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

Former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie interviewed by Megyn Kelly.Credit...Fox News

A prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump drew concern and condemnation from advocates for Muslims’ rights on Wednesday after he cited 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, 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. “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 show’s host.

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 that 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 constitutional lawyer and was working from a layman’s understanding of the 1944 Supreme Court ruling that the order for internment camps was constitutional. He said he hoped to be involved in the Trump administration but had engaged in no “formal conversations” with the president-elect’s team.

On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not reply to a request for comment. That night, a CNN reporter wrote on Twitter that Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump transition team, had issued the following statement: “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. 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.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Kobach declined to comment.

A spokesman for the Great America PAC said Mr. Higbie had stopped working for the fund-raising group on the day after the election.

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

Representative Mark Takano, a Japanese-American and Democrat from California whose parents and grandparents were imprisoned during World War II, said in a statement on Thursday that the comments reflected “an alarming resurgence of racism and xenophobia in our political discourse.” He called on Mr. Trump to denounce them.

Robert S. McCaw, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, called the reference to internment camps as a precedent “absolutely deplorable” and said that it would “return America to one of the darkest chapters of its history.”

Mr. McCaw noted that Congress had formally apologized for the Japanese-American internment in a law signed by President Ronald Reagan.

“I can’t see how it would now be right to do the same thing to Muslims,” Mr. McCaw said.

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Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas.Credit...Dave Kaup/Reuters.

Mr. Kobach, who is Kansas’ secretary of state, was referring to the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which he helped create while working at the Justice Department. The program was first proposed in 2002, and significant portions of it were suspended nine years later. Mr. Kobach, who has degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale, had helped to create and carry out the system when he worked for Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The policy came under heavy criticism while it was in effect and afterward. In a 2012 report, the Center for Immigrants’ Rights at the Pennsylvania State University’s law school called it a “tool that allowed the government to systematically target Arabs, Middle Easterners, Muslims and South Asians” and a “clear example of discriminatory and arbitrary racial profiling.”

“Within its first year of operation, the registration system resulted in the apprehension of numerous suspected terrorists,” according to his Kansas government biography.

That program was not as broad or sweeping as the database of Muslim residents that Mr. Trump had said he would “certainly implement” during the Republican primaries. He later backed off the idea after criticism.

On social media, many non-Muslims have reacted to Mr. Kobach’s comments by saying that they will simply “register as Muslim.” The official Twitter account of the Anti-Defamation League posted a statement from its chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, saying that “if one day Muslims will be forced to register, that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim.”

That seems unlikely to work; such a registry would apply only to visitors from certain countries.

Mr. McCaw, the spokesman for CAIR, said that the proposals advanced by Mr. Higbie and Mr. Kobach might seem to be different in degree, but that the two ideas — a database of names and internment camps based on religious or ethnic heritage — were inexorably linked.

“I really do feel as though the prospect of internment is always tied to registries of people,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Muslims Denounce Talk of Japanese Internment as ‘Precedent’ for Registry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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