Project 2025 March 18th 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 how Senator Eric Schmitt and Heritage Foundation operatives laid out a plan to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans at a Washington panel where one speaker dismissed a million people a year as “paper citizens.” Eight Republican governors have now signed formal partnerships with Turning Point USA to plant the organization’s chapters inside public high schools. And Trump posted a graphic on Truth Social cataloguing every journalist fired, every outlet defunded, and every FCC threat his administration has made since taking office.

Project 2025’s Expanding War on Who Gets to Be American

Mike Howell has fantasized about LGBTQ+ Americans being raped in prison. He has urged the FBI to classify transgender people as domestic terrorists. He is a Project 2025 contributor. On March 11, 2026, Howell stood at a Heritage Foundation lectern and asked a sitting U.S. senator, Eric Schmitt (R-MO) to justify the citizenship of a million naturalized Americans a year. Many of them, Howell said, “don’t speak English” and “haven’t meaningfully assimilated.” Heritage’s Lora Ries had already framed the question in her opening remarks. “We have a lot of paper citizens,” she said. “What do we do about them?” “Paper citizens” is Heritage shorthand for people who hold U.S. citizenship but whom Ries and her colleagues consider American in name only.

The event, billed as a discussion of “weaponized immigration,” was run by Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center. Ries heads the center. She is a Project 2025 contributor and a former DHS Acting Deputy Chief of Staff. She acknowledged that businesses cite labor shortages and falling birth rates to justify immigration, then dismissed every one as “old excuses to continue this weaponization.” The third panelist, Peter Schweizer, runs the Government Accountability Institute, which he co-founded with Steve Bannon. Howell runs the Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation spinoff. Last November, Howell graded Trump’s deportation efforts a C-minus, goading the administration to go harder. Howell moderated the Heritage event and set the tone early by describing Minneapolis as home to “Islamic no-go zones” where “armed resistance” fills the streets. Protesters, he said, are “domestic terrorists, taking up arms in places like New York with the benefit of paper citizenship behind them.”

Schweizer singled out specific ethnic and religious communities. He quoted Ihsan Bagby, a board member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as saying Muslims “can never be full citizens of this country,” and read a Mexican senator’s declaration that Mexicans are “going to take back the territory that was stolen from us.” Mexico’s 53 consulates in the United States, Schweizer alleged, function as hubs for “organizing political activity.” Mexican officials, he claimed, hold parliamentary seats at home while “organizing violent protests and riots” on American soil.

Schweizer went further. He folded China, Mexico, and the Muslim Brotherhood into a single conspiracy he called the “Red Green Alliance,” tracing it to a September 2007 conference in Tehran where Che Guevara’s children met with Iranian officials. Their shared goal, according to Schweizer: “We want to destroy America.” What he left out: the conference collapsed after Aleida Guevara protested from the podium that the Iranians were distorting her father’s ideology; the four-day event shut down early, and the Latin American delegation was escorted out. Schmitt echoed Schweizer’s language, calling what is at stake “a civilizational battle” and the United States “the protector of Western civilization.”

Schmitt has a bill for this. The SCAM Act — the Stop Citizenship Abuse and Misrepresentation Act — would create a 10-year window after naturalization. During that decade, fraud, a serious felony, or any affiliation with a designated terrorist group would trigger the revocation of citizenship and deportation. Stephen Miller backed the bill and picked his target by name: “All Somali refugees, or any other immigrants, who have committed fraud against the United States must be immediately denaturalized and deported,” Miller said. Schmitt told the Heritage panel: “If a thousand Somalis came here three years ago and their view was, ‘Look at this system we can defraud,’ they should lose their citizenship.” Between 1990 and 2017, the federal government averaged 11 denaturalization cases a year. Trump’s first term pushed that to 42. Schmitt’s bill would industrialize what courts have treated for decades as a last resort.

Schmitt then widened the target. He called the H-1B visa a vehicle for “companies firing thousands of American workers at a time to bring in lower-cost, more compliant foreign workers.” The target, he made clear, is the legal immigration system itself: “the new right and conservatives rightfully should be about legal immigration, too.” He went on to call for banning sanctuary cities, revoking the tax-exempt status of immigrant-serving nonprofits, and siccing the Justice Department on “these NGO networks.”

Schweizer’s claim that between 750,000 and 1.5 million U.S. citizens are being raised in China, products of birth tourism, had already dominated a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, chaired by Schmitt, on March 10, where Schweizer testified that he had tracked more than 1,000 CCP-linked birth tourism companies. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month on Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship. Lower courts have so far blocked the order.

Project 2025 called for “arresting, detaining, and removing immigration violators anywhere in the United States.” It also proposed merging immigration agencies into a single enforcement body and threatening to cut federal funding from any local police department that refused to hold migrants. Howell, who promised “zealous advocacy” for a deportation program “larger than President Eisenhower’s” when Heritage announced his fellowship, closed the panel with the number he cares about. “Whether the deportation numbers are in the millions or not,” he said, “will be what we can all look back on and say, did we succeed?”

Eight GOP Governors Have Partnered with TPUSA to Seed Conservative Chapters in Public Schools

Eight Republican governors — in Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Montana, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Indiana — have formalized partnerships with Turning Point USA to plant the organization’s “Club America” chapters inside public high schools. None of these deals existed before TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September 2025. The New York Times reported on March 15 that the push has crossed into blue states as well: students in Democratic-governed New York have started chapters on their own, without the governor’s involvement. TPUSA, which sits on Project 2025’s advisory board, now claims more than 3,500 Club America chapters nationwide. Its stated goal is 20,000. GPAHE has documented how the organization evolved from a secular libertarian campus outfit into one of the most powerful Christian nationalist operations in the country. Kirk’s assassination accelerated that transformation.

TPUSA has lately been embroiled in scandal. In Miami, on March 4, The Floridian published screenshots from a WhatsApp group chat run by Miami-Dade Republican Party Secretary Abel Alexander Carvajal. The chat included Ian Valdes, who headed the TPUSA chapter at Florida International University, and Dariel Gonzalez, the College Republicans’ membership director. In about two and a half weeks that Fall, participants racked up more than 400 variations of the N-word, Miami New Times reported. One participant posted a message cataloguing dozens of ways to murder Black people — crucifixion and beheading among them.

Valdes renamed the group chat “Gooning in Agartha.” Agartha refers to a mythical Aryan homeland rooted in esoteric Nazi occultism, explored in detail here. Valdes also wrote that he would “def not marry a Jew.” One Black woman quit the College Republicans after a member used a racial slur to her face. Carvajal deleted 42 of his own messages before the screenshots became public. He had also been recruiting chat participants into the Miami-Dade GOP as party committeemen, NBC Miami reported. The county Republican board voted to demand Carvajal’s resignation. He refused to leave. Valdes stepped down. FIU confirmed that a criminal investigation is underway involving local, state, and federal law enforcement.

The Club America rollout started in Oklahoma. Then-Superintendent Ryan Walters, in September 2025 ordered Club America chapters onto every campus across the state and threatened to strip accreditation from schools that refused. A month later, Ron DeSantis announced Florida’s version at New College of Florida, the liberal arts school whose board he had already stacked with allies. His education commissioner told school administrators they would face the “full force of the law” for obstruction, even though every Florida school that had asked to host a chapter had already said yes. None had ever blocked a chapter. In December, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed on and warned that any interference should be reported to the Texas Education Agency. In January, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick wrote a $1 million check directly to TPUSA’s Phoenix headquarters — the first known cash transfer from a sitting state official to the extremist organization’s school expansion effort. At the same time, Texas banned LGBTQ+ student clubs statewide under Senate Bill 12.

In Tennessee, Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson unveiled the state’s partnership behind closed doors that same month; the only broadcast was on Rumble, and Governor Bill Lee sent a video message. Days later, Johnson admitted to the Williamson Scene that the deal was “a handshake statement of intent” with no legislation behind it. Tennessee went further still. Representative Monty Fritts introduced a bill that would spend $18 million building “Charlie Kirk Memorial Courtyards” at all 47 state universities, each one featuring a Ten Commandments plaque. The Tennessean covered the proposal before it stalled on March 4.

Montana’s Greg Gianforte held a Capitol rotunda event lauding TPUSA on February 4. Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen told the Nebraska Examiner that the initiative was about “right and wrong, God and Satan.” Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a proclamation on March 11 after appearing alongside TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk at a student rally at Arkansas Christian Academy. No other organization — religious or secular — appeared in the proclamation’s text. Indiana’s Governor Mike Braun followed on March 12.

The U.S. Department of Education has already placed TPUSA on its America 250 Civics Education Coalition alongside two other Project 2025 backers: the America First Policy Institute and Hillsdale College. TPUSA senior director Josh Thifault told the Williamson Scene that First Liberty Institute, a Christian legal organization, is drafting executive order language for governors to make the partnerships legally binding. Thifault was explicit about the long game: pair chapters with voter registration drives, he said, and you build “a machine to activate and track, and then using the Turning Point Action staff, drive out to vote a lot of young America.”

Project 2025’s War on the Press: License Threats, Treason Talk, a Muzzled Military Newspaper, and Another Journalist Detained

On the evening of March 14, from Mar-a-Lago, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned television broadcasters on X: “correct course” in their coverage of the Iran war or lose their broadcast licenses. Carr wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC, profiled here, and has spent the past year executing it point by point.

Carr’s post attached a screenshot of a Trump Truth Social post attacking the Wall Street Journal and New York Times for their reporting that Iranian missiles had damaged five U.S. refueling planes at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia. The next day, Carr told CBS News that broadcast licenses are not a “property right.” Hours later, Trump endorsed Carr’s threat and suggested treason charges against outlets whose coverage he called “knowingly FAKE.” Under federal law, treason carries a maximum penalty of death. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said on Fox News he opposes “the heavy hand of government, no matter who’s wielding it.”

Carr keeps reaching for the same instrument: the FCC’s “news distortion policy,” a 1949 rule invoked only eight times in six decades before Carr took office. He has since used it to open an investigation into CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cited it again when he went after ABC for Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary on the Charlie Kirk assassination, and invoked it a third time against “The View.” Nexstar and Sinclair pulled Kimmel off their ABC affiliates — both companies had mergers pending before the FCC at the time. CBS refused to air a Colbert interview with a Democratic candidate. A bipartisan coalition of former FCC chairs petitioned to repeal the policy. Carr has taken no action on it.

On March 4, Estefany María Rodríguez Florez was riding in a Nashville Noticias vehicle — the outlet’s logo visible on the door — when roughly eight ICE agents grabbed her outside a South Nashville gym. Rodríguez is 35 years old and covers immigration enforcement for the Spanish-language outlet. She had published a story about ICE the day before her arrest. Department of Homeland Security records filed in court show that the agency had surveilled her family’s daily movements for days before moving in. Her attorneys allege the arrest was retaliation for her reporting.

ICE says she overstayed a visa. But Rodríguez holds a work permit valid through 2029, is married to a U.S. citizen, and has no criminal record. The agency designated her a flight risk on the basis of two missed appointments — except one of those fell during an ice storm that shut down Nashville, and ICE could not produce evidence it ever scheduled the second. When agents finally filed a warrant, it was a crumpled sheet of paper with no Certificate of Service. Federal Judge Eli Richardson ordered the agency to justify the detention. Reporters Without Borders called for her release, and 41 press freedom organizations joined the demand, noting Rodríguez is at least the second Latin American journalist detained for deportation since Trump took office. On March 16, an immigration judge set bond at $10,000. ICE has reserved the right to appeal.

The first was Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning reporter in Georgia who was detained for more than 100 days after filming ICE agents at a protest. He never faced criminal charges. He was deported to El Salvador in October 2025. The Project 2025 blueprint demanded that the government “reconsider the accommodations given to journalists.”

The Pentagon is also attacking press freedoms. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stripped Stars and Stripes — the military’s own newspaper, editorially independent under a congressional mandate dating to World War II — of the ability to run AP and Reuters wire copy. The same memo ordered that all reporting be “consistent with good order and discipline.” That phrase is borrowed directly from the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Some Stars and Stripes reporters serve in uniform, which means the language carries a concrete threat: court-martial for publishing a story the Pentagon dislikes.

It was Hegseth’s second strike. In September 2025 he had ordered Pentagon reporters to sign loyalty pledges — written promises not to gather information without official authorization. Most of the press corps handed back their credentials instead.

Carr removed the word “independent” from the FCC’s website in December, 2025 and told a Senate hearing that the agency answers to the president. On March 14, Trump posted an infographic on Truth Social under the title “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media.” Under “Gone”: PBS and NPR being defunded, Meta’s fact-checking program being dropped, the Washington Post layoffs, and the departures of six anchors and correspondents from major networks. Under “Reforms”: CNN’s pending sale and “FCC Broadcast Accountability.” At the bottom, labeled “Winning,” a Guardian headline alongside a Hollywood Reporter piece calling Carr the president’s “media pitbull.” The post drew 7,600 shares and 27,700 likes.

Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 57th out of 180 countries in its 2025 World Press Freedom Index — the lowest ranking in the index’s 23-year history.

The Varieties of Democracies Institute (V-Dem), housed at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, yanked the United States out of its “liberal democracy” category in its 2026 report. V-Dem found U.S. freedom of expression at its lowest level since World War II and cited the suppression of the media and dissent as the reason. “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” the researchers wrote.