Project 2025 December 17th Update

Project 2025 Is Here.

With Trump’s presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy. 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,  the erosion of environmental and education protections, and reduced economic opportunities for all, particularly marginalized communities. 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 Heritage Foundation’s accelerating credibility crisis, ICE agents arresting immigrants at their own green card interviews, and how enforcement terror is gutting the childcare workforce.

The Heritage Foundation: From Think Tank to Sinking Ship

Professional women are medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome. If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.

That’s Scott Yenor, the Boise State professor that the Heritage Foundation just hired to lead its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. It’s a curious choice for an organization already reeling from a public relations catastrophe over its president’s defense of a Holocaust denier — unless, of course, the quiet part is now the whole point.

Yenor brings a documented history of inflammatory positions: that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women and pay only male heads of households; that women’s suffrage was a feat of social engineering; and that America needs a regime of soft patriarchy where adultery, homosexuality, no-fault divorce, and abortion are outlawed. He has advocated for coverture marriage — the English common-law concept under which women lose the right to vote, work professionally, or hold property.

The National Organization for Women demanded that corporations that have donated to Heritage in the past, such as Walmart, Molson Coors, and ExxonMobil, end their support immediately. “The Heritage Foundation and its donors now face a clear choice. Stand up for equality — or stand with hate,” the NOW statement read. “The public is watching, and accountability is long overdue.”

Heritage’s official response has been notably contradictory. Vice President of Domestic Policy Roger Severino told The Atlantic that Heritage does not, and does not believe employers should, discriminate based on sex — a position directly at odds with Yenor’s published advocacy. The think tank maintains a one-voice policy, stating that Heritage employees always row in the same direction. Which direction that might be remains unclear.

The Yenor hire is only the latest wound in what has become a cascading institutional crisis. Six weeks ago, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts stood before staffers and admitted he had let down the institution. What began as a public relations disaster over Roberts’ defense of Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes has metastasized into something far worse — a cascade of board resignations, staff departures, the implosion of an antisemitism task force, and a series of personnel decisions that have drawn fire from figures across the political spectrum.

The unraveling matters beyond Washington’s think tank wars. For half a century, Heritage has served as the intellectual engine room of American conservatism, providing policy blueprints to Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump. Its Project 2025 became the most discussed — and most controversial — governing document of the 2024 election. Now, as the organization hemorrhages credibility and personnel while rushing out a glossy rebranding campaign, the crisis offers a window into a broader fracture: whether the mainstream conservative movement can hold its coalition together or will splinter between those willing to accommodate extremism and those drawing a hard line against it.

The crisis erupted in late October when Roberts released a video defending Carlson, whom he called a close friend, against what he termed a venomous coalition attempting to cancel him. Roberts stated that while he abhorred some of Fuentes’ views, canceling him was not the answer either. The backlash arrived within hours. Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell publicly rebuked Roberts, with Cruz declaring that sitting silently beside someone praising Adolf Hitler makes one a coward and complicit in that evil.

Inside Heritage, the reaction proved incendiary. At a leaked all-staff meeting, one employee called it the most embarrassing moment of their career at the organization. At the same time, another warned that young interns were increasingly sympathetic to Fuentes’ views. Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus — who had posted that staffers engaged in virtue signaling should resign — departed days later.

The bleeding continued through November. Princeton professor Robert George, one of the most respected conservative intellectuals in America, quit the board of trustees. Stephen Moore, a prominent economist, walked. The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism severed ties entirely, with its leaders announcing they would continue their work outside Heritage for a season. Mark Goldfeder, an Orthodox rabbi and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, wrote in his resignation letter that Heritage’s actions represented moral collapse disguised as courage.

The exodus accelerated this week. On Tuesday, two more trustees resigned: Abby Spencer Moffat, CEO of the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation and a board member since 1992, and Shane McCullar, a former executive at McDonald’s and Rubbermaid who joined just last year. “When an institution hesitates to confront harmful ideas and allows lapses in judgment to stand, it forfeits the moral authority on which its influence depends,” Moffat said. McCullar was equally blunt: “No institution that hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred — or that gives a platform to those who spread them — can credibly claim to uphold the vision that once made the Heritage Foundation the world’s most respected conservative think tank.” The board now stands at 10 members plus Roberts.

Into this maelstrom, Heritage launched its Heritage 2.0 campaign earlier this month. Slick advertisements proclaim a return to the “Golden Age,” showcasing American flags and aspirational imagery, accompanied by a sappy soundtrack. The campaign will be prominently featured at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, of which Heritage is a sponsor, and aired during CBS News’ interview with new TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk, widow of founder Charlie Kirk.

Yet the 2026 policy agenda underlying this shiny packaging offers more of the same. The newly released America’s Promise playbook is nine pages of strategic goals that continue Project 2025’s assault on reproductive rights, pledges to dismantle the Department of Education, and commit to reducing both the demand and supply for abortion at all stages. Ms. Magazine’s analysis describes the document as a plan for forced motherhood, government-policed gender, and the end of women’s equality as we know it.

What emerges from the past six weeks is a portrait of an institution that cannot decide what it stands for — or against. Heritage simultaneously claims to combat antisemitism while its president defends the platforming of a Holocaust denier. It insists it opposes workplace sex discrimination while elevating an advocate who has called for its legalization. It launches a Golden Age campaign celebrating American values while its senior scholars question women’s suffrage and call for the criminalization of divorce.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Roberts’ original defense of Carlson stunning negligence and described him as a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.

That may be the most accurate summary of Heritage’s current predicament. After decades as the intellectual backbone of American conservatism, the foundation continues to burn down the house that Reagan built — one controversy at a time.

The Interview Trap: How USCIS Became an Enforcement Zone

Hanne Daguman and her husband Joshua arrived at the San Diego United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office on a Monday in mid-November. They’d been married for months. She’d overstayed her tourist visa while they navigated the green card process — common enough that immigration attorneys barely blink at it. The interview lasted an hour and a half. The questions went well. Then Hanne signed an iPad acknowledging the overstay, and three officers in bulletproof vests walked in.

“She gives me a card, says, ‘scan this,'” Joshua said. “We’re gonna arrest your wife for an overstay on her visa.”

Hanne is Norwegian. She has Type 1 diabetes. At the Otay Mesa Detention Center, staff removed her glucose monitoring system. For eight days, she couldn’t tell if her blood sugar was dangerously high or low. Joshua posted $1,500 bond two days before Thanksgiving. The legal bills have reached $7,500 so far and will likely reach as much as $12,000. She’s still on track to receive her green card.

“For what reason?” Hanne asked after her release. “If I’m gonna end up with a green card, hopefully anyways, what was the reason to put me through this?”

The Dagumans are one family among dozens. Since mid-November, ICE agents have been stationed inside USCIS offices during green card interviews, arresting applicants moments after they complete their paperwork. The detentions began in San Diego and have since occurred in New York, Cleveland, and Utah. The people being arrested share a profile: spouses of American citizens, legal visa entries, and no criminal histories. Their only violation is an expired visa — something that routinely occurred while USCIS took months to schedule their interviews.

Attorney Tessa Cabrera watched it happen to her client in November. He’d come to the U.S. in 2002, helping his American citizen mother cross the border in a wheelchair. His daughter, also an American citizen, had filed for his green card. The interview officer left the room. Two ICE agents entered, asked his name, ordered him to stand, and cuffed him.

“It implies to me that they use the information that they gathered at his green card interview to then decide that he was someone that they could detain,” Cabrera said.

This is Project 2025 in practice. The authoritarian blueprint called for ICE to handle civil immigration enforcement “anywhere in the United States, without a warrant where appropriate.” It calls for eliminating prosecutorial discretion that allows agencies to focus resources on people with serious criminal records. It envisioned USCIS as an enforcement body. USCIS Director Joseph Edlow made that vision explicit during his confirmation hearing: “at its core, USCIS must be an immigration enforcement agency.”

At least 1,300 career employees took federal buyouts. Others resigned on their own.

“There are questions about what will be our mission, what will be our focus?” Michael Knowles, executive vice president of the union representing 15,000 USCIS employees, told NPR. “And to that extent, we are alarmed.”

The agency has since posted job listings for “homeland defender” positions — roles designed for law enforcement backgrounds — and received 35,000 applications.

Viktoriia Bulavina arrived in the U.S. in 2022 through a humanitarian parole program for Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion. Her daughter had been training with a gymnastics program when the war started; they reunited through the Uniting for Ukraine program. Viktoriia met Victor Korol, an American citizen, in San Diego. They married in November 2024. She applied to renew her parole status in January, within the required timeframe — meaning she remained in authorized stay while it was pending.

In early December, ICE agents arrested her at her final green card appointment. Her attorney, Caroline Matthews, said Viktoriia followed every rule, has no criminal history, and was technically still in authorized status. Matthews has started describing what’s happening as entrapment.

The numbers from the broader enforcement operation mirror what’s unfolding at USCIS. Stateline’s analysis of the Deportation Data Project figures shows that arrests solely for immigration violations climbed from 20 percent of the total in April to 44 percent by October. The share of people arrested who had been convicted of violent crimes fell from nine percent in January to under five percent in October. Roughly 75,000 people arrested through mid-October had no criminal record.

“The result stands in contrast to the administration’s objective of arresting the ‘worst of the worst,'” said Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute.

San Diego immigration attorneys have started giving clients new advice before interviews: bring notarized childcare arrangements. Carry emergency contact information. Prepare for the possibility that you won’t come home.

Attorney Saman Nasseri says that five of his clients were detained in a single week. None had arrests. None had criminal histories. “These are cases where individuals entered the country legally, but their visas have expired,” he said. “All of them are married to US citizens and are going through the normal immigration process.”

Emily Wietzel has practiced immigration law long enough to think nothing could shock her anymore. The past month changed that.

“These are the people who are in the line, who have done everything the right way,” she said. “This is the final step in their process to becoming a lawful permanent resident or a citizen, and we have never seen this before.”

When ICE Comes for Childcare

Before Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents became a fixture in her historically Latino neighborhood this summer, teachers at CentroNía bilingual preschool in Washington, D.C., took their students on walks to nearby parks and libraries — spaces they considered extensions of the classroom. Now they push children on strollers through hallways instead. They converted a classroom into a miniature library after abandoning a partnership with a local branch. In October, the school canceled its beloved Hispanic Heritage Month parade, when immigrant parents typically dressed their children in costumes and soccer jerseys from their home countries.

“That really dominates all of our decision making,” CEO Myrna Peralta said.

One in five childcare workers nationwide are immigrants, with concentrations far higher in cities like Miami and San Jose, where they comprise more than two-thirds of the workforce. The consequences of removing these workers are unfolding in real time, in classrooms across the country, affecting children too young to understand why their teachers have vanished or why they can no longer play outside.

Since January, approximately 39,000 immigrant childcare workers have left the field. The departures stem not only from deportations but from pervasive fear that has driven workers — including many with legal status — to abandon their posts or shift to less visible work as private nannies and babysitters. The Economic Policy Institute warns that if the administration achieves its stated goal of deporting one million people annually, the direct care sector alone could lose nearly 400,000 jobs over four years.

The terror extends far beyond undocumented workers. Edelmira Kitchen, a teaching artist at CentroNía, was pulled over by ICE agents on her way to work in September. Officials demanded she exit her vehicle for questioning. Kitchen is a U.S. citizen who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child. “I felt violated of my rights,” she said. Another staff member was detained while walking down the street and held for several hours, unable to contact anyone. She was eventually released that evening. Some teachers have been hospitalized with panic attacks in the middle of the school day.

When Washington sent mental health consultants to CentroNía through a partnership with the Department of Behavioral Health, administrators directed them to work with teachers rather than students. “If the teachers aren’t good,” site director Joangelee Hernández-Figueroa explained, “the kids won’t be good either.”

At a Montessori school in Portland, Oregon, teachers observed behavioral changes among preschoolers after ICE agents attempted to arrest a father in the school parking lot in July. The incident triggered a lockdown; staff played loud music and led children in songs to drown out the yelling outside. In the weeks that followed, students increasingly retreated to “the regulation station” — an area stocked with fidget toys where children could calm themselves. “That level of fear now is permeating a lot more throughout our society,” said Amy Lomanto, the school’s head.

In South Philadelphia, a daycare serving predominantly low-income immigrant families saw enrollment plummet from 158 children to 97 after enforcement actions forced layoffs and classroom closures. In California, where raids began in June, parents have started storing extra clothing and toiletries in classrooms — just in case their children cannot go home for several days. Some emergency contact lists now extend to 12 names.

The chaos ripples outward. An estimated 77,000 U.S.-born mothers of preschool-aged children have left the workforce since January — a direct consequence of the instability roiling the childcare market. “When you increase instability in the childcare market, essentially by ramping up immigration enforcement, you’re scaring the heck out of a lot of workers who are no longer going to show up,” said Chris M. Herbst, an Arizona State University professor who studies childcare economics. “Because of that, the nation’s ability to provide childcare services has declined.”

Beyond deportation itself, the administration has stripped legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants who held Temporary Protected Status after fleeing violence and natural disasters in their home countries. Last month alone, 300,000 Venezuelans lost their protected status. CentroNía lost two employees when their TPS ended; Tierra Encantada, which operates Spanish immersion preschools across multiple states, saw a dozen teachers walk away.

Congress approved $170 billion over four years for immigration enforcement last summer. As ICE hires additional officers and arrests accelerate, the childcare sector faces continued upheaval — and American families face impossible choices between their incomes and their children as Christian nationalists look to push women toward motherhood rather than careers outside the home.

“I want to be productive. I want to be part of the workforce,” said one New York mother identified only as Jen, whose family depends on an au pair. “If she goes, then I would have to quit my job.”

Schools and childcare centers were once off-limits to ICE, in part to keep children out of harm’s way. Those rules were scrapped shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Now agents are urged to exercise “common sense” — a standard that, for families hiding extra clothes in cubbies and teachers rehearsing lockdown drills with toddlers, offers cold comfort.