Trump Camp’s Talk of Registry and Japanese Internment Raises Muslim Fears

Thursday, 17 November 2016

NesiaLive.com -  A prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump set off concern and condemnation on behalf of Muslims on Wednesday after citing World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps as a “precedent” for an immigrant registry suggested by a member of the president-elect’s transition team.

The supporter, Carl Higbie, a former spokesman for Great America PAC, an independent fund-raising committee that backed Mr. Trump, made the comments in an appearance on “The Kelly File” on Fox News.

He was referring to a suggestion by Kris Kobach, a member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, that the new administration could reinstate a national registry for immigrants from countries where terrorist groups were active.

“We’ve done it based on race, we’ve done it based on religion, we’ve done it based on region,” Mr. Higbie said in an appearance on “The Kelly File.” “We’ve done it with Iran back — back a while ago. We did it during World War II with Japanese.”

“You’re not proposing that we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope,” said Megyn Kelly, the host of the show.

Mr. Higbie, a former Navy SEAL who served two tours in Iraq, denied that, but said, “We need to protect America first.”

He stood by his comments in a phone interview on Thursday morning, saying that he had been alluding to the fact that the Supreme Court had “upheld things as horrific as Japanese internment camps.”

“There is historical, factual precedent to do things are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security,” he said, adding that he “fundamentally” disagreed with “the internment camp mantra and doing it at all.”

He clarified that he was not a constiutional lawyer and was working from a layman’s understanding of the law, and the 1944 Supreme Court ruling that the order for internment camps was constitutional.

And he said that while he hopes to be involved in the Trump administration, that he has had no “formal conversations” with the president-elect’s team.

Mr. Higbie’s comments were met with furious criticism by civil rights activists, Muslim organizations and politicians.

Representative Mark Takano, a Japanese-American congressman from California whose parents and grandparents were imprisoned during World War II, said in a statement Thursday that “these comments confirm many Americans’ worst fears about the Trump administration” and that they reflected “an alarming resurgence of racism and xenophobia in our political discourse.”