Project 2025 April 15th Update

Project 2025 Is Here

Project 2025 is a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism published by the Heritage Foundation and developed with input from more than 100 far-right organizations. Its stated goal is to reshape America into an “ideal” nation in which women cannot get abortions or contraception, LGBTQ+ people don’t exist in public life, immigrants are removed en masse, and education, the environment, and the social safety net are gutted. The Trump administration is implementing the plan. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE tracks how Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are becoming a reality under Trump, and their impact on the American people and democracy, and advocates for ways to stop the implementation of authoritarianism in the U.S.

This week, we look at the architect of Project 2025 toasting the man who coined the term “alternative right” and putting Heritage’s institutional muscle behind a magazine whose pages have defended David Duke and published the work of white supremacists. We also look at the White House purging immigration judges who won’t rubber-stamp deportations, and Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator keynoting a conference thrown by a radical climate-denial group and Project 2025 contributor, the Heartland Institute.

Kevin Roberts Raises a Glass to the Godfather of the Alt-Right

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025, toasted Paul Gottfried at a recent dinner held in honor of Gottfried’s magazine, Chronicles. Roberts called the 84-year-old paleoconservative intellectual “one of the sages of our age,” praised him for challenging “the antidiscrimination regime,” and pledged Heritage’s help to “expand your reach.” He dismissed conservative gatekeeping as “stupid” and a “fool’s errand.” A Chronicles editor posted the remarks to social media Friday night.

Roberts warned against “heritage Americans … repudiating their heritage” and described Gottfried’s faction as once “exiled” from conservatism but now “ascendant.” The Trump administration has adopted much of what Project 2025 proposed. So when the man who built that blueprint promises his organization’s institutional muscle to a magazine whose pages have defended a former Ku Klux Klan leader and published the work of white supremacists, it is worth knowing what Chronicles is and what it has printed.

Gottfried earned a doctorate from Yale. He taught humanities for 25 years at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and co-coined the term “paleoconservative” with writer Thomas Fleming in 1986. But he is probably best known for a 2008 speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, an organization he founded, which extremism researchers have long characterized as a white nationalist gathering. There, Gottfried coined the term “alternative right.” In that same speech, he castigated conservatives who had “become so terrified by those on their left that they pretend not to notice the stark fact of human cognitive disparities.” The problem, Gottfried argued, was that “not everyone enjoys the same genetic precondition for learning.”

White nationalist Richard Spencer published that speech in far-right Taki’s Magazine. A 2016 Tablet profile called Gottfried “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather” and described him as Spencer’s intellectual mentor. Gottfried, who is Jewish and whose family fled Hungary in the 1930s, has said he does not want to be associated with white nationalists or neo-Nazis.

In 2021, Gottfried took over as editor of Chronicles, a monthly magazine founded in 1977 by the Rockford Institute. The magazine’s former editor, Thomas Fleming, was a founding member of the League of the South, a white nationalist secessionist group. Fleming co-authored The Conservative Movement with Gottfried in 1988 and edited Chronicles for three decades. During that time, the magazine published the work of Sam Francis, a former Heritage Foundation policy analyst who was fired from the Washington Times in 1995 for making racist remarks at a white nationalist conference. Francis used Chronicles to argue that former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke defended “the American Way of Life.” He went on to become chief editor of the newsletter for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist organization whose website Dylann Roof cited in his manifesto before murdering nine Black churchgoers in Charleston. Jared Taylor, a fellow white supremacist, called Francis “the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time.” By 2017, the magazine had become so toxic that even conservative commentators described Chronicles as “controversial even among conservatives for its racism and anti-Semitism.”

Roberts’ toast followed months of turmoil at Heritage over exactly this kind of proximity. In October 2025, Roberts released a video defending Tucker Carlson after Carlson interviewed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Roberts called Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition.” Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, wrote an open letter saying Roberts had privately promised to denounce Carlson and cut Heritage’s financial ties to him (including sponsorship of Carlson’s show), then never followed through. Robert P. George, the legal scholar, left the board after demanding a retraction that Roberts wouldn’t give. Scores of staff walked, and Reason reported that nearly the entire legal and economic departments decamped for Advancing American Freedom, the nonprofit former Vice President Mike Pence founded. Through all of it, Chronicles rallied to Roberts’ side, publishing pieces that applauded him for pushing Heritage to honor “its commitment to conserve our Western patrimony.”

In November, Roberts told his remaining staff that he “made a mistake.” Five months later, he stood at a dinner for Chronicles and called the man who coined “alternative right” a sage of the age. He praised Gottfried’s opposition to anti-discrimination law. He pledged the institutional weight of the organization that built Project 2025 to boost a magazine steeped in white nationalism, neo-Confederate ideology, and open defenses of a former Klan leader.

“All of the institutions that are considered to be exiled from the Republican establishment, y’all are the best friends in town,” Roberts told the room. The apology tour is over.

Deportation by Design: Inside the Administration’s Purge of Immigration Courts

On a Friday in November 2025, San Francisco immigration judge Shuting Chen was hearing testimony from three Venezuelan siblings about the persecution that drove them from their country. Mid-hearing, an email landed on her screen: “Notice of Termination.” Chen started crying in front of the courtroom. She was the twelfth San Francisco immigration judge fired that year. Nine remained to handle the caseload that 21 judges had navigated.

A New York Times investigation found that the Trump administration has dismissed more than 100 immigration judges out of roughly 726 who were serving when Trump took office, an unprecedented purge. The Times reported that judges were threatened with disciplinary action if they did not order more deportations, and then terminated when they failed to fall in line. Dozens more quit. In the courtrooms of eight of those fired judges in New York, the lights went dark on a single day. In Boston on April 11, the administration axed the judges who had blocked the deportations of Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk and Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Boston’s immigration court went from 11 judges to five.

Asylum approval rates have dropped below 10 percent this year, the lowest rate for which data exists. The White House declared on April 10 that the “Era of Amnesty Is Over.” At the Board of Immigration Appeals — the appellate body that is supposed to catch trial-level errors — the government won 97 percent of published cases in 2025 after the administration cut the board’s membership nearly in half and filled the remaining seats with Trump appointees. So far in 2026, the board has sided with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in every published decision but one; in that case, the immigrant had already withdrawn their appeal.

The man running the courts is retired Marine Col. Daren Margolin, whom the administration tapped in 2025 to lead the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). Margolin had quit his own judgeship in early 2024, telling Axios he “felt like a co-conspirator in treason” under Biden’s border policies. Before his judicial career, he was a security officer at Marine Base Quantico, where he was removed in 2013 after discharging his M9 handgun into an office floor. Under Margolin, EOIR has brought on roughly 50 temporary military attorneys,  or Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs), to replace the fired judges. A 2025 regulation eliminated the previous requirement that temporary judges have 10 years of experience in immigration law. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has publicly advertised the open positions as “deportation judges,” a term with no precedent in American law.

Nathan Hansen started hearing cases at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, on April 9. Hansen is a solo-practice attorney from Washington County who has never practiced immigration law. He graduated from the University of North Dakota School of Law in 2003 and lost a race for state district judge in 2024. EOIR called it a “competitive application process.”

Hansen’s qualifications, such as they are, live on social media. He endorsed Pizzagate. He pushed Obama birtherism. In 2024, he amplified the debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating family pets, a racist conspiracy cooked up by a neo-Nazi group that Trump and JD Vance rode through the final stretch of the presidential campaign. He posted on Facebook that all property taxes are illegal under the Minnesota Constitution. “The government owes us a lot of money for theft,” he wrote. On a Washington County Facebook page in January, he posted simply, “I want more ICE.” Most of the rest of his online footprint is gone — he scrubbed roughly 100,000 posts before his 2024 judicial run and has since locked his X account — and he declined to discuss any of it with the Minnesota Reformer, hanging up after the reporter identified herself.

Fort Snelling is also the hub of ICE deportation operations in Minnesota. Thousands of immigrants have already passed through Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling on their way to jails and detention facilities across the country. He will decide which of them get to stay.

The legal guardrails are mostly gone. In March, the Merit Systems Protection Board, a quasi-judicial federal agency that adjudicates civil service disputes, ruled for the first time that the attorney general can fire immigration judges at will, a sweeping departure from more than a century of civil service protections. The board’s two Republican members (Trump fired the Democrat in 2025) accepted the administration’s argument that Article II of the Constitution lets the president remove “inferior officers” without cause. The decision is being appealed to the Federal Circuit. In the meantime, the DOJ can cite it to justify terminations far beyond the immigration bench.

Project 2025 called for exactly this. The blueprint’s DOJ chapter, written by Gene Hamilton — a former Trump official whom the American Immigration Council described as second only to Stephen Miller in his restrictionist ambitions — laid out a plan to fold EOIR, ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and other agencies into a single enforcement body answerable to the White House. It urged the next administration to isolate immigration decisions from court review, strip privacy protections from non-citizens, and punish local jurisdictions that refuse to honor ICE detainers. The mass deportation agenda required captive courts, and the administration has delivered.

More than three million people have cases pending before these courts. Jeremiah Johnson, a San Francisco judge who served on the bench for eight years before the DOJ fired him, had a word for what he watched happen around him: “dismantling.” The next available asylum hearing dates in his old courthouse are in 2029.

Zeldin’s Heartland Keynote: A Project 2025 Promise, Kept

The Heartland Institute — a Project 2025 advisory board member that signed on to the Heritage Foundation’s coalition early and helped shape its environmental provisions — got exactly the payoff it wanted on April 8. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin delivered the keynote address at Heartland’s 16th International Conference on Climate Change at the Hotel Washington, co-hosted by climate change deniers the CO2 Coalition, Watts Up With That, and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Roughly 220 attendees gave him a standing ovation before he’d spoken. “It is a day to celebrate vindication!” Zeldin told them.

Zeldin spent most of the speech airing grievances. He blamed decades of climate regulation on “the elite, the ruling class… the politicians, the biggest grifters” — a “cabal,” he said, that had chosen “exactly which model is the chosen model.” He dismissed federal climate grants as a “grift” and then thanked the Heartland audience for Trump’s victory: “Because of the election of Donald Trump, which many of you worked very hard to make possible, you were given a great surprise decades earlier than expected.” That an EPA administrator would credit a 501(c)(3)’s audience with partisan electoral work, on the record, is worth pausing on.

Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from Long Island who received more than $410,000 in oil and gas contributions over his career, had never worked in environmental science or policy before Trump tapped him. He once vowed to “drive a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Since January 2025, he has repealed the endangerment finding that underpinned nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulation, shuttered the agency’s research arm, slashed its budget by 65 percent, and exempted dozens of coal-burning power plants from pollution controls. More than 160 environmental and public health organizations have called for his resignation. Craig Rucker, president of CFACT, introduced Zeldin as a “rockstar” and boasted that the administrator had cut EPA staff from 16,000 to 12,000.

Heartland’s fingerprints are specific. Project 2025 targeted the very endangerment finding Heartland had fought since 2009. It called for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to be “broken up and downsized” and for climate research across the federal government to be dismantled. Heartland has built its own competing temperature sensor network to discredit NOAA’s data. Zeldin has now delivered on every one of those asks. Institute president James Taylor called him “the greatest EPA administrator ever.”

Heartland has been selling doubt to paying clients for four decades. Founded in Chicago in 1984, it spent the 1990s working for Philip Morris, producing reports to discredit the health risks of secondhand smoke. A Philip Morris executive sat on Heartland’s board while running the tobacco company’s lobbying shop. In a 1999 fundraising letter, founder Joseph Bast bragged that “Heartland does many things that benefit Philip Morris’ bottom line, things that no other organization does.”

When tobacco money dried up, climate became the product. By the early 2000s, Heartland had emerged as what PBS Frontline called an entity that had “worked harder to instill doubt in American minds about the science of climate change” than any other. ExxonMobil funneled at least $676,500 to the group between 1998 and 2005. The Koch brothers, the Mercer Family Foundation, and Murray Energy all contributed. In 2012, Heartland erected a billboard along a Chicago expressway featuring the Unabomber’s mugshot asking, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Dozens of corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Two board members walked.

Heartland responded by hiding its donor list and routing money through what watchdogs SourceWatch and the Center for Media and Democracy have described as identity-scrubbing charities. One Heartland official acknowledged that “the grants are driven by donor intent.” DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund — opaque charities favored by Koch network donors — have moved more than $21 million to Heartland. The Mercer Family Foundation poured in nearly $2.6 million between 2014 and 2017 alone.

The money also bought access abroad. Since 2023, Heartland has worked with Austrian MEPs from the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) to derail the EU’s Nature Restoration Law. In March 2024, Heartland President Taylor spoke in the European Parliament. The institute opened a European base in London in December 2024, and in Germany, it works with EIKE, a climate denial group linked to the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD.) Climate scientist Michael Mann told DeSmog that “climate denial is one of the most toxic exports the U.S. has to offer.”

Joe Bonfiglio of the Environmental Defense Fund dismissed Heartland as “a disinformation factory” and called Zeldin’s appearance “surreal.” Twenty-four states have sued over the endangerment finding repeal. None of that dimmed the mood in the ballroom. Taylor told the crowd that “restoring CO2 and restoring warmth to our world” amounted to “a restoration to more ideal conditions.” Guests squeezed free stress balls shaped like miniature Earths — “Don’t stress. There is no climate crisis,” the lettering read — while March broke U.S. heat records in 14 states.