“The talk that is published by media sources that President Trump will deport Arabs can be described as bulls---,” Walid Phares said. | AP Photo Trump aide: Iranian regime spreading rumors about deportation of Muslims

Reports that President-elect Donald Trump may deport Muslims “can be described as bulls---,“ and are perpetuated by “the Muslim Brotherhood or the Iranian regime,” according to Walid Phares, a Trump adviser on national security issues.

“The talk that is published by media sources that President Trump will deport Arabs can be described as bulls---,” Phares said in an Arabic-language interview with Elaph Journal, a pan-Arab website based in London.


“The Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian regime are behind it,” he said, adding, “and more than that, this talk aims to intimidate Muslims, and those who work to intimidate them want to control them. There is no positive reason for the American government to deport any citizen.”

Phares pushed back against the notion that a President Trump would discriminate against Arabs or Muslims, despite his call last December to ban all Muslims from entering the United States “until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

“The sources that publish these lies themselves deport their peoples from Aleppo and Mosul,” Phares said, calling whoever is behind these “accusations” an “ideological party rooted in the Middle East.”

The deportation of any particular community of citizens “does not exist in American political culture,” Phares added.

Phares, a Lebanese-born Maronite Christian who moved to the United States in 1990, writes frequently on terrorism and Middle Eastern affairs, and has been a commentator on those topics for Fox News since 2007.

In 2011, when Phares became an adviser to then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the magazine Mother Jones linked him to Lebanese Christian militias that were accused of committing atrocities against Muslims; Phares has denied the accusations.