Project 2025 May 28th Update

Project 2025 Is Here.

With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe. 

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy, which is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.

Project 2025’s stated goal is to create an “ideal” America that would see women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and others deprived of their hard-won constitutional rights and the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is keen to achieve. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE monitors how Project 2025 is becoming a reality and reports on the ties between the project and the administration, and its impact on the American people and democracy. We track Project 2025 activities at the federal, state, and local levels, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America.

This week we look at how the Trump regime is implementing Project 2025’s call for mass deportations across the country, where ICE appears to be focusing on feeding a lucrative assembly-line detention machine rather than apprehending the violent criminals, terrorists and gang members Trump campaigned on. We’ll also take a look at border czar and Project 2025 contributor Tom Homan’s recently revealed financial ties to the booming detention industry that holds these people under deplorable, inhumane conditions.

Nashville: A Mother’s Nightmare

Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus measured the distance between life and death in hours: seventy-two of them, to be precise. The 38-year-old Guatemalan woman carried her deceased child in her womb for three days while pleading with guards and medical staff for care beyond testing her urine and checking her blood pressure. She knew something was wrong, but they dismissed her concerns as routine pregnancy discomfort. “I had him inside here for three days, in this Louisiana facility, my baby dead in my stomach, inside my stomach for three days, dead,” she told the Nashville Banner. 

Her boyfriend of 18 months and the father of her child is Gary Bivens. The couple met when they were neighbors. Bivens was a widower and Monterroso-Lemus helped him in his grief, which gradually turned into a romantic relationship. Bivens reported all was well with the pregnancy after Monterroso-Lemus’s regular checkup on February 10. 

The ordeal began on March 26, 2025, when Lenoir City Police detained her for missing a child custody hearing. She had temporarily transferred custody of two of her six children to her mother, but with a new life growing inside her, she was trying to get it together. Yet missing that Saturday hearing would prove to have dire consequences.

Bivens posted bail for Monterroso-Lemus right away, but ICE had already snatched her up on a detainer hold, just as they had the other 195 other people in Nashville they assumed were undocumented during that sweep of the city. “That’s when the nightmare started,” Bivens said.  

Monterroso-Lemus was moved through a circuit of detention facilities over the coming days — Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama — before arriving at Richwood in Louisiana in early April when her pregnancy was around five months along.

Richwood, operated by LaSalle Corrections, is a facility with documented baggage. A 2023 Department of Homeland Security inspection had catalogued violations: unclean living conditions, inadequate medical grievance systems, and restricted access to legal visits.

 An August 2024 ACLU report revealed that Richwood’s problems extend far beyond the bureaucratic negligence noted by DHS. Their report documented a catalog of institutional sadism, including untreated medical conditions, prolonged solitary confinement exceeding 200 days, physical and sexual assaults by staff, and cockroach-infested food. The ACLU characterized these conditions as torture under international law, creating an environment where medical neglect during pregnancy becomes a sadly predictable outcome.

Monterroso-Lemus encountered these conditions directly. Despite repeated requests for ultrasounds to monitor her pregnancy, staff limited care to blood pressure checks and urine tests. As contractions began, officials dismissed her concerns, telling the mother of six children that the pain was normal because “the baby was growing.” On April 29, physicians confirmed intrauterine fetal death, noting the pregnancy was “complicated by no PNC” — no prenatal care. She delivered her stillborn son while shackled, she says, and by Mother’s Day Monterroso-Lemus had been deported to Guatemala.

“They sent our son home to me in a box, through the mail,” Bivens says, posting photos of a tiny baby, foot and handprints, and the package he says was sent to him by the ICE facility containing the stillborn boy’s cremated remains. 

“It’s unbelievable. It’s disgusting. I’m beside myself, I really am,” Bivens said. “I’m ashamed to even call myself an American citizen. With what is going on in these facilities? … It’s costing people’s lives. It’s breaking families apart. It’s so inhumane. … It’s un-American. That’s what’s happening.”

Mississippi: The Citizenship Trap

The shackles around Kasper Eriksen’s ankles on April 15 embodied the disconnect between America’s immigration rhetoric and its enforcement reality. The Danish welder and green card holder from rural Mississippi, a father of four with a fifth child imminent, found himself chained to a detention shuttle because of a missing form from 2015.

Eriksen’s arrest at what he believed would be his final citizenship interview illuminates ICE enforcement priorities. Immigration officials acknowledge that cooperative immigrants represent easier targets than dangerous fugitives to meet the deportation numbers demanded by the Trump regime, and Eriksen exemplified this vulnerability. 

A brawny young man with sandy hair and a broad grin, Eriksen first came to Mississippi as a foreign exchange student in 2009. He met a girl named Savannah at the high school they both attended in Starkville and fell head over heels. They dated long-distance for years before he legally immigrated to the U.S. in 2013. That May, he got down on one knee in front of the Cinderella Castle at Disneyworld. She said yes, the couple married and their first daughter was born in January 2017.

Eriksen was in the process of holding down his job as foreman at the welding shop in Sturgis while building a home with his own hands for his growing family. Savannah cared for and homeschooled their towheaded brood, three girls and a boy, thus far. 

He had a green card, a social security number, a driver’s license, paid taxes reliably, obeyed the law and approached naturalization with earnest compliance. His transgression was Form I-751, a “Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence” due in 2015, a step that slipped through the cracks during the early days of their marriage when the young couple was grieving Savannah’s miscarriage.

Immigration services issued a removal order in 2019 without successfully notifying the family, creating a bureaucratic trap that would be sprung six years later. As USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser told the Mississippi Free Press, a single missed notice negated a decade’s worth of work toward citizenship. 

“It is the responsibility of conditional residents of the United States to apply to have those conditions removed before their Green Card expires — allowing them to obtain their permanent residence and ultimately citizenship,” Tragesser said. “This is a long-standing requirement set by law, and ignoring it can have severe consequences, including removal from the country.”

Eriksen shares a large cell at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, LA,  with nearly 100 detainees. The facility, operated by GEO Group — a major donor to the Trump campaign who saw its stocks soar post-election — represents the profitable intersection of political rhetoric and private incarceration. Savannah, who has started an online fundraiser to help with legal costs and the financial hardship of losing her family’s sole breadwinner, reports that Eriksen was denied bond at an immigration hearing on May 27 but has yet to be deported.

Nashville: Education Under Siege

The empty desks in Laura Verner’s third-grade classroom tell Nashville’s immigration story with devastating clarity, symbolizing a political climate that transforms school attendance from an educational routine into a deportation risk.

Verner’s classroom has become an inadvertent laboratory for studying the educational impact of fear. One student spent reading class sobbing on the hallway floor, her mother deported the previous weekend, leaving behind a child whose academic focus dissolved into desperate uncertainty about maternal whereabouts. “I had this little girl sitting right outside my classroom door crying because she didn’t know where her mom was,” Verner recounts with the particular exhaustion of educators confronting institutional cruelty beyond their professional purview.

The psychology of enforcement extends beyond immediate family separation to anticipatory paralysis. One mother confided her terror of driving her daughter to school. An arrest during morning commute while alone with her child would abandon the girl to institutional limbo. “It’s just her and her daughter and she’s like, ‘And then what will she do?'” Verner explains, articulating the impossible choice between educational advocacy and family preservation that immigration operations impose upon vulnerable communities.

The empty seats in Nashville classrooms reflect a broader national exodus. Denver schools recorded 3,323 student withdrawals through mid-April — an increase of 686, while data from 15 districts across eight states reveal similar patterns of calculated retreat into hiding or self-deportation following Trump’s January inauguration.

New York State’s Education Department now sanctions virtual learning for immigrant students who “may be unable or averse to attending school, including during times of political uncertainty,” the State Education Department’s March 13, 2025 policy reads. “This may include English Language Learners, immigrant and migrant students, as well as others who may be affected and reluctant to attend school in person due to concerns about their personal safety and security.” Schools that once symbolized American opportunity now represent existential risk, forcing families to choose between their children’s education and their family’s survival — reducing learning to a luxury fewer immigrant families can afford.

The Courthouse Gambit

America’s immigration courthouses have been transformed into carefully orchestrated traps, where legal victory has become a prelude to detention. Across the country, federal agents now wait in courthouse hallways to arrest migrants the moment they emerge from hearings — even when judges dismiss their cases.

Three immigration officials told the Associated Press that government attorneys received orders on May 19 to systematically dismiss cases, including “people who have no criminal records, migrants with no legal representation and people who are seeking asylum,” knowing that ICE agents are waiting outside to make the arrests. This coordination between prosecutors and enforcement marks a fundamental shift: the justice system itself has become bait.

And while Trump vowed to deport “gang members and criminals,” agents are systematically targeting law-abiding migrants with no criminal records — arrests that inflate deportation statistics without the complexity of pursuing actual criminals. The math is brutal: easier targets yield better numbers.

Seattle: A migrant walked out of Seattle’s courthouse on May 22, holding dismissal papers, as his deportation case had been terminated at the government’s request. Seven ICE agents waited in the hallway. His legal victory lasted exactly as long as his walk to the exit. Plainclothes agents were positioned at exits while prosecutors requested case dismissals, creating an assembly line from the courtroom to custody. Court observers documented three arrests that week, each of which used “expedited removal” orders that bypassed judicial review. Twelve migrants skipped their May hearings rather than risk detention, triggering in absentia removal orders that gave enforcement fresh targets. The strategy is self-perpetuating: make court dangerous, then arrest people for not appearing. 

San Diego: ICE officers arrested 11 people after their court hearings at the San Diego Immigration Court on May 23, positioning themselves in hallways outside courtrooms to arrest individuals and place them into expedited removal proceedings that bypass judicial review. The operation unraveled when officers attempted arrests based on faulty identification. An immigration attorney from the American Bar Association’s Immigration Justice Project accompanied his client from the courtroom when ICE moved to detain the man. When the attorney requested to see their warrant, the officers physically positioned themselves between the lawyer and the client. Two officers seized the man and appeared to cuff him while forcing him to the ground, where he began gasping for air and hyperventilating.

“May I please see a warrant because the warrant you provided is not that person,” the attorney stated. “You are making an unlawful arrest.” Officers maintained their position around the detained man, preventing the attorney from assisting even as his client’s breathing became increasingly distressed. When ICE cited the man’s condition as justification for keeping the lawyer away, the attorney responded: “He’s having a medical emergency thanks to you.”

The confrontation continued until another attorney called for an ambulance. ICE officers eventually stepped back, allowing the lawyer to support his client’s weight and escort him toward the elevator. “I will help my client at this point,” the attorney declared as they departed. “You guys have done enough.” ICE later acknowledged the arrest was made in error.

Those arrested were taken to Otay Mesa, a private detention facility notorious for abuse, neglect and assault that is operated by Trump-donor CoreCivic, which benefits directly from enforcement escalation, creating profit motives for continued operations that exploit legal technicalities to bypass constitutional protections.

Buffalo: ICE agents violated courthouse sanctuary on May 22, arresting four migrants inside the federal building itself — a breach attorneys called unprecedented. Six to 12 officers, many plainclothes and some armed, occupied courtrooms and hallways. A 19-year-old Venezuelan with a court extension until February 2026 was cornered in an elevator by agents demanding he sign deportation papers without counsel. Six migrants skipped hearings rather than risk arrest, generating four in absentia orders that fed the removal pipeline. Those arrested were taken to the Buffalo Federal Detention Center (BFDC), managed by Akima Global Services, which also manages the ICE detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay per a $163 million federal contract. BFDC has been plagued with allegations of severe mistreatment, including excessive force by guards and prolonged solitary confinement, as documented in 2023 and 2024 federal audits.

Miami: Juan Serrano, a 28-year-old Colombian migrant with no criminal record, attended a hearing for what he thought would be a quick check-in. Government attorneys asked to drop the case. “You’re free to go,” the judge told Serrano. ICE had other ideas. Five federal agents waited outside the courtroom, cuffed him against the wall, and whisked him away in a van with a dozen other courthouse detainees. 

Serrano fled Colombia in 2022 due to threats related to his work as a political adviser, submitted asylum paperwork, and lived a law-abiding life with his Venezuelan girlfriend. They met while working on a cleanup crew helping clear Hurricane Ivan debris in Tampa. They fell in love and moved to Miami where he worked construction while she cleaned houses, driving carefully, scraping together rent for their apartment decorated with photos from their visit to the Statue of Liberty. 

Serrano called her to tell her the news, and she was left outside the courthouse holding his passport, immigration papers and tax receipts trying to figure out how to tell his parents. “He told me to go, that he had been arrested and there was nothing more to do,” she said.

Phoenix: A Venezuelan man fled Caracas after receiving death threats for his work as a political adviser opposing the Maduro regime — the kind of targeted persecution that typically qualifies for asylum protection under U.S. law. In November 2024, he secured one of the 1,250 daily CBP One appointments distributed across eight border crossings, choosing bureaucratic patience over the cartel-controlled smuggling routes that had claimed thousands of lives. He submitted biometric data, cleared background checks, and crossed at Nogales with documentation that should have guaranteed legal standing.

The system promptly betrayed him. The Trump administration canceled his appointment on January 20, revoked his parole status on April 8, and then issued new paperwork demanding a courthouse appearance. When he arrived at Phoenix Immigration Court on May 21 for his first hearing, a credible fear interview — the first step for asylum seekers fleeing political persecution–he carried the confidence of someone who had followed every rule while fleeing government persecution. The hearing proceeded with standard efficiency until the ICE attorney moved to dismiss his case — a development that should have meant freedom. Isaac Ortega, his attorney, watched the proceeding conclude normally. His client gathered his papers and headed for the exit, believing his legal compliance had been vindicated. 

Masked federal agents waited in the courthouse corridor. They wore no identifying badges, refused to name their agency, and insisted only that they possessed federal authority. Video footage captured several agents around unmarked vehicles, their faces concealed, and their legal basis for detention deliberately obscured. “My client has no criminal history; he entered the U.S. through the CBP program,” Ortega stated as his client disappeared into an unmarked vehicle bound for a Phoenix processing center. “Tuesday was his first court date, and he was trying to do the right thing.” Multiple arrests occurred simultaneously as attorneys watched their clients vanish despite having their cases dismissed. One female lawyer described the scene as “mayhem” to colleagues, later confiding that she remained “shaken to her core.”

The Misery Business: Project 2025’s Deportation Inc.

Tom Homan’s financial disclosure was released quietly by the Department of Homeland Security on May 23, 2025, just before the long Memorial Day weekend. It revealed that before joining the Trump administration as “border czar,” Homan earned consulting fees exceeding $5,000 from GEO Group, one of the two companies operating the vast majority of America’s immigrant detention facilities. The amount could be far higher; ethics rules require no greater specificity than “more than $5,000,” a disclosure threshold that transforms potential millions into regulatory anonymity.

The news confirms that the mass deportation machine envisioned by Project 2025 is both an ideological crusade and a financial enterprise. When Homan was appointed in January, GEO Group’s stock had already surged 90 percent since election night, with investors recognizing what the disclosure now makes explicit: Homan’s personal financial interests align seamlessly with the companies positioned to profit from his “biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” 

In 2024, GEO donated $1 million to Trump’s presidential campaign through its subsidiaries. Thus far in 2025, GEO has seen a return on its investment with contracts to reopen facilities in New Jersey and Michigan, generating a combined annual revenue of $130 million. ICE contracts accounted for 43 percent of GEO Group’s revenues in 2024, making immigration enforcement the cornerstone of their business models. The company’s CEO estimated that his company could generate $400 million a year through immigration detention centers under the Trump regime.

This convergence of personal profit and public policy finds its intellectual foundation in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for authoritarianism that Homan helped craft as a visiting fellow. The document’s recommendations for immigrant roundups and detention camps read differently when viewed through the lens of Homan’s consulting fees. That Project 2025 section appears more like a business plan, written with input from someone with a direct financial stake in its implementation.