The Dangers of Project 2025 - Who's At Risk?

Project 2025 is a blueprint for the next administration, if its preferred candidate, Donald Trump, wins the U.S. presidential election. It is written by a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, with help from more than 100 other conservative groups. 

Though the project is not formally tied to Trump, who has tried to distance himself from the operation, its proposals were developed in part by former members of his administration and other Trump allies, and the ex-president has previously praised Heritage for its policy work.

 An as-yet-unreleased “playbook” lays out what Trump should do in his first 180 days. The project has drawn the most attention for its “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-page proposed policy agenda that describes itself as a “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors,” laying out plans for all aspects of the executive branch.

“The danger is real,” said Sandy Close, EMS Executive Director, at the Ethnic Media Services briefing. “We can’t believe they would put it down in writing as a manifesto,” she said incredulously. “But we are glad they did!” 

Experts at the EMS briefing described Project 2025 as an ideological agenda designed to push the U.S. toward autocracy. Legal experts warn that it would erode the rule of law, weaken the separation of powers, blur the lines between church and state, and threaten civil liberties. It aims to promote extreme policies, reshape the United States Federal Government, and consolidate executive power over the presidency.

“We know that this isn't in a vacuum, because we've seen it most recently in Springfield, Ohio, where false claims were made about Haitian immigrants saying that they had stolen pets and were eating them. That is not dissimilar from what our AAPI communities have faced for decades,” said Manju Kulkarni, Executive Director of AAPI Equity Alliance, a coalition of over 40 community-based organizations which serves and represents the 1.6 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County.

Immigration and the threat of mass deportation

Trump said that he, in a second term, would launch “the largest deportation in the history of our country,” and Springfield would be one of the first communities he’d target. In his campaign speeches Donald Trump has spoken of deporting legal immigrants or rescinding the citizenship of naturalized citizens.

“He is going to do it because he did many of those things or tried to do many of those things in the past.  We should not forget that thousands of children were separated from their parents. They were put in detention camps,” said Kulkarni. 

“They don’t want brown and black and Asian folks in the US so they want to scare us enough that we self-deport.” 

Project 2025 aims to eliminate family-based immigration, which has been a key tool for thousands of families having the ability to reunite in the US. 

Furthermore, in October of 2023, the U.S. government proposed significant changes to the process through which potential immigrants could process a H-1 B visa. The changes, aimed at modernizing the program and combating fraud, include amendments to the selection process, redefining eligibility criteria. Another significant threat to Asian immigration channels is that Project 2025 envisions greatly downsizing the H-1 B visa program. 

There's also been discussion of de-naturalizing U.S. citizens and even removing birthright citizenship by those who are running for office.

Project 2025 envisions a mass deportation force unlike anything we've ever seen. It would give broad authority to immigration agents at ICE to target, arrest, detain and deport immigrants, including Asian immigrants from across the country. Immigrant agents could claim the right to enter our private homes, schools, places of business, and even houses of worship, said Kulkarni, “arresting people who they suspect to be undocumented – a suspicion that is not necessarily based on actual immigration status. And we know that this also impacts millions of mixed families in our country, households with undocumented parents whose children are US citizens.”

Reproductive rights and freedom of choice

Yvonne Gutierrez, Chief Strategy Officer for Reproductive Freedom for All pointed to the 900-page conservative policy agenda on reproductive freedom, including abortion, medication, abortion, care, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. Throughout this document, the project propagates disinformation about reproductive healthcare, and it does so both through these direct policies but as well as using personhood ideology, and the extreme belief that life begins at conception as facts, and promoting harmful and outdated stereotypes.

This mandate, if permitted to take effect, would particularly devastate reproductive freedom. She highlighted some key examples. “It willfully misinterprets and misuses the antiquated Comstock Act to block access to both abortion pills and medical equipment used for abortion, care. This would effectively ban abortion in all 50 States, with or without the support of Congress and the courts. They don't need a national abortion ban!” she said.

Secondly, she said, it includes language and policies that propagate the belief that life begins at conception. This so-called personhood language could ban not only abortion, but also some forms of birth control and assisted fertility treatments like IVF.

“And one that is particularly scary is that it goes as far to track pregnancy outcomes, including abortion, across the country,” she said. “Project 25 plans to have the Federal Government broadly track pregnancy outcomes, including births and abortions, and withdraw a rule in place by the Biden Harris administration to actually strengthen HIPAA protections for patients accessing reproductive healthcare.”

The psychological impact of these policies cannot be disregarded. “So many women are afraid to seek care. immigrant families fear getting care because of fear of deportation. That will be multiplied if Project 2025 were in effect.”

Danger to Transgender freedom

Tony Hoang, the Executive Director of Equality California and Silver State Equality and a veteran of the LGBTQ+ equality movement spoke of the dangers to transgender community. “This document equates the act of being transgenderism to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed … describing it as a ‘social contagion’ for youth.” 

Project 2025 would revoke federal funds for gender-affirming care for all adults and minors; allow health providers to deny it if they object for religious reasons; and replace the Department of Health and Human Services with the “Department of Life”, cutting Title X family planning funding and redirecting federal funds to support a biblically-based definition of families as composed of a married father, mother and children, said Hoang.

“Ultimately, this is about power,” Kulkarni said. “Folks who had a monopoly on power in America are losing it because of demographic changes, and they don’t like it. In our democracy, if you can’t do something when it’s unpopular, you can do it by taking away the rights of individuals through executive action … It’s going to take all of us to fight that.”

“I do believe they have been inspired by their fear of replacement. The America that the authors represent Is being replaced by a different America, an America of inclusion, diversity, and equity, and they want to stop it. Full stop. It is a remarkable document that we need to take seriously as an intellectual formulation that we rarely see. I can't remember seeing such clarity over 900 pages, setting forth this manifesto,” said Close.