(REPORT) — Totally unused since 2011 according to most officials, the NSEER system, which required registration of immigrants entering and exiting the US from predominantly Muslim countries, has been canceled by the Obama Administration, as the incoming Trump Administration says they are looking at a very similar program for their own Muslim registration scheme.
The NSEER program was widely criticized by civil and human rights groups, and was mostly abandoned in 2003 as not particularly useful, though some aspects of it were kept around for years after that. Trump’s transition team is said to be keen on the program, however, or something like it, and is said to like a lot of the more onerous aspects, and wanting to expand it to more direct religious profiling.
In removing the program, Obama eliminates the remnant infrastructure, but analysts say this would be only a minor inconvenience for the Trump administration, whose own program is expected to feature some notable differences, and likely is done mostly for the sake of being able to say the Trump program wasn’t inherited.
The move was the result of calls from several Democrats, who argued in an open letter that the program hadn’t led to a single terror conviction, and that Trump shouldn’t be given any tools to help with his own planned registry.