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Does anything strike you about this picture? That's the president-elect and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an anti-immigration hardliner whom he is considering for the Secretary of Homeland Security post. If you squint a bit, you can see that the future defender of our homeland is unintentionally leaking his confidential plan by posing with it for a photoshoot. And if you look even closer, you can see that "PLAN FOR FIRST 365 DAYS" in all its grotesque glory:

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Hey @nytimes, if you haven’t assigned all your reporters to the @kanyewest announcement yet maybe put one on this. pic.twitter.com/wpZ756iUFH — Mike Monteiro🌹 (@monteiro) November 21, 2016

While much of the text is obscured, we can make out a few bullet points quite clearly:

"Update and reintroduce the NSEERS screening and tracking system (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) that was in place from 2002-2005. All aliens from high-risk areas are tracked." (Editor's note: The system, put in place following 9/11, was shelved in 2011 because it was ineffective, costly, and often seen as harassment.)

"Add extreme vetting questions for high-risk aliens: question them regarding support for Sharia law, jihad, equality of men and women, the United States Constitution."

"Reduce the intake of Syrian refugees to zero."

Farther down the page, things are murkier. The next header appears to call for some course of action for a "record number of criminal aliens in the first year." Later, a plan for that famous wall along the southern border with Mexico invokes the PATRIOT Act. What could go wrong?

The Council on Islamic-American Relations has already "expressed alarm at Kobach's plan," according to his homestate Topeka Capital-Journal, calling the proposed extreme vetting process "inquisition-style questions." A spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, was unsurprised, however: "I think this is unfortunately in line with the actions we've seen from President-Elect Trump's transition team," he told the paper.

According to an NBC News report last week, Kobach expressly supports a Muslim registry and "believes Trump can take action immediately with the swipe of a pen." The report continues: "In an interview with Reuters this week, Kobach said Trump's immigrant transition team proposed drafting executive actions to reinstate a post-9/11 era program that registered immigrants and visitors from countries designated as havens for extremist activity." That appears to be reflected in the NSEERS section of the plan Kobach exposed today. According to TPM, Kobach designed the original program as a lawyer in George W. Bush's Justice Department.

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That NBC story also sheds some light on the connection between the border wall and the PATRIOT Act. Kobach has been a policy adviser to Trump for some time, and engineered his most specific plan to get Mexico to pay for the wall: Using a provision of the PATRIOT Act to prevent Mexican nationals in the U.S. from sending money home to their families. It would essentially be a hostage scheme to force the Mexican government, under pressure from their expats and the families dependent on them, to accept Trump's demands. Trump [link href='http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/jul/26/how-trump-plans-build-wall-along-us-mexico-border/' target='_blank' 0='data-tracking-id="recirc-text-link"' link_updater_label='external']alluded to the plan

at various points during the campaign.

TPM also suggests a line farther down reading, "Draft Amendments to National Voter..." may refer to the National Voter Registration Act. That federal law has blocked Kobach's voter suppression initiatives at the state level multiple times. Judges have ruled that "his attempts to require Kansans to show documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote" are in violation of the NVRA.

All this citing of post-9/11 legislation is a reminder of the pitfalls of rapidly expanding executive authority in the wake of a traumatic event. Kobach, of course, has a strong record of cooking up legal justifications for extreme right-wing policy. He wrote Arizona's infamous "papers, please" immigration law, and has waged war on voting rights in his own state. His role in crafting Trump's more detailed nativist policies seems to be greater even than previously known. We'll all have to wait and see what his hand was covering on that paper.

This post has been updated.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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