U.S. Border Patrol apprehends a group of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
This article is part of a Liberation News series exploring the different facets of Project 2025. Project 2025 is a comprehensive plan assembled by leading figures of the right wing elite laying out how a future Trump administration would shred the civil and economic rights won in the 1930s and 60s. Read the series’s inaugural article for an overview of the project and its significance.
Project 2025’s positions on immigrants and the U.S. immigration system would be a nightmare for immigrant rights if they were to be made real under a second Trump term. In its publication “Mandate for Leadership,” Project 2025 lays out its racist and xenophobic vision and policy agenda for immigration in the United States.
The Mandate employs the racist and dehumanizing terms “alien” and “illegal alien” in its discussion of immigrants and undocumented people in the U.S. Using typical right-wing rhetoric depicting the U.S. as a vulnerable country under attack and invasion by foreigners, the Mandate calls to “secure the homeland” and make repairs to the immigration system that has suffered from “the Left’s wokeness.” It makes clear that its priorities of “border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation” reflect its vision of creating a machine focused on locking up immigrants, separating families, and deporting migrants as efficiently and ruthlessly as possible. Project 2025 would have Congress funnel more taxpayer money to expanding the U.S.’s inhumane immigrant detention centers, enlarging the U.S.-Mexico border wall, and bolstering the ranks of enforcement personnel at Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As part of its mass deportation machine, Project 2025 intends to launch an assault on the sanctuary cities across the country that have historically been safer places for immigrants and undocumented people to live. Including some of the largest cities in the U.S. like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, these are municipalities in which local law enforcement are denied or limited in the ability to cooperate with the federal government in immigration law enforcement. One of the ways in which the Mandate hopes to attack sanctuary cities is by requiring local compliance with federal immigration detainers, which are requests from ICE to local law enforcement agencies to coordinate in turning over custody of immigrants that ICE is targeting for deportation. Another way the Mandate will target sanctuary cities is by creating “financial disincentives” for sanctuary jurisdictions and reviving a Trump-era practice of adding conditions to grants provided to local governments requiring compliance with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
The Mandate promotes an environment where immigrants would live in constant fear and ICE officers could operate with impunity when raiding and apprehending immigrants they are targeting for deportation. It calls for rescinding all existing policies designating areas of life such as schools, religious institutions, and hospitals as “sensitive zones” where immigration raids are prohibited. Not only would the elimination of sensitive zones make immigrants more vulnerable to ICE, but it would also expose communities to the danger and collective trauma of ICE raids.
Project 2025 encourages trampling over the due process rights of immigrants by expanding the power of immigration agencies to deport immigrants without a day in court before a judge through the expedited removal process. Currently the expedited removal procedure is only carried out against immigrants within 100 miles of the U.S.’s borders, but Project 2025 seeks to remove the 100-mile limitation and grant immigration agencies the power to conduct expedited removal anywhere in the country.
Disturbingly, Project 2025 seeks to completely eliminate immigration relief for some of the most vulnerable, exploited, and traumatized members of the U.S. immigrant population. For starters, the project would repeal T and U visas, essential forms of relief for immigrant victims of sex and labor trafficking and other serious crimes, offering the unsettling reason that “victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit.” Even under the current flawed system, crime victim applicants for the U visa have to endure notoriously long wait times of nearly a decade before they can have their applications decided due to annual quotas imposed by Congress. If the authors of Project 2025 had it their way, however, these immigrants would be totally left in the shadows, struggling to live not only without a path to immigration status but also as survivors of horrific crimes.
The Mandate also calls for the total repeal of TPS (Temporary Protected Status), a form of temporary immigration status provided to immigrants in the U.S. from specific countries designated as unsafe to return to due to natural disasters or armed conflict. The TPS list currently consists of 16 designated countries including Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador, Sudan, Yemen, and Nepal due to reasons including earthquakes, hurricanes, and armed conflicts. Eliminating TPS would severely and negatively impact these various immigrant communities by pulling the rug out from under their feet and putting them at risk of being deported to life-threatening conditions in their countries of origin.
Reflecting its racist and white nationalist agenda, Project 2025 calls for the repeal of the diversity immigrant visa system, which is a long-standing system enacted by Congress in 1990 (under President Bush, Sr.) meant to diversify the immigrant population that offers green cards to immigrants from countries that have low levels of immigration to the U.S. The Project has also set its sights to eliminate what it calls “chain migration,” referring to the legal right of green card-holding immigrants and naturalized U.S. citizens to petition their relatives abroad for green cards to also immigrate to the U.S. To Project 2025, these systems only further contribute to the “invasion” of the country by immigrant foreigners, especially people of color.
The Mandate also advocates other means to make obtaining immigration relief and status more difficult. It considers the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program designed to aid undocumented immigrant youth to be illegal and would take steps to cancel it. It recommends reinstating Trump’s anti-poor and working class policy on the public charge rule, which aimed to make it easier to block immigrants applying for green cards due to their receipt of public benefits. It calls for a significant increase of all immigration application fees, which already cost anywhere from hundreds to over a thousand dollars, which steals more from the pockets of immigrants and increases the financial hurdles of applying for fictional legal statuses. It would create more obstacles in the application process by making it easier for the agencies to reject applications and requiring applicants to submit to interviews more frequently. It aims to remove benefits afforded to unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. without their parents or guardian, stating that they only encourage parents in other countries to send their children while turning a blind eye to the horrific circumstances that cause these migration patterns.
For asylum seekers escaping persecution, Project 2025 only wants to make it more difficult to apply for status by narrowing eligibility and eliminating domestic violence and gang violence as legitimate grounds for asylum. Lastly, the Mandate also recommends eliminating or significantly reducing the number of student visas issued to students from “enemy nations” and reducing opportunities for workers from other nations to obtain status to work in the U.S.
Democrats try to outflank Trump from the right
Despite the nightmare for immigrant rights that Project 2025 represents, the Democrats, Biden, and their 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris are not the answer. Instead, they have only veered rightward under President Biden’s term and sought to mimic Trump’s anti-immigrant policies to appear to be tough on immigration for the upcoming presidential elections. Although Biden said he would undo Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and introduce “humane” initiatives, upon assuming office he only continued Trump’s Title 42 order expelling hundreds of thousands of asylum-seeking migrants, even going so far as to defend its legality in federal court. Even after the Title 42 restrictions were finally lifted in 2023, the Biden-Harris administration introduced arguably stricter rules that presume migrants crossing the border to be ineligible for asylum unless they meet certain exceptions. Immigrant rights and civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have criticized and challenged this new rule as illegal. In addition, more recently on June 4, Biden signed an executive order that tightened the U.S.-Mexico border and allowed for a temporary shutdown of asylum requests if a level of average daily encounters is reached.
It is reasonable to expect that Harris, if elected president, would continue the direction and policies on immigration that she and Biden established. After all, just earlier this year they both supported the anti-immigrant bill being considered in Congress. This bill would have increased funding to detention centers, border patrol, and immigration enforcement in the same ways that Project 2025 aspires to do. After Trump spoke out against the bill for not being strict enough, however, Senate Republicans blocked it. In a dark twist of irony, the Harris campaign will now plan to use that against Trump in the election and paint him as someone who isn’t sufficiently tough on immigration and the border in an effort to appeal to voters leaning toward Trump. Harris is also expected to play up her prosecutor past as attorney general of California and her record of laying down the law in border-related cases.
In a 2021 visit to Latin America, Harris merely echoed the anti-immigrant messaging that Mike Pence delivered on a similar trip in 2018 when he was vice president. Her memorable quote from that news conference suffices to sum up her and Democrats’ attitude and political stance on immigration: “Do not come.”
Our current immigration policy, and the one that Project 2025 represents, is a betrayal by both parties. Only a socialist program can guarantee full immigrant rights, granting them legal status, amnesty, and citizenship, and end all raids and deportations. Further, a socialist program would end all U.S. wars and U.S.-imposed economic sanctions which drive migration in the first place — part of a foreign policy based on collaboration and solidarity, not domination and aggression.
