Photo credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Yesterday, Donald Trump held more meetings with all sorts of people hoping to ingratiate themselves with the president-elect. Among them was Kris Kobach, the deeply anti-immigrant secretary of state of Kansas who was thought to be Trump’s pick for attorney general, but now may be in the running for another job seeing as Trump selected another guy who hopes to rid America of menacing brown people.


Kobach posed for photos outside Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, and in doing so he revealed parts of the plan he pitched to Trump.


It’s tough to make out all the words, but we can see the first three bullet points:

Kobach would “reintroduce the NSEERS screening and tracking system (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) that was in place from 2002-2005. NSEERS was a system put in place by the Bush administration that made visitors and some United States residents who came from certain countries register with the federal government. Those countries per the ACLU was “ineffective [and] discriminatory,”

Kobach wants to “add extreme vetting for high-risk aliens,” which would mean asking questions “regarding support for Sharia law, jihad, equality of men and women, the United States Constitution.” Surely, the terrorists will give themselves up at this point.

The plan also calls for reducing “intake of Syrian refugees to zero.”

Some other stuff that can kinda be made out:

Kobach appears to call for wall construction along 1,989 miles of the Mexican-American border.



Way at the bottom underneath his sleeve, the term “voter rolls” is bolded and underlined, which would mean that obsession with non-existent voter fraud would be making its way into the White House.

Not much of what is visible here is much of a surprise, given both what Trump campaigned on and public statements given by Kobach. Last week in an interview with Reuters, Kobach floated the possibility of bringing back NSEERS.

Still, it’s helpful to have it all in one place, and of course it raises the question of whether Kobach was too careless to realize that his policy proposals were in full view of very powerful cameras—which would mean a potential future cabinet member accidentally enacted a plot point from the British political satire The Thick Of It—or whether this is some sort of secret trial balloon that doubles as viral marketing for the Trump administration. Ultimately, that question doesn’t much matter, since, no matter what the answer, Donald Trump is almsot certainly going to pursue an agenda that looks very much like the one Kris Kobach lays out here.