Posted on March 10, 2017

Trump Travel Order Raises Specter of ‘Superior Race’: Hawaii Attorney General

Alex Johnson and Ali Vitali, NBC, March 10, 2017

President Donald Trump’s revised immigration order is so “blatantly discriminatory” that it seems designed to divide people into a “superior race,” Hawaii’s attorney general alleged Thursday.

Trump’s revised executive order, which restricts entry by nationals from six mostly Muslim countries and is scheduled to take effect March 16, includes nicer, “neutral” language, but it remains at its core a “Muslim ban,” Attorney General Doug Chin said at a news conference in Honolulu on Thursday.

Attorney General Doug Chin

Attorney General Doug Chin

Chin said that would set the country back by 75 years, when Japanese-American U.S. citizens were placed in internment camps during World War II.

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Hawaii this week became the first state to challenge the new order in court. A hearing is scheduled in U.S. District Court in Honolulu next Wednesday.

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“This is the first time that a president has made such a broad, sweeping kind of executive order that bans people purely based upon their nationality,” he said.

“In other words, it’s saying if you’re from one of these six countries, you are presumptively a terrorist. To us, that’s bringing us back to a time before I was even born, a time that our prior generation lived under, that’s a dark chapter that I don’t believe we should repeat.”

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Chin is a Democrat, but he denied Thursday that he was taking the lead in opposing the revised order to advance a political position.

“I don’t see this as a ‘Democrat’ thing or an agenda thing,” he said. “I see it as a racist thing.”