Kris Kobach--Trumps Ideas Man For Hard-Line Immigration Policy (the man with the clipboard)

[riversedge]

I remember this......and now will be most likely an advisor to Trump. damn



By Jonathan Blitzer November 22, 2016





For more than a decade, Kris Kobach has been the G.O.P.’s anointed ideas man for hard-line immigration policies. Now he’s advising Donald Trump.Photograph by Carolyn Kaster / AP



During Mitt Romney’s campaign for President, in 2012, he claimed that he could solve the political conundrum of immigration reform by getting undocumented immigrants to “self-deport” from the United States en masse. He was roundly mocked for the idea. Why would millions of people voluntarily leave a country they’d long considered home? His suggestion, though, was hardly a flub—it was meant to be a serious threat. For Kris Kobach, the adviser who sold Romney on the concept, the eventuality of widespread self-deportation was entirely feasible. The government simply had to make life so unrelentingly difficult for immigrants that they’d have no other choice.

Kobach, who has been the Kansas secretary of state since 2011, is advising President-elect Donald Trump during the transition, and he appears to be a candidate for a top post in the incoming Administration. On Sunday, he met with Trump in Bedminster, New Jersey, to “discuss border security, international terrorism, and reforming federal bureaucracy,” according to an official statement. If Trump intends to expel the country’s undocumented immigrants—one of the core pledges of his campaign—Kobach is a natural ally. For more than a decade, he has been the Republican Party’s anointed ideas man for hard-line immigration policies. A press photograph taken of Trump and Kobach together after their meeting Sunday captured a hint of what might be in store. In plain view, Kobach held a memo detailing his “Strategic Plan” for the “Department of Homeland Security.” Several policy proposals were exposed to the camera: a national registry to help “bar entry of potential terrorists”; “extreme vetting” for “high-risk aliens”; construction plans for the “rapid build” of the border wall.

Kobach is fifty years old, and is a graduate of Harvard, Yale Law School, and Oxford, where he received a doctorate in political science. (Kobach declined to comment for this story.) While serving in the Justice Department after 9/11, he helped create a national registry to track immigrants from countries with a “high risk” of terrorism—an effort that resulted in zero terrorism prosecutions but put nearly fourteen thousand people in deportation proceedings. In 2003, Kobach left the federal government. He taught law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, but he wanted greater influence as an advocate, so he also took a position as a lawyer with an arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “hate group.” (FAIR has disputed the categorization.)

Over the next several years, Kobach used FAIR as the base of operations for a nationwide campaign to make life miserable for immigrants. In California, he appeared before the state’s Supreme Court to argue against a law that made college affordable for undocumented students known as Dreamers, who arrived in the U.S. as children. On his home turf, in Kansas, he opposed granting in-state college tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants. In Arizona, he argued on behalf of a county that sought to criminalize immigrants as felons for “smuggling” themselves across the border.

The federal government sets immigration-enforcement policy, but Kobach’s approach was to make municipal and state governments vehicles for draconian new initiatives. In recent years, he was involved in either drafting or defending sweeping anti-immigrant legislation passed in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah, as well as local ordinances in cities and towns in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Nebraska. These measures all relied on a legal theory known as “inherent authority,” which Kobach has used to argue that local and state officials have the power to enforce national immigration laws if they believe the federal government has been too lax.


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[dalton99a]

1. Kick.