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

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

A prominent supporter of Donald Trump’s 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.


“We’ve done it based on race, we’ve done it based on religion, we’ve done it based on region,” 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 show’s host.

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 Thursday morning, saying 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 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, he has had no “formal conversations” with the president-elect’s team.


Higbie’s comments were criticized 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.”

Takano, a Democrat, called on Trump to “immediately denounce” Higbie’s comments.

On Thursday morning, neither a spokeswoman for Kobach nor a spokeswoman for Trump replied to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Great America PAC said Higbie had stopped working for the fund-raising group on the day after the election.

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

“The US Congress itself had apologized for the Japanese internment,” McCaw said, referring to the Civil Liberties Act, which formally apologized for Japanese internment during the war and was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.

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

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 Department of Justice. The program was first proposed in 2002, and significant portions of it were suspended nine years later in 2011.


The policy came under heavy criticism while it was in effect and afterward. In a 2012 report, the Center for Immigrants’ Rights at 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.”

Though a reinstatement of that program would not be as broad or sweeping as the database of Muslim residents that Trump said during the Republican primaries that he would “certainly implement,” it set off a wave of criticism among many for whom it brought about the prospect of a wave of religious discrimination that could be an omen of worse to come.

While working under John Ashcroft at the Department of Justice, Kobach, whose education at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale and experience in government could make him an unusual fit for the administration of an outsider presidential candidate, created and implemented the system that he hopes to reinstate.

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

McCaw, the spokesman for CAIR, said the ideas advanced by Higbie and Kobach might seem to be different in degree, but 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.