Project 2025: Immigration

Written by white nationalists the Project 2025 immigration agenda is a white nationalist vision for America

Overview

Project 2025 is a radical plan geared for a potential second Trump term and setting the agenda for the right. Broadly expansive, Project 2025 targets immigrants and anyone who looks like one. The Heritage Foundation is the driving force behind Project 2025, but it is made up of over 100 right-wing organizations. On immigration, the President of the Heritage Foundation recently stated their goal: “we need to have the biggest mass deportation system ever.” 

But now that this plan “has gained notoriety — thanks, in part, to actor Taraji P. Henson and others — Trump has sought to distance himself from the effort,” Judd Legum reports at Popular Information. It’s a laughable claim from Trump, because top voices within his administration have been responsible for this nearly-1,000 page agenda that fundamentally alters our government and rolls back constitutionally protected rights. As Legum notes, “of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition.”

When it comes to the immigration issue, Trump and his team’s fingerprints, and extremely racist and xenophobic ideas, are all over Project 2025 - literally. Their plan takes Trump’s rally rants and lays out the policy to achieve it. 

Policy 

Selected immigration components of Project 2025 are below:

Mass Detention and Family Separation: Project 2025 paves the way for mass family separation by eliminating important benefits for unaccompanied children and transfers the care of unaccompanied minors from Health and Human Services to DHS to allow for large scale detention of young children. The proposal recommends weakening standards for migrant detention, calling for mass detention in temporary structures such as tents. 

Attacks on Dreamers and Parents of US Citizens: Project 2025 calls for the elimination of family-based immigration and DACA. 

Raid Schools Hospitals and Religious Zones: Project 2025 removes prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’ thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions. 

Suspending Due Process: Project 2025 removes legal processes allowing immigrants a day in court by expanding the use of expedited deportations to the ‘fullest extent’ throughout the country. It also gives DHS the authority to declare a ‘mass migration event’ and enact anything to avert it (e.g. scrapping all Title 8 requirements and automatically expelling migrants). The proposal further undermines due legal processes by allowing immediate expulsion of migrants in the case of ‘loss of operational control’ or USCIS backlogs which is caused by consistent underfunding from Republican officials. Project 2025 would create a show-me-your-papers style mandate and require ICE to remove, arrest, and detain immigration violators anywhere in the country and without warrant, if possible. The plan authorizes local law enforcement to participate in border security actions and penalizes jurisdictions that do not comply. The project also plans to remove oversight authorities from ICE and classify all USCIS operations.

Use of the Military: Project 2025 encourages the use of the US military to crack down on peaceful migrants arriving at the border. The proposal also considers engaging in war with drug cartels in Mexico.

Attacks Legal Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to restrict legal immigration by barring certain groups or nationalities from accessing work and student visas, eliminates DACA, family-based immigration, TPS, and visas for victims of crime, reduces asylum and discounts gang and domestic violence as grounds.

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Authors

Beyond the plan, there are the men, and they are mostly men, who were key advisors in the last Trump administration who will be the committed proponents to carry out the plan if given the chance. In their own writing, public appearances and media coverage have been expanding and expounding on the Project 2025 agenda. 

Stephen Miller

Several are on Project 2025’s Advisory Board, including America First Legal, the extremist, xenophobic group led by white nationalist and former Trump administration advisor Stephen Miller. Miller is the mastermind of Trump’s mass deportation plans, who, as Radley Balko detailed, “plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants.” Under this plan, children will come home from school to find their parents disappeared. Crops will rot in the fields. Working families will suffer.

We know Miller means what he says because he was principal architect of the Trump administration’s cruelest immigration policies, including the discriminatory Muslim ban, the attempt to end the popular and successful DACA program and subject hundreds of thousands of Dreamers to deportation, and the traumatic “zero tolerance” policy that ultimately resulted in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of 5,500 children from their parents at the southern border. Behind the scenes, Miller reportedly pushed for the separation of as many as 25,000 children, and apparently became so outraged by the lack of progress on separations that he forced Trump administration officials to take a vote by a show of hands on proceeding. 

Trump administration figures that helped Miller advance this horrific agenda are now key figures behind Project 2025 and have in stark terms laid out their dystopian vision for a potential second Trump term.

Gene Hamilton

Author of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Justice is Gene Hamilton, who serves as the Vice Chair of Miller’s organization and was a top aide to former Trump Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. As further noted by Legum, Hamilton drafted the Trump administration’s family separation policy, working in tandem with Miller to implement the memo against internal warnings “that the execution of a policy that separated children from their parents would create moral, legal, or logistical problems,” The Atlantic reported in 2022. 

The New York Times reported that Hamilton “pushed aggressively” to expand family separation beyond the initial, secretive “piloting” of the program in 2017. During a meeting with prosecutors the following spring, his boss gave the chilling orders: “‘We need to take away children,’ Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes.” 

To this day, 1,400 children remain apart from their families due to the Trump administration’s rapid deportation of parents, failure to track separations, and general indifference toward the most vulnerable among us. Experts with Physicians for Human Rights said the policy constituted torture and enforced disappearance, a term usually associated with human rights abuses in dictatorial regimes in Chile and Argentina. One separated parent said that officers told her that her son would be put up for adoption. They told her to forget about him. They would not be reunited for two months.

Hamilton was also a key player in the Trump administration’s moves to end DACA. As Jonathan Blitzer wrote about a deposition of Hamilton back in 2017: “During the proceeding, Hamilton was pushed to describe the part he’d played in various Administration decisions. Over four hours, he detailed his interactions with senior officials such as Kelly and Miller, shared his personal views on immigration policy, and acknowledged, notably, that he’d been the author of the September 5th D.H.S. memo that formally terminated DACA.”

At a recent House hearing, while being grilled by Rep. Jasmine Crockett about the role America First Legal plays in Project 2025, Hamilton boasted, “we are proud contributors to Project 2025.”

Ken Cuccinelli

Meanwhile, the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Homeland Security is Ken Cuccinelli, which is ironic considering that the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the Trump administration unlawfully appointed him to serve as deputy DHS secretary. A federal court found that Cuccinelli’s appointment to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services by the Trump administration was also illegal. Cuccinelli took a sledgehammer to this agency when at its helm, personally pressuring asylum officers to deny claims, rolling out policies intentionally harming asylum-seekers and immigrant families through credible fear interview changes and a discriminatory public charge rule, and even trying to strip terminally ill immigrants of deportation protections. 

When the gut-wrenching photo of a father and child who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande went viral in 2019, Cucinelli went onto television to despicably claim that the father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, only had himself to blame. Cuccinelli also previewed some of the extremist rhetoric now normalized by the GOP, including comparing immigrants to “rodents”. Trump has echoed Nazi rhetoric by dehumanizing immigrants as “animals,” “not people,” and “poisoning the blood.”

Related to the mainstreaming of extremist rhetoric within the Republican Party, another member of the Project 2025 Advisory Board is The Center for Renewing America, which just published a strong defense of the Great Replacement Theory written by the group’s Vice President, Wade Miller.

Tom Homan

Thomas Homan, Trump’s former acting ICE director, is now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and is also listed as a Project 2025 contributor. Along with Miller, he’s been one of the most vocal proponents of a mass deportation vision. During a recent gathering of far-right activists, Homan pledged to make good on the Trump campaign’s promise to round up millions of immigrants – with him at the helm of Miller’s red state deportation army.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”

Under Homan’s tenure as acting ICE director, the arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record surged over 170 percent in 2017. He openly took pleasure in terrorizing families, saying the following year that he was “enjoying it.” Homan also issued a diabolical warning to immigrant families, telling them they “should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.” 

Since leaving the Trump administration, Homan has associated with hate groups and has been a vocal messenger of white nationalist conspiracy theories. Homan told The New York Times he’d “come back” for a second Trump term to “run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.” Like Miller, he means it. “Thomas Homan deports people. And he’s really good at it,” stated the Washington Post in April 2016.