Dara Lind

For nine years, from 2002 to 2011, a version of one of Donald Trump’s most extreme proposals was standard US government policy: requiring certain people in the US on visas from Muslim-majority countries to register with the government. President Barack Obama suspended the program in 2011 — after years of complaints by civil rights groups that the program targeted Muslims and wasn’t effective in preventing terrorism. But it had never been fully dismantled — it was still sitting around for the Trump administration to dust off. Until now.

On Dec 22, the Department of Homeland Security published a regulation that would totally get rid of the National Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) — forcing the Trump administration to take the time to create something new, and giving civil rights groups an opportunity to stop them. The regulation goes into effect Friday, December 22, well before President Trump is inaugurated. So when his administration takes office — if it’s serious about finding a way to register people from Muslim-majority countries in the US — it’s going to have to find another way to do it.

Even after President Barack Obama released his longform birth certificate in 2011, Donald Trump repeatedly questioned its authenticity and insinuated there was a conspiracy (including murder!) to keep the truth of President Obama’s foreign birth from the public. Then in September 2016, Trump finally acknowledged that he did in fact believe President Obama was born in the US — and said that he’d dropped the issue after the longform birth certificate came out, even going so far as to falsely blame his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for starting the whole thing.

Trump did something — for years — and then denied he’d done it. Is it fair to call him a liar? Common sense says this is a pretty open-and-shut question. But New York Times public editor Liz Spayd — the paper’s independent ombudsperson — is really, really resistant to the idea that it’s ever okay to say, in so many words, that a politician “lied.” Ultimately, she’s okay with it in the case of Trump’s post-birtherist denials — because it was a particularly sustained and particularly racist kind of lie. But she protests that journalists shouldn’t use the word “lie” just because it’s “factually accurate” that a lie has taken place: "That said, I think The Times should use this term rarely. Its power in political warfare has so freighted the word that its mere appearance on news pages, however factually accurate, feels partisan. It feels, as Ryan said, as if you’re playing the referee in frivolous political disputes."

Expanding visas to allow more high-skilled workers to come to the United States was supposed to be the last bipartisan immigration proposal standing. But Hillary Clinton described comprehensive immigration reform as a way to "keep the pressure on" the tech industry to "resolve the bigger problem" — "and then we can look to see what else, if anything, can and should be done."

Clinton is making it clear that for Democrats, immigration is an issue primarily about Latino voters — not tech donors. The tech industry has sometimes thought of itself as first among equals when it comes to the "immigration reform" coalition — now there’s reason for it to worry it might be last.