Trump team denies reports of plans for Muslim registry

by Jessie Hellmann - 11/17/16 7:52 PM ET

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team on Thursday denied that it supports tracking individuals based on their religion.

{mosads}Reuters reported this week that a Trump adviser considered drafting a proposal for the president-elect to instate a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.

“President-elect Trump has never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion, and to imply otherwise is completely false,” Trump communications director Jason Miller said in a statement to CNN Thursday.

“The national registry of foreign visitors from countries with high terrorism activity that was in place during the Bush and Obama Administrations gave intelligence and law enforcement communities additional tools to keep our country safe, but the President-elect plans on releasing his own vetting policies after he is sworn in.”

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an immigration hard-liner who has been advising Trump, told Reuters that transition policy advisers are weighing the merits of such a registry.

He added that the policy could be recommended as part of initial executive orders “so that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security hit the ground running.”

Trump has long embraced the policies of immigration hard-liners like Kobach meant to curb illegal immigration, cut off immigration from largely Muslim countries and limit acceptance of refugees from areas that have been plagued by terrorism.

Last November, Trump told an NBC reporter that he would “certainly implement” a database to keep tabs on Muslims in America, adding that Muslims would be required to sign up.

A month later, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

But his campaign has also updated its policy, which calls for a ban on immigration from countries that have a history of terrorism, not a ban on travel to the United States by all Muslims.

During an October speech in Gettysburg, Pa., he outlined his revised immigration proposal, saying it would suspend “immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.”

Tags Donald Trump