JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): Ari, so you actually spoke with over 20 homeland security experts about Trump's proposal. How would it work?
ARI MELBER: Yeah, there's been questions about whether this is legal and whether it's a good idea. We dug in, because he is the major party nominee here, on what it would actually take. We can put up some of the quotes we got talking to people who were ICE, DHS, border security. They said it's “impractical,” “unworkable,”“impossible,” “not doable.”
SCARBOROUGH: Anybody tell you that it could be done?
MELBER: Some people looked at the price estimate, and I can show you that, 189 million entries to the U.S. a year that are non-immigrant entries. So, if you take that and you say, actually you want to patrol and vet those people for their beliefs, for their religion, you have to start looking at what the top Muslim nations are. We can put those up, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Of the top ten Muslim nations, only one has religion on a passport, which means you'd have to personally vet these people.
SCARBOROUGH: Well, and that's what Trump said, you'd have to ask them. You start by asking their religion.
MELBER: You'd have to ask them, you'd have to decide whether they were telling the truth, and then you'd have to track it. John Sampson, a former ICE official we spoke to, again, these are people who do border security for a living, said “what are you going to do here, tattoo the crescent on those who are Muslim? Are you nuts?” And we heard that again and again from people who basically said, this isn't workable. Now, you ask, what if you wanted to do it? Well, ballpark right now, we spend about $21.5 billion on immigration enforcement. We were told by officials it would take multiples of that. Maybe three times, 60 billion, maybe five times, up to 100 billion just to set up the kind of global vetting system to look at people's beliefs.
