Back to School

After Harvard, Kobach completed a Ph.D. program at Oxford University in England and, in 1992, returned to the United States to attend law school at Yale. He spent a year as a judicial clerk in the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. In 1996, when UMKC was looking for a constitutional law professor, Kobach applied. Suni says his résumé and his ability to provide political diversity with his conservative views made him immediately attractive.

"In those days, it was much harder for us to attract the kind of people we really wanted," Suni says. "Here's someone with big-name schools and a great thinker and someone who's very likely to come."

When he arrived, students took notice. The young professor began auctioning rides on his motorcycle in the annual fund-raiser for the Black Law Students Association. A quick excursion to lunch on his Daytona 1200 sports bike has drawn as much as $200.

Kobach has also become a favorite character in the $1.98 Law Review, an annual production that satirizes campus personalities and current events. Last year, the show included a skit called "Kobach's Garage Sale" that played on his propensity for answering his cell phone during class, his constant appearances on national news programs, and his Brad Pitt status among female students.

A more-distant figure also found him attractive: former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

On September 1, 2001, Kobach arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin a White House fellowship in Ashcroft's Justice Department. Ten days later, his plans took a drastic turn. As a fellow, the professor had already been tapped to advise the attorney general on immigration issues. But two weeks after the September 11 attacks, Ashcroft issued a challenge to his staff.

"He had us in the attorney general's dining room for a brown-bag lunch, and he basically related to the group that, when he spoke to President Bush on 9/11, the president told him, 'John, do not let this happen again,'" Kobach recalls. "So he basically issued an invitation: 'If any of you have ideas on what we can be doing differently, I want to know them personally, and I want to know them now.'"

Kobach says he'd already been considering the basics of a program that would come to be known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. NSEERS mandated that men from certain Arab and Muslim nations be photographed and fingerprinted when they arrived in the United States. Men from these countries who were already U.S. residents had to register. NSEERS also required that they be interviewed 30 days after they entered the country, that they notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service if they changed their address, and that they present themselves for an annual interview while they remained on American soil.

Ashcroft, Kobach says, "was immediately receptive of the idea and said, 'Kris, go ahead and pursue it.'"

In his new book, Never Again, Ashcroft refers to Kobach as "a sharp new White House Fellow," and includes him in a short list of acknowledgments — right after FBI Director Robert Mueller and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Kobach says Ashcroft isn't as grave as his press-conference persona implied. When the wives were back in Missouri, Kobach says, Ashcroft would often organize weekend trips with his staff to outdoor destinations such as Assateague Island in Maryland.

"We were hiking along the beach, and he said, 'OK, who wants to go body surfing?' and charged into the water," Kobach recalls. "He's not a stuffed shirt. He's not so dour and serious that he doesn't let loose."

Kobach spent months in discussions with high-level State Department and INS officials. But NSEERS was not well-received.

Ashcroft admits in Never Again that the program faced immediate criticism. Civil liberties organizations called the efforts racial profiling, universities objected to intrusions into their student records, and Middle East allies took issue with the fact that Muslim men were singled out. The major provisions were dropped less than a year after their inception.

The NSEERS program wasn't Kobach's only foray into federal policy. In 2002, he led a reform effort that reduced the number of judges who heard immigration appeals from 23 to 11. To keep up with the increasing number of cases, the smaller cadre of judges began issuing one-line opinions in response to complex legal decisions.

Mira Mdivani, an Overland Park immigration lawyer, says the attempt to streamline the system had the opposite effect. For example, she recently had a client from Somalia who got a one-liner from the Board of Immigration Appeals that would have sent him back to a war zone. Sensing that the opinion did not reflect a full analysis of his case, Mdivani appealed.

Immigration lawyers nationwide have done the same. Appeals increased sevenfold between 2001 and 2005. Overburdened federal judges began criticizing the changes; effectively reversing Kobach's reforms, the Justice Department is now proposing to boost the number of judges and mandate full opinions instead of one-line decisions.

Despite the criticism, Kobach says he had an open invitation to stay on in the Justice Department after most of his responsibilities were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. Instead, he decided to take his expertise to a different branch of government and entered the race for the Kansas 3rd District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004.