Project 2025 March 4th 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.

The document calls for dismantling federal agencies, rolling back civil rights protections, gutting environmental regulations, and concentrating executive power. Read the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’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 an ICE attorney who resigned so he could tell Congress the agency is training cadets to break the law, federal agents in San Diego who detained church volunteers for praying in a hallway, and a pattern of Native American citizens getting grabbed by officers who don’t know what a tribal ID is. All three trace back to Project 2025.

The Whistleblower at the ICE Academy

On February 23, at a democratic forum, Ryan Schwank sat in front of lawmakers and television cameras at a Capitol Hill Democrats forum and said it plainly: “On my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.” Schwank had worked for ICE since 2021. His most recent title was assistant chief counsel. He volunteered in September 2025 to train recruits at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia — the agency’s main academy — and resigned on February 13 because he wanted to say what he’d seen without getting fired first.

On Schwank’s first day at Glynco, a supervisor showed him a memo from acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and told him to read it in the supervisor’s presence. The memo authorized agents to force their way into homes without a judicial warrant. Schwank was told not to take notes, not to keep a copy, and not to document that he taught it. Two other ICE attorneys were removed from teaching positions at Glynco, one forcibly resigned, for refusing to train cadets on the memo’s contents. Schwank was the replacement.

Blumenthal’s office had the receipts before Schwank ever sat down. A second, anonymous whistleblower had turned over the July 2025 and February 2026 training syllabi, which showed ICE had cut training from 72 days to 42, and 240 hours of coursework had been stripped out: constitutional law, firearms, use of force, lawful arrests, and the limits of an officer’s authority. More than a dozen practical exams were gone too — “judgment pistol shooting,” “criminal encounters.” Use of force simulation training vanished entirely.

While the hearing was still underway, DHS issued a statement: “Under these new improvements, candidates still learn the same elements and meet the same high standards ICE has always required. No subject matter has been cut.” Blumenthal read it aloud to Schwank and asked if it was accurate. “Sir, I would call it a lie,” Schwank replied. The agency, he testified, had made the program shorter and “removed so many essential parts that what remains is a dangerous husk.”

The official story was locked in before Schwank sat down. Two weeks earlier, acting Director Todd Lyons had told the House Homeland Security Committee the curriculum was the same as ever — just compressed into six-day weeks with 12-hour days. DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis repeated the line. The syllabi, obtained by CBS News, showed 250 fewer hours. Instead of requiring cadets to memorize the material, ICE had switched to open-book, multiple-choice tests. DHS plans to push 12,000 additional officers through this program in 2026.

Congress gave DHS $170 billion under the One Big Beautiful Bill and mandated the hiring surge that came with it. ICE’s workforce will more than double — from roughly 10,000 agents to over 22,000. Schwank warned that these officers will graduate not knowing when deadly force is lawful, not understanding what makes an arrest legal. They will not know how to recognize an illegal order — because the class that taught them to refuse one no longer exists.

In January, ICE agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother, on a residential street. Days later, agents killed Alex Pretti at a prayer encampment. Both were American citizens. In Savannah, ICE agents pursued a Guatemalan man through city streets on February 16 until he ran a red light and crashed into Linda Davis, a 52-year-old special education teacher on her way to work at Hesse K-8 School. She was killed half a mile from her classroom.

Alongside Schwank, Stevan Bunnell, who served as DHS general counsel from 2013 to 2017, testified. He is one of six former DHS general counsels — spanning the Bush, Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations — who co-authored a New York Times essay opposing ICE’s warrantless entry policy. His point at the hearing was the same one the courts have made for centuries: the police cannot sign their own warrants.

Teyana Gibson Brown, a pediatric nurse and U.S. citizen from Minneapolis, described the night ICE agents came for her husband, Garrison Gibson, a Liberian man who had complied with check-ins for years. Her husband asked for a warrant. Nobody produced one. Agents pepper-sprayed the crowd of neighbors who had gathered outside. Then about ten officers walked up to her front door, holding each other’s shoulders, and rammed it three times until it broke open. They entered with guns drawn on Gibson Brown, her 9-year-old daughter, and her daughter’s cousin. “The fear in my daughter’s eyes is something you can’t imagine,” she told lawmakers. A federal judge later ruled the agents had violated the Fourth Amendment. Blumenthal called it “one of the most grievous violations of the Constitution I have seen in America.” Gibson Brown testified that agents at the federal building took trophy photos with her husband on their personal phones, thumbs up. The broken front door stayed broken for two weeks. Gibson Brown had to prop weights against it to keep it shut. ICE made her pay for the replacement.

The DHS chapter of Project 2025, written by Ken Cuccinelli, recommended eliminating the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the office that fields complaints when agents break into someone’s home or beat someone in a parking lot. That office has since been gutted. The chapter also called for doubling the enforcement workforce and removing the legal reviews that slowed deportations down. Both happened. Schwank’s whistleblower complaint went to channels that are now largely unstaffed.

Schwank’s most specific charge came in his closing statement. ICE had stripped out the classes on the oath to the Constitution, on the duty to uphold it, and on the personal responsibility to refuse an illegal order. “These cadets and these new officers don’t have any firmament, any basis on which to stand,” he testified. “They don’t know what they don’t know.”

ICE Doesn’t Want Witnesses

Patrick Corrigan had been standing in the second-floor hallway of the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building in downtown San Diego since just after Labor Day — praying with families, watching ICE agents walk people to the elevator. On the morning of February 26, Federal Protective Service officers told him he was loitering. Corrigan is a retired attorney. He knew that without a citation, there would be no standing to challenge the exclusion in court. So he stayed. “Is praying loitering?” he asked the commander. “Is observing loitering? People have notebooks. People have rosaries.” Officers put Corrigan and three other volunteers — Robert Kovelman, Jill Weigt, and Jocelyn Ahlers — against a wall and cited each one $284.

Corrigan keeps an icon of St. Oscar Romero on his wall — the Salvadoran archbishop murdered at the altar in 1980 for standing with the poor against the state. It is a fitting symbol for a man who drives to a federal building four mornings a week to pray with strangers the government is about to detain. He is the daily ministry lead for Faithful Accompaniment in Trust and Hope (FAITH), the program started by the Catholic Diocese of San Diego to accompany immigrants to their hearings and ICE check-ins. “I feel closer to God at an ICE check-in,” he told GPAHE.

But he admits it’s not easy. Some mornings, he sits in his car in the parking lot, arguing with himself about whether to go inside. He goes in anyway.

Corrigan works alongside volunteers from Detention Resistance, who document arrests while the FAITH volunteers pray with families. Over the months, they have recorded the detention of pregnant women, grandparents, and people on walkers. The week before the citations, volunteers watched a young boy walk with two ICE officers into the elevator that descends to the agency’s holding cells. ICE later confirmed it had detained his mother at Naval Base San Diego and deported her and the child to Venezuela two days later.

Corrigan does not want the ticket dismissed. He wants a federal judge to rule on whether volunteers have a constitutional right to be in that hallway. “If the court says we don’t, then that’s how it is,” he told GPAHE. “But I’d be surprised.” The next day, three more people were cited — two U.S. veterans and an immigration attorney, Ian Seruelo. That afternoon, Rev. Hung Nguyen brought faith volunteers to sit in on public court hearings. About eight Federal Protective Service officers surrounded the group and ordered them out. One officer accused them of conspiracy and threatened a $250,000 fine. Court staff stepped in and told the officers the group could stay.

Weeks before any of this, a Federal Protective Service agent photographed Corrigan’s face and told him he was going into a database. On the morning of the February 26th, with the agent’s supervisor standing next to her, Corrigan said it out loud: “You took my picture and told me I was in the database.” He said it on purpose, with witnesses present. “Yep,” the agent said with a smile. Court documents in a separate case revealed that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations office has been running a surveillance operation in San Diego called “Operation Road Flare” since October 23, 2025.

The internal document is labeled “law enforcement sensitive.” Two people are identified in it: Wong, who organized cyclists to patrol schools for ICE activity, and Gonzalez, who films encounters with agents and posts them on TikTok. At least two more names are blacked out. The government’s language for the people who stand on sidewalks and record arrests is “agitators” who “create a safety risk to federal agents.” A gathering of fifteen or twenty people at the 47th Street Trolley Station gets called a “violent mob.”

The document surfaced because a government attorney used it against Wong. She had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault on a federal officer after unmasking an immigration official during a raid in Linda Vista last summer. Prosecutor Evangenline Dech submitted the Road Flare file to argue Wong should be jailed pending sentencing. She is now on home arrest with an ankle monitor. Gonzalez said he won’t stop filming. “Who they should really be investigating are these ICE agents who are picking people up with no criminal history,” he told Daylight San Diego.

ICE and CBP leadership told the Senate Homeland Security Committee they are not keeping lists of activists or tracking them in a database. The Road Flare document is a list of activists. It tracks them in a database.

“If the government is not seen in what it’s doing, it can do whatever it pleases,” Kovelman told NBC San Diego. All seven plan to fight their tickets in federal court. Asked why a database of courthouse volunteers should concern anyone, Corrigan was direct: “The only answer they can give you should be an answer that scares everybody. We want to know who you are, keep track of you. And if we ever get the place to where we want it to be, we have a list.” In November, DHS expanded Federal Protective Service authority over federal buildings. The new regulation gave agents the tool they needed to clear witnesses from the hallway. On the morning of February 26, they used it.

Indigenous on Their Own Land, Detained as Foreign

At 4:30 a.m. on January 12, Peter Yazzie was standing outside his mother’s Chevrolet Malibu at a gas station in Peoria, Arizona, pulling on his orange high-vis vest for a construction shift, when several cars flooded the parking lot. ICE agents threw him to the ground and zip-tied his wrists before telling him who they were. He showed them his Certificate of Indian Blood and his birth certificate. They detained him anyway. When he explained the car was his mother’s, agents said the registration didn’t match — which meant, they told him, that he had stolen the vehicle and possibly his own identity. “Dude, I have a job. I have family, I have bills, I have kids,” he told The Times. One agent replied: “We’ll get them, too.” He spent four hours in a holding cell. His arrowhead necklace was confiscated as a “dangerous weapon.” A photo of his baby niece was taken and run through a database for “paedophilic stuff.” DHS told The Times it had no record of detaining him.

On February 12, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sent a letter to tribal leaders calling reports of Native American detentions “false” and accusing the tribes of “misrepresenting facts and spreading misinformation.” By then, Indian Country Today had collected documented accounts from the Standing Rock Sioux, Red Lake Nation, and Navajo Nation confirming their enrolled citizens had been detained. Noem wrote that ICE “does not target, and will not target, Native Americans or any U.S. citizens based on appearance, ethnicity, or community affiliation.” She also scolded the tribes for banning ICE from their lands. Several of those same reservations had banned Noem personally in 2024, after she made derogatory statements about tribal leaders while serving as South Dakota’s governor.

At a February 23 democratic forum where ICE whistleblower Ryan Schwank testified, Rep. Emily Randall of Washington, whose district includes 12 tribal nations, said parents were sending their children to school with tribal IDs pinned to them. She called Noem’s letter “a pure lie” and said the secretary was calling every tribal citizen who had spoken out about their experience “liars.”

None of this is accidental. William Perry Pendley authored the Project 2025 section on tribal affairs, and his record tells you what that means. He spent decades at Mountain States Legal Foundation litigating against tribal voting rights, tribal court jurisdiction, and protections for lands tribes consider sacred — using finger quotes around the word “holy” when referring to those sites. In his book Warriors for the West, he wrote that federal policy toward Native Americans was not racial hatred but “an attempt to achieve a Jeffersonian ideal” in which all people “adopted the English language, Christian religion, and Anglo/American culture.”

William LaFromboise, a 23-year-old member of the Dakota Sioux, was at the Minneapolis prayer encampment a few hours after agents killed Pretti. After two hours of demonstrations, agents threw tear gas at the crowd. LaFromboise told The Times that he tried to help an elderly person when an agent charged at him. They tackled him, punched him, and pepper-sprayed his face; he could not see for three hours. ICE posted a photo of his bruised face on social media, accusing demonstrators of having “swarmed and attacked” agents. LaFromboise was held for nine hours at the Whipple Building and released without charges.

The Yurok Tribal Council in Northern California confirmed on February 25 that at least one Yurok citizen had been detained during deportation operations outside the region. The council said it had fielded calls from citizens afraid to travel. “My constituents are telling me they are fearful of traveling to big cities because they’re worried about being targeted based on their skin color,” said council member and Army veteran Phillip Williams. “Any one of us could be misidentified and taken to a detention facility.” ICE does not track tribal status in its detention data, so the actual number of Native citizens swept up remains unknown. The detentions now span Navajo, Oglala Sioux, Red Lake, Standing Rock, Mescalero Apache, Salt River Pima, and Yurok citizens.

The Native American Rights Fund condemned what it called an “ongoing campaign of violence marked by racial profiling, warrantless arrests, excessive force, and a total lack of accountability.” Minnesota’s Native American Caucus called ICE agents “masked militias.”

Several tribal nations banned ICE from reservation land outright. Others rushed new citizenship cards to members who live off-reservation, paired with emergency hotlines and know-your-rights briefings on what to do when agents stop you and don’t recognize your ID.

The Indian Citizenship Act has been law for 102 years. Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose district includes the Minneapolis neighborhoods where ICE has run its largest operations, said it was “unconscionable that they are being forced today in the United States of America to prove that they are citizens.”

Project 2025’s DHS chapter demanded more agents, faster deportations, and fewer internal checks on how either got done. Since 1780, the United States has signed more than 370 treaties with tribal nations. Not one promised that enrolled citizens would have to prove they belong here. Not one has been rescinded.

Congressional Republicans on the House Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs said they did not know it was happening. Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas offered this: “I wasn’t aware that they had arrested Native Americans, but hopefully they resolved it and set them free if they hadn’t broken the law.”