demonic. From the Capital-Journal:
The document is arranged in a numbered format. The first point reads, “Bar the Entry of Potential Terrorists.”
The document calls for updating and reintroducing the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. The program was implemented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but largely suspended in 2011.
“All aliens from high-risk areas are tracked,” the document reads.
All that is, as the paper points out, comparable to what Kobach told Reuters in an interview. Kobach served in the Department of Justice under George W. Bush and helped pioneer a system called National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which, as Reuters wrote, subjected immigrants from certain countries to constant monitoring, mandatory check-ins, and was dismantled for being both redundant and a civil rights nightmare:
Under NSEERS, people from countries deemed “higher risk” were required to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting on entering the United States. Some non-citizen male U.S. residents over the age of 16 from countries with active militant threats were required to register in person at government offices and periodically check in.
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.
The paper in Kobach’s hand also calls for “extreme vetting questions” for “high-risk aliens,” and says Syrian refugees—the victims of the worst active humanitarian crisis in the world—would be totally barred from the United States.
Kobach’s hand is covering a few other ominous things: a reference to “386 miles of existing actual wall” for one, and the words “Draft amendments to National Voter —”, probably a reference to the National Voter Registration Act, suggesting that maybe the next step in disenfranchising voters is making it harder for people to register to vote to begin with.
A columnist for the Kansas City Star wrote recently that Kobach in a position of federal authority is “the scariest scenario that can be imagined,” calling him “rabid” about making the lives of undocumented people worse, “mean-spirited,” “vindictive,” and obsessed with treating them as “sub-human.” Sounds right.