“We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized,” said 2016 Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Senator from Texas Ted Cruz in a statement last week following the deadly March 22 coordinated terror attacks in Brussels.

“For years, the West has tried to deny this enemy exists out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either. Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods,” continued Sen. Cruz’s statement according to CNN.

Time notes that New York City Police Department deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism John Miller recently responded to Cruz’s comments on CBS’ Face the Nation, saying, “When you have people campaigning through fear and using that as leverage, and then giving advice to police to be the cudgel of that fear, that’s not the direction American policing should be taking in a democracy. We’re the proudest country on the planet and that’s because we have been a leader on freedom and human rights and everything else.”

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Miller added, “I think in our history if there are moments of shame it would be Japanese internment, the Red Scare and McCarthyism, torture after 9/11 — these are things that on reflection, through history, the American people have rejected.”

Rival Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called Cruz’s proposal a “good idea.”

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) disagreed with Cruz’s plan and said according to CBS News, “To send inflammatory messages could actually have an unintended consequence.”

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“In Europe it’s very segregated, and you have the diasporas in Belgium that I saw. And they’re being radicalized because they’re not assimilated with the culture. I don’t think we have that same situation in the United States,” said McCaul.

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