That order, however, appears consistent with Sessions’s long record of public statements on Muslim immigration and his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sessions was among the first to defend Trump’s proposals to ban Muslims from the country, and has long portrayed Muslim immigrants to the United States as posing a particular threat. He has, moreover, issued a series of releases and public statements implying that the overall level of Muslim immigration to the United States, and not just the views of particular immigrants, should be a matter of public concern.

Asked during his January 10 confirmation hearing about his opposition to a 2015 amendment stating that “the United States must not bar individuals from entering into the United States based on their religion,” a measure Sessions called an “unprecedented” effort to ensure “these so-called ‘immigrants’ rights’ must be supreme to the rights of sovereign nations to determine who can and cannot enter their borders,” Sessions insisted he bore Muslims as a whole no ill will.

“I have no belief and do not support the idea that Muslims, as a religious group, should be denied admission to the United States. We have great Muslim citizens who've contributed in so many different ways,” Sessions said. But asked about Trump’s campaign proposal to bar Muslims from the United States, Sessions, foreshadowing both the executive order that would come days later, and the legal defenses of it that would be deployed in court, responded that he thought Trump believed “the focus should be on individuals coming from countries that have history of terrorism.”

Sessions previously offered unqualified praise for a 1924 immigration law that was designed to restrict immigration of nonwhites and Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly Jews. Like the Trump administration’s travel ban, it was defined in geographical terms, but its authors made no secret of which immigrants were being targeted. The goal of that law, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was to maintain the ethnic and religious composition of the United States so that those considered white protestants would remain the majority.

Sessions’s views on immigration may already be shaping administration policy, even prior to his confirmation. Trump’s top White House adviser, Stephen Bannon, has already identified Sessions as “the clearinghouse for policy and philosophy” in the Trump administration. Stephen Miller, a longtime Sessions aide, is now a key policy hand in the Trump White House. On a background briefing with reporters, a Trump adviser implied that the administration’s intent was to prevent the development of a Muslim community in the United States resembling those of Europe, viewing that as a national security threat in itself. “The situation that exists today in parts of France, in parts of Germany, in Belgium, etc, is not a situation we want replicated inside the United States,” the adviser said, adding that it would lead to “the kind of large and permanent domestic terror threat that becomes multidimensional and multigenerational and becomes sort of a permanent feature.”