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.”