Project 2025 October 23rd Update

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 look at Project 2025’s deadly global shockwaves, the chilling rise of book bans that entrench censorship, and the brutal human cost of America’s unprecedented deportation machine.

Health Cuts Demonstrate Project 2025’s Global Reach

The warehouse in Belgium holds nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives. Paid for. Packaged. Ready to ship to 1.6 million women who need them in Sub-Saharan Africa. They’re not going anywhere.

Instead, the Trump administration claims these birth control pills and devices could “potentially be abortifacients” — a medically false assertion that reveals everything about Project 2025’s global strategy. Contraceptives prevent pregnancy; they don’t end it. But the distinction no longer matters.

Nine months into implementation, the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism has crossed oceans. What began as a domestic policy manifesto now dictates whether a mother in Tanzania can access HIV medication for her unborn child. Whether a clinic in Kenya stays open. Whether health workers in Uganda receive paychecks.

Research teams from Physicians for Human Rights fanned across five African nations — the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania — documenting what happens when the world’s largest health donor abruptly stops giving. They found children dead from malaria, a disease with a simple cure. Pregnant women watching HIV replicate in their bodies, unable to afford the drugs that would protect their babies. Clinics with medicines but no staff, because no one’s been paid in months.

Project 2025 didn’t hide its intentions. Upon publication in 2023, it described the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as “a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” It called for scaling back funding, and “deradicalizing” the program by scrubbing USAID communications clean of specific words: “gender,” “gender equality,” “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights.” It also advocated for a return to, and expansion of, the Mexico City Policy, which denies funding to non-governmental agencies that provide abortion advice, information, referrals, services, or advocacy. Under Trump, this also includes contraception.

Without U.S. global family planning funding, 47.6 million women and couples will lose access to modern contraceptives over one year. That produces an estimated 17.1 million unintended pregnancies. And 34,000 women will die from pregnancy-related causes that money could have prevented, researchers predict.

History already demonstrated what the Mexico City Policy accomplishes. When applied to 26 Sub-Saharan African countries between 2001 and 2008, contraception use dropped 13.5 percent. Unintended pregnancies climbed 12 percent. Abortions increased 40 percent. The policy designed to reduce abortions produced the opposite effect, because desperate women found other ways.

Other disease interventions are also now at risk. At the United Nations, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. torpedoed a declaration on non-communicable diseases — heart disease, diabetes, respiratory illness. Countries had negotiated for months, yet Kennedy withdrew U.S. support on the meeting day itself, falsely claiming the text promoted “destructive gender ideology” and abortion rights.

Other wealthy nations aren’t filling the funding void. The Netherlands plans to make two-thirds in cuts by 2027. The United Kingdom slashed aid to boost defense budgets. These three countries — the U.S., Netherlands, U.K. — provide 70 percent of global family planning funding.

Those contraceptives in Belgium represent a choice. Send them, and 1.6 million women control their reproductive futures. Destroy them, and those same women face unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, preventable deaths. The warehouse doors remain locked. Project 2025 made its choice clear.

Empty Shelves: How Book Bans Mirror Project 2025’s War on “Harmful” Content

Shellie Flockhart drove an hour north from her home in Dallas Center, Iowa (population 1,900), on September 12, 2025, heading for a meeting with the Iowa Board of Education in Gilbert with a binder full of “evidence.” The cosmetologist and Moms for Liberty vice chair was on a mission: convince the Iowa Board of Education that three books assigned to Dallas Center-Grimes sophomores violated state law. But sexual content wasn’t her complaint, it was the nation’s honor. “The teaching material is teaching social justice, and it paints a poor picture of America,” she said.

Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese was among the challenged titles — an award-winning graphic novel later adapted for a Disney television series about a boy facing racist bullying and his journey toward acceptance of his identity. The San Francisco Chronicle described it as “one of the most powerful and entertaining works of literature to be published this year,” and district officials had already reviewed the materials and found them compliant. Flockhart’s appeal failed, but what it revealed is a rising effort to remove materials not for explicit content, but for their perspectives on race and American history as censorship becomes normalized.

Between July 2024 and June 2025, PEN America documented 6,870 book bans across 23 states. “These attacks on students’ rights and educational institutions are the symptoms of a much larger disease: the dismantling of public education and a backsliding democracy,” PEN wrote in its report. The pattern mirrors Project 2025’s blueprint for eliminating “divisive” concepts and “Marxist indoctrination” from classrooms, which under Trump translates to materials addressing racism, slavery, gender identity, and sexuality.

Project 2025’s education chapter advocates ending federal programs promoting “gender ideology,” “indoctrination,”and “sexual orientation.” Similar language now appears in state laws driving book removals across the country.

New Braunfels, Texas, provides an extreme example. On October 13, district officials voted to simply close all middle and high school libraries as they review more than 50,000 books for compliance with Texas Senate Bill 13. The law requires libraries to be free of “harmful material” and “profane content,” but provides no definitions for either term.

The numbers nationwide tell a story of acceleration. Florida recorded 2,304 instances of book bans in 2024-2025 — more than any state. Iowa pulled more than 3,400 individual books. Tennessee banned at least 1,623 titles.

PEN America’s data shows 97 percent of bans stemmed from fear of legislation rather than legal mandates, with some librarians preemptively removing books from the shelves and school districts issuing “do not order” lists. “We’ve become so acclimated to censorship in our backyards that it’s hard to even remember that this should be crazy,” Sabrina Baêta, senior manager of PEN America’s Freedom to Read Program, said. “This should be un-American. This should be, at times, unconstitutional.”

Josh Coleman, who researches book bans for the National Academy of Education, sees the consequences in classroom practice. Teachers aren’t bringing books back “because they don’t know if they’re going to have to take them out again, or they’re just frightened for their jobs,” he said.

Last year’s bans affected 3,752 unique titles and 2,600 writers, illustrators and translators. The targeting follows a clear pattern. “LGBTQ+ content, content with people of color, Black folks, Indigenous folks, tend to be the focal objects,” Coleman noted.

The federal government has joined the campaign. Days after Trump’s inauguration, the Education Department declared book bans “a hoax” while threatening districts’ federal funding for non-compliance with censorship demands. In July 2025, the Trump Administration removed nearly 600 books from Department of Defense schools on military bases. On October 20, 2025, a federal judge ordered that the books be restored to military schools after parents filed a lawsuit. “The record is clear that by removing books, Defendants intended to deny Plaintiffs access to ideas that they, by virtue of the Presidential EOs, found distasteful, ‘radical’ or ‘divisive,’” and not by the educational qualities of the books,” the judge wrote.

Utah and South Carolina have implemented statewide ban mechanisms that multiply the impact of each removal. Utah’s “no read” list contains 18 titles. South Carolina has 22. Once a book appears on these lists, the ban automatically applies to all districts statewide. The two states combined may have triggered over 2,500 individual cases from fewer than 40 challenged titles.

Many of these bans have been orchestrated by Moms for Liberty (MFL), a Project 2025 advisory board member and anti-LGBTQ+ organization that has evolved dramatically since moms in Florida got together to protest mask mandates during COVID. With close connections to the Trump White House and claims of 130,000 members, MFL has transformed into a well-funded implementation arm of the Project 2025 agenda. The organization, which took in $3.4 million in 2023, supports book ban campaigns nationwide while backing legislation to censor materials on subjects they deem dangerous.

Yet pushback has increased. Seventy of 87 districts impacted by book bans showed evidence of public response against censorship, supported by local groups and national organizations including the ACLU, EveryLibrary, American Booksellers for Free Expression, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. “Book bans are not popular. And when communities speak up — it matters,” Baêta stated. “It’s not a magic wand restoring books to shelves, but people in communities across the country are fighting for their right to read.”

In New Braunfels, students wait. Officials won’t say when they’ll finish reviewing 50,000 books and the libraries stay closed. As PEN’s report concluded, book bans are part of a larger campaign to “restrict and control education and public narratives,” which allows a culture of censorship to fester, impoverishing students’ educational opportunities.”

The question isn’t whether these bans will continue, but whether communities will recognize what’s being lost before those empty spaces on shelves become permanent.

“How Do They Look Compared to You?”: Project 2025’s Mass Deportation Plan in Action

Leonardo Garcia Venegas was inside a half-built house in Baldwin County, Alabama, drywall dust on his jeans, headphones on, when he felt someone watching. He turned. A masked immigration agent stood inside the garage.

Garcia Venegas pulled out his wallet. Alabama only issues REAL IDs to people who are legally in the country. The agent looked at it and kept looking. Then he held Garcia Venegas there for 20 minutes to verify his citizenship. This was the second time in two weeks. During the first detention in May, different agents raided another worksite, ignoring no trespassing signs and snatching up Latinos. These agents also dismissed the same ID as fake, tackling him and yelling at him to “get on the fucking ground, while pushing his face into the drying concrete.” “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen!” he protested. He was held handcuffed for an hour until they determined he was telling the truth by running his Social Security number.

Garcia Venegas’s detention is no anomaly. Under Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has become the largest dragnet in American history  — one that has swept up not only undocumented immigrants but U.S. citizens too. As detention levels surge, oversight has collapsed. Death rates are climbing and medical neglect complaints mount.

By September 2025, the number of people being detained by immigration reached 59,000—a 60 percent increase in 12 months. In August, the count hit 61,226, a record. By mid-October, more than 60,000 people remained in custody. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership had called for exactly this scale: “raising the daily available number of beds to 100,000” and loosening detention standards to allow ICE to operate “soft-sided facilities” — tents or camps — wherever it chose.

The Trump-Republican “Big Beautiful” budget bill provided $170 billion through September 2029 to build this capacity. That’s $42.5 billion per year, the funding equivalent of the world’s thirteenth largest military. The 17 largest detention facilities currently in operation, each holding more than 1,000 people, are all privately run. In August, one company CEO told investors about “unprecedented growth opportunities.”

Iraq Veteran and U.S. citizen George Retes, 25, was on his way to work as a security guard in Southern California when ICE detained him. Retes, a father of two, managed one phone call on July 10 before agents confiscated his Apple Watch. His hands were cuffed behind his back when he pressed the watch face against his body to dial his wife. “ICE arrested me,” he said, then the line went dead. His family spent three days calling every law enforcement agency they could find. No one would tell them where he was. Eventually, Retes’ sister saw a TikTok video where she recognized her brother’s car and the disabled veteran decal on his window. The video showed a man on the ground, surrounded by agents. He was a United States citizen and a combat veteran. Agents knew this, Retes said. “They didn’t care.”

Garcia Venegas and Retes are far from alone. ProPublica documented more than 170 Americans held by immigration agents during the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Among them: nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. More than 50 Americans were detained because agents questioned their citizenship. Almost all were Latino. Another 130 faced arrest for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers. About fifty of those cases resulted in dropped charges or dismissals.

When asked how agents determine who to target, Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino was blunt. Standing beside a white reporter, he explained how agents identify suspects: “How do they look compared to, say, you?”

A 79-year-old car wash owner and U.S. citizen who had recently recovered from heart surgery was knocked down and tackled, agents’ knees pressing into his neck and back, breaking his ribs. He was detained and held for 12 hours and denied medical attention. An 84-year-old woman, a U.S. citizen, sustained a concussion after federal agents rushed and knocked her to the ground during what The Oregonian described as a peaceful protest in Portland. “With no warning the feds charged into us, knocked us down and sprayed us. I was hit in the head with a projectile,” she said. Her husband, also 84, a U.S. Citizen and a Vietnam veteran, was knocked off his walker to the ground. “I never thought federal officers could behave this way,” she said. “I always thought people must be provoking them or something, that they would never do this unprovoked. Obviously, I was wrong.”

The brutality of enforcement extends to deplorable, inhumane, and sometimes deadly conditions at detention centers across the country. Sixteen immigrants are reported to have died in ICE custody between January and October, whereas 24 deaths were recorded during the entire four years of the Biden administration. This year’s reported deaths appear to have resulted from causes such as infections, injuries, uncontrolled diabetes, and suicide.

Jonathan White, a retired commander in the U.S. Public Health Service Corps who oversaw detention of undocumented, unaccompanied minors during Trump’s first administration, said that without fundamental policy changes people will continue to get sick and die. “The larger problem is that this is a system to abduct and detain people without meaningful due process,” he said. “That is inherently harmful and cannot be made humane or healthy or safe, no matter how many people you throw at it.”

Medical neglect is rampant. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary and California City Detention Facility, immigrants launched hunger strikes in September to protest poor access to medical care, including difficulty accessing diabetes medication and receiving treatment for injuries. Rebekah Wolf, a staff attorney with the Immigration Justice Campaign, described one client with untreated diabetes. “They just stopped giving her medicine,” Wolf said. “And so we’re like, ‘Hey, detention center, why’d you stop giving this medicine?’ And there’s just no response.”

In Michigan, a detainee with chronic myeloid leukemia sued the administration after his chemotherapy was suspended for several weeks following his detention. In August, responding to a class-action lawsuit in New York City, a judge ordered ICE to allow migrants to keep prescription medications they had on them when detained.

The detention centers — overcrowded and increasingly reliant on hastily constructed tent cities — make it easier for communicable diseases to spread and more difficult to manage chronic illnesses. Frequent transfers between states disrupted medical treatments and caused prescriptions and records to be lost in transit. These privately-run detention centers have a long history of overcrowdedness, neglect, and basic human rights violations, even with a fraction of the number of detainees they are housing now. A 2024 report found that more than 90 percent of deaths in ICE custody could have been prevented with better medical care. The report documented instances of incorrect diagnoses, contraindicated medications, and delayed treatment during heart attacks, suicide attempts, and other emergencies.

“The lack of medical staffing is a consistent theme,” said Eunice Cho, senior counsel for the ACLU. “Specialist care is denied. People are transferred from place to place before they’re able to actually get their care. People are not given medication.” Human rights groups worry deaths may be undercounted. “There is no standardized way in which ICE reports on deaths. It is quite possible that people have died and no one knows,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security attempted to eliminate offices that investigate complaints of discrimination, neglect, and mistreatment of detainees, calling them “internal adversaries that slow down operations.” After human rights groups sued, the offices were restored in May, but hundreds of their staff were laid off a few months later, hobbling oversight efforts. Trump also fired the independent inspectors general who investigated conditions at detention centers.

Meanwhile, the raids continue. In coastal Alabama, Garcia Venegas knows of 15 construction sites raided in recent months. The industry struggles for workers. He carries his REAL ID and Social Security card everywhere now. It hasn’t helped. “If they decide they want to detain you,” he said, “you’re not going to get out of it.” He still goes to work. He checks his wallet before leaving: REAL ID, Social Security card, and birth certificate now too. On construction sites along Alabama’s Gulf Coast, he listens for footsteps behind him. The headphones stay off.