REUTERS/Gary Cameron
The Obama administration is formally tearing apart a national registry which was used to keep tabs on visitors from countries with terrorist groups, the Department of Homeland Security announced today. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (Nseers) was developed after 9/11 and was widely criticized as a way to unjustly track of Muslims and Arabs in the US. It was, in many ways, a relic of the former Bush administration's "War on Terror." The DHS stopped using the NSEERS registry in 2011 because it was "redundant, inefficient and provided no increase in security," DHS spokesperson Neema Hakin told the New York Times.
With today's announcement, the Obama administration is making sure that Donald Trump won't be able to use the existing program as the basis for his so-called "Muslim registry." That won't stop Trump's ambitions entirely, but it'll make his anti-immigration promises much harder to fulfill. Over 80,000 people from 25 countries were pushed onto the NSEERS program, which required them to be fingerprinted, photographed and forced to attend periodic DHS interviews.
The news comes after tech workers from the likes of Google and Microsoft pledged that they would never build a Muslim registry for Trump. Yesterday, we also learned that Palantir, a data mining firm co-founded by Trump's lone tech adviser Peter Thiel, is also helping the US Customs and Border Protection agency to track illegal immigrants (with a bit of help from NSEERS).
"Since the implementation of NSEERS in 2002, DHS has increasingly moved away from the NSEERS model and instead focused on a targeted, intelligence-driven border security model that identifies current and emerging threats in real time," the DHS wrote in a memo today. "For these reasons, DHS has concluded that NSEERS is obsolete and inefficient; that its implementation would be counterproductive to the Department's comprehensive security measures; and that the regulatory authority for NSEERS should thus be rescinded."