Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, one of the chief architects of the anti-immigrant movement’s legal and legislative strategies, told a caller to his weekly radio program last week that while he thought it was “unlikely,” it would not be a “huge jump” to predict that the Obama administration could call an end to the prosecutions of African Americans for any crime. Claiming that “it’s already happened more or less in the case of civil rights laws,” Kobach told listeners that “I’ve learned to say with this president, never say never.”
Kobach was discussing the University of Minnesota’s decision to stop including race and other physical descriptions in email alerts of crimes on campus unless they have “sufficient detail that would help identify” a perpetrator, when a listener named Stu called in to share a theory.
“Given the situation in Minnesota, given the recent story that Obama was instructing immigration enforcement to not enforce the immigration laws against illegal aliens, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, Kris, to envision an announcement that any black person accused of a crime, charged with a crime, is not going to be prosecuted, regardless of the crime,” he said, adding that “we’ve already seen it from Eric Holder in his failure to prosecute the Black Panthers.”
Holder, Kobach agreed, “basically made it clear….that the civil rights laws were only to protect minority races, and he was not going to be enforcing them to the benefit of white people who were discriminated against on the basis of their race. So, that’s basically what you’ve described.”
“So the word is going to come down that there just won’t be any prosecutions of black criminals,” Stu predicted. “And I can see it happening. I don’t think I’m nuts for envisioning it.”
“Well, it’s already happened more or less in the case of civil rights laws,” Kobach responded. “So I guess it’s not a huge jump, I think it’s unlikely, but you know I’ve learned to say with this president, never say never.”
Kobach got national attention back in November when a caller presented the outlandish scenario that a Latino majority in the U.S. would embark on an “ethnic cleansing,” to which Kobach responded in a similar noncommittal way, saying that while he didn’t “think it’s going to happen in America,” under Obama “things are strange and they are happening.”
