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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 take a look at the Trump regime’s determination to whitewash history in national parks, as mandated in Project 2025, which extends to former Japanese American internment camps where some 125,000 immigrants and those of Japanese descent were imprisoned during World War II, the vast majority American citizens. We hear from a Japanese American Episcopalian priest whose great-grandparents were sent to U.S. internment camps in 1941, and learn how that generational memory influences his ministry to the undocumented.
Erasing Memory: Trump’s War on Japanese American History
On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FBI agents and two soldiers with rifles and bayonets came to Yusuke “Harry” Kimura’s home in Anchorage, Alaska. They arrested the Issei immigrant, born in Japan, and marched him off to the brig at Fort Richardson Army Base. It would be four long years before he could go home again.
In a cruel twist, Harry’s U.S.-born son George — a buck private in the Alaska Territorial Guard — was assigned to guard his own father’s prison cell.
This story remained buried in family shame for 40 years. Then, in 1981, Harry’s son William Kimura testified before the Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. “Wait,” interrupted Congressman Daniel Lungren, “are you saying that the son was forced to guard his own father?”
The pause that followed was electric. William’s grandson, Greg Kimura, was a 12-year-old schoolboy who watched his grandfather force back tears as he answered simply: “Yes.”
Today, that same schoolboy — now Reverend Greg Kimura, former director of the Japanese American National Museum and Rector at Saint James Episcopal Church in Pasadena — watches in alarm as the Trump administration attempts both to rendition members of his congregation, and to erase the very history his family helped bring to light the last time the government decided to send thousands of immigrants to detention camps.
Both policies are straight out of Project 2025, which seeks mass deportation no matter what the cost, and the rejection of people and policies that “believe that America is — and always has been — ‘systemically racist.’”
Today, Trump-mandated signs are posted at Manzanar National Historic Site, where over 10,000 Japanese Americans were held behind barbed wire from 1942 to 1945. In total, 125,000 Japanese immigrants were incarcerated under the Alien Enemies Act, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens.
These placards, posted in hundreds of national parks nationwide, ask visitors to become government snitches in support of Trump’s Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” signed March 27, 2025. These reporting signs compete for attention with exhibits documenting one of America’s gravest constitutional failures, and the juxtaposition feels intentionally chilling. Visitors are being asked to police the very history that the site exists to preserve.
The new signs specifically encourage visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features” via a QR code. While the order broadly mandates that public properties “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people,” its impact on Japanese American historical sites reveals something far more troubling — a systematic pattern of retelling America’s most difficult chapters in a MAGA light.
As Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, executive director of Densho, an organization dedicated to preserving the history of the WWII internment camps which has collected some 900 oral histories of those who lived through this dark chapter, puts it: “Any attempt to constrain or sanitize the stories that are told at Manzanar should concern every American.”
“It’s basically to chill any type of narrative that doesn’t match what this current administration wants to try to portray,” says Dennis Arguelles, who leads the California division of the National Parks Conservation Association. “We’re just starting to unearth some of these important histories, and now we’re being faced with the attempt to erase them,” Arguelles said.
Here’s what’s really telling, though. Despite over 200 responses to those QR codes across national parks, not a single visitor has followed the prompt to report “negative” content. Instead, they used the system to call the request “outrageous,” among other choice words. One visitor wrote: “What upset me the most about the museum — more than anything in the actual exhibits — were the signs telling people to report anything they thought was negative about Americans.”
Another commenter wrote: “The executive order…asking for feedback is ****. Parks already do an amazing job telling stories that contain hard truths and everyone is entitled to the truth to make better decisions in our lives. So what if people feel bad?”
This assault on Japanese American historical sites fits within Trump’s larger historical revisionism project. The administration has systematically targeted funding for museums and educational organizations documenting difficult aspects of American history.
The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) has launched a “Scrub Nothing” campaign, directly countering administration pressure to remove diversity and inclusion content from their programming.
But the pressure is real. JANM has already lost $1.7 million in federal funding and faces an additional $5 million in cuts. That’s not pocket change for any museum, let alone one dedicated to preserving stories the government apparently prefers to erase.
The Park Service, however, is scrubbing away, and quickly stripped the contributions of transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument’s website. Earlier this year, government agencies compiled hundreds of words to be erased from federal recognition such as “diversity,” “cultural heritage,” “marginalized,” “racial inequality,” and “ethnicity.” Similar pressures affect institutions preserving stories of slavery, civil rights, and other challenging chapters of the American experience.
Kimura’s grandfather, William, never fully recovered from his family’s ordeal. When the war was over and the Kimuras were allowed to return to Alaska, they found their home and businesses ransacked, and a community still distrustful despite their sacrifice. The Episcopal Church became their sanctuary — All Saints’ in Anchorage welcomed them when others would not. That experience of institutional courage in the face of popular prejudice shaped Kimura’s fundamental understanding of moral responsibility and motivates him as a religious leader.
“I promised myself, back then as a twelve-year-old boy staring into his hands, that if anything like this ever happened again, I would do what I could to prevent it,” Kimura recalls. That promise led him to years of sanctuary work with immigrants, drawing direct connections between his family’s experience and today’s threats to vulnerable communities.
“The use of the Enemy Aliens Act against migrants from places like Venezuela is chilling to Japanese American ears,” Kimura tells GPAHE. “This was the rationale used during WWII for Executive Order 9066, which forcibly removed Japanese Americans from the West Coast and incarcerated them in America’s version of concentration camps. That is the term the government used then and my family were victims of it.”
The parallels extend to the targeting of people based on their appearance rather than their actions. Kimura recalls the story of former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who shared his confusion as a six-year-old American citizen. “This country of which he was a citizen by birth considered him at six years old an ‘enemy alien.’ They even confiscated his baseball bat when he was carted off to camp with his family. They took away even the symbols of American identity for a helpless child who was an American citizen.”
The selective nature of wartime persecution particularly stings. “Remember that we were at war with Germany and Italy. No similar incarcerations happen to these groups of Americans. It was because Japanese Americans looked different to what people considered real Americans. This is happening now around the country. It’s happening in my own neighborhood with ICE raids.”
The historical echoes shape Kimura’s current ministry, where he gives talks before his church’s weekly food pantry about what to do if ICE shows up. He distributes red information cards in several languages to those who gather, informing them of their rights should they be detained. “It’s impeding our ministry as well as dehumanizing people, most of whom are elderly on fixed incomes or working poor, supplementing food,” Kimura says.
This lived experience drives Japanese American solidarity with today’s threatened communities. “We’ve seen this before,” Kimura explains.
The irony of rewriting history while it’s still within living memory strikes particularly deep. “The fact that this history is now being erased by the government at concentration camps like Manzanar and Minidoka is shameful,” Kimura says. “It’s as if only white sacrifice counts. As if only mainstream accomplishment in service of our country matters.”
Despite the fear that people who look less than white in this country are experiencing, Kimura maintains hope that true American ideals will prevail. “I believe in America and I believe that the current hysteria against immigrants and our LGBTQ community, the vast majority of whom are improving our country, will be judged harshly by history.”
