Explore Our Latest Project 2025 Updates
Project 2025 Is Here.
With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page plan spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is poised to become a reality. More than 100 far-right organizations support this blueprint for autocracy, which now appears to be an important source for Trump’s proposed policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Staffers he is announcing for 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. We track Project 2025 activities at the federal, state, and local level, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America.
This week, we look at Donald Trump’s new “Border Czar” and his plans for mass deportations, Trump’s attacks on DEI programs, and his wish to end content moderation policies that reduce hate speech and misinformation online.
Pack Your Bags: Tom Homan’s Plans for Immigrants as Border Czar
Former Acting Director of ICE under Trump, Heritage Foundation Fellow and Project 2025 contributor Tom Homan, Trump’s newly appointed Border Czar, has repeatedly said he is “pissed off” about illegal immigration and chomping at the bit to round up and deport millions. His anger finds fertile ground in several dramatic shifts in immigration enforcement he has signed on to that are in sync with the Trump administration’s hardline, Christian Nationalist approach. Never mind that some call these policies racist, he says.
“I’ve been called all kinds of names. I don’t give a shit what people think about me. I never have and never will,” Homan told the audience at Washington DC’s National Conservative Conference in July 2024, “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” vowing “they ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
Here are some of the Trump policies Homan will likely enact:
Advocating “Self-Deportation” for Assimilated Immigrants
In an unwitting acknowledgment of how deeply rooted many undocumented immigrants are in American society, On November 11, 2024, Homan told Fox News, his former employer, that self-deportation, sometimes referred to as remigration, would allow immigrants with established lives to organize their departure: “When they self-report they can put everything in order, their family business that they got, homes, or whatever. They can put all that in order and leave with their family all together.” This statement inadvertently highlights that many targeted by this policy are business owners, homeowners, and families who have fully integrated into American communities. However, Homan emphasized this grace period wouldn’t apply to everyone: “Criminals and gang members get no grace period… we’re gonna come and find you.”
Military Involvement in Deportations
In interviews with both 60 Minutes and The Times, Homan outlined plans to expand military involvement in deportation operations. “The military has helped on the border for the last six presidents, so it’s nothing new that the DoD [Department of Defence] will assist,” he said. While claiming soldiers wouldn’t make arrests, he confirmed they would handle “transportation… infrastructure-building… help build these facilities and help finish the wall with the Army Corps of Engineers.”
Family Separation Policy
When pressed about whether family separation policies would return under his leadership, Homan was unequivocal: it “needs to be considered, absolutely.” While he disputes being the “father of Trump’s family separation policy,” telling 60 Minutes “I didn’t write the memorandum to separate families. I signed the memo,” he defends the practice as a necessary deterrence: “I was hopin’ to save lives… we thought, maybe if we prosecute people, they’ll stop coming.”
Workplace Raids and Total Enforcement
Rejecting concerns about “concentration camps” or “mass sweeps of neighborhoods,” Homan nevertheless promised “concentrated” enforcement including workplace raids. When asked by 60 Minutes whether even undocumented grandmothers would face arrest, he responded: “It depends… let the judge decide. We’re gonna remove people that a judge’s order deported.” His ominous message at the Republican National Convention summed up his approach: “I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country. You better start packing now.”
As he told Fox News, “We have a targeting system. I can’t really talk about it on the air ’cause it’s law enforcement sensitive, but we’re going to find them. And look, we’re going to go, we’re gonna go get ’em.” Sanctuary cities will also be targeted, and government officials in those refuges for migrants have been warned. “They better get the hell outta the way. Either you help us or get the hell outta the way,” Homan vowed.
Ideological Screening and Student Deportations
Under Homan’s planned enforcement regime, even legal residents and visa holders would face new scrutiny based on their political views. The Trump administration has repeatedly signaled plans to cancel visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests.
As Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who is returning to the White House in January, warned, “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown… The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.” As Trump considered during his first term as president, U.S. consular officials would be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block those with “undesirable attitudes,” and people granted temporary protected status from unsafe countries would have their status revoked — including tens of thousands of Afghan allies who assisted U.S. forces, The New York Times reports.
The Mis-Education of Donald Trump: DEI in the Crosshairs and Restitution for White Students
President-elect Donald Trump is poised to act on his campaign promise to darkly reshape American education, particularly targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs — a major bogeyman of Project 2025. The centerpiece of his proposed plan: not just eliminating these programs, but using their funding to provide what he termed “restitution” to their alleged victims.
“Schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment,” Trump declared in a 2023 campaign video, adding that seized funds would be redirected “as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies.”
This unprecedented proposal to redistribute university endowments, which has remained a consistent part of Trump’s education platform throughout his campaign, represents a significant escalation in the culture wars surrounding American education. While Trump hasn’t explicitly defined who qualifies as “victims” of DEI policies, his rhetoric aligns with recent anti-DEI lawsuits claiming discrimination against white students and corporate workers, many spearheaded by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, which served on Project 2025’s advisory board before distancing itself from the coalition in July. Miller, who has strong ties to white nationalism, will serve as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.
The president-elect’s arsenal includes what he describes as his “secret weapon” — control over the accreditation process — alongside his proposed American Academy, a tuition-free online university he claims would be “strictly nonpolitical” with “no wokeness or jihadism,” and funded by “taxing the large endowments of private universities plagued by antisemitism.”
“We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions — we can’t let this happen. It’s time to offer something dramatically different…We will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and using excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow…the American Academy,” Trump said.
Given his failed track record with operating institutes of higher learning, this may be another one of Trump’s bankrupt ideas.
Free Speech or Free Rein? Trump Dictates What Qualifies as Freedom of Speech
Donald Trump’s dangerously authoritarian approach to reshaping America’s speech landscape includes a “digital bill of rights” that would fundamentally alter social media content moderation, giving misinformation and extremism free rein.
Trump has promised that his retribution against his perceived enemies, whom he refers to as a “censorship cartel,” will be swift, enacted within hours of his inauguration.
This unprecedented restructuring of digital discourse represents a dangerous fusion of government power and personal vendettas, pointing to Trump’s history of threatening lawsuits against critics while demanding amplification of his own speech.
“A sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left wing activists and depraved corporate news media, have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” he vowed in a 2022 campaign video tweeted by Elon Musk on November 8. “The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed, and it must happen immediately.”
It’s a page, quite literally, out of Project 2025’s playbook, which calls for the next president to “support free speech and hold big tech accountable,” and “immediately conduct a thorough review of federal policy regarding free speech online and provide policy solutions to address big tech’s censorship of speech.”
Trump’s free speech agenda has been lauded by ally Robert Kennedy, Jr. on social media, who feels Trump’s dictatorial policies should be rewarded with a spot on Mount Rushmore.
Here’s a portion of what to expect from Trump on January 20, 2025:
Misinformation and Extremist Content: The centerpiece of Trump’s digital rights proposal would give users over 18 the ability to opt out of all content moderation, receiving what he calls “an unmanipulated stream of information,” creating unrestricted channels for spreading misinformation and extremist content. The plan would require court orders for content removal while simultaneously mandating platforms increase removal of undefined “unlawful content.”
Weakening Section 230: Under Trump’s proposal, users whose content is restricted would gain new rights to notification, explanation, and appeals. However, platforms would only retain Section 230 liability protections if they meet undefined standards for “neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination.” Trump’s proposed revision of Section 230 could effectively force platforms to carry all speech, regardless of its harmful nature or its violations of the companies’ own content policies. This “must-carry” mandate would turn social media into unmoderated spaces ripe for exploitation, not dissimilar to how Twitter/X operates under Elon Musk.
Universities Targeted: The plan’s targeting of universities has drawn particular alarm, as institutions could lose federal funding for five years for engaging in what Trump vaguely defines as “censorship activities.”
Hobbling Content Moderation Expertise: The initiative includes a seven-year “cooling off” period before intelligence community members can work for companies handling user data, which would reduce content moderation expertise at major platforms. Trump frames these measures as existential: “The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America.”
DOJ to Investigate: To enforce these changes, Trump plans to order the Department of Justice to investigate “all parties involved in the new online censorship regime,” including nonprofits and academic programs, for potential violations of civil rights, campaign finance, election, securities, and antitrust laws. House Republicans are being urged to send preservation letters to the Biden administration and tech companies regarding evidence of content moderation.
