Editor’s note: The following material is taken from “Project 2025: Unveiling the far right’s plan to demolish immigration in a second Trump term,” a document written by Cecilia Esterline of the Niskanen Center and published in February 2024. Excerpts from it are republished here under Creative Commons license CC By 4.0. Project 2025 is part of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” versions of which have been published by the Foundation for over 40 years as a collection of suggested policies for Republican administrations. The Trump administration implemented nearly 64% of previous Heritage Foundation recommendations during the first year of Trump’s term, and Trump advisors have made clear they will try to implement much of what is in Project 2025 if Trump is elected again. Trump has said he will deport tens of millions of immigrants if he is president, and the Heritage Foundation has endorsed the idea. Project 2025, the far right’s plan to demolish immigration, threatens all of us. Below the excerpts is a link to the full text of Esterline’s article.
Esterline writes: “The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the policy playbook for a second Trump administration, and its impacts on immigration would be far more complex and destructive than previously reported. It isn’t simply a refresh of first-term ideas, dusted off and ready to be re-implemented. Rather, it reflects a meticulously orchestrated, comprehensive plan to drive immigration levels to unprecedented lows and increase the federal government’s power to the states’ detriment. These proposals circumvent Congress and the courts and are specifically engineered to dismantle the foundations of our immigration system. The most troubling proposals include plans to:
• Block federal financial aid for up to two-thirds of all American college students if their state permits certain immigrant groups, including Dreamers with legal status, to access in-state tuition.
• Terminate the legal status of 500,000 Dreamers by eliminating staff time for reviewing and processing renewal applications.
• Use backlog numbers to trigger the automatic suspension of application intake for large categories of legal immigration.
• Suspend updates to the annual eligible country lists for H-2A and H-2B temporary worker visas, thereby excluding most populations from filling critical gaps in the agricultural, construction, hospitality, and forestry sectors.
• Bar U.S. citizens from qualifying for federal housing subsidies if they live with anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident.
• Force states to share driver’s licenses and taxpayer identification information with federal authorities or risk critical funding.
“These proposals, along with the others discussed…are designed to cripple the existing immigration system without regard for the extraordinarily harmful effects on the health and wealth of our country. They would weaken our nation’s prosperity and security and undermine the vitality of our workforce, with far-reaching consequences for future generations of Americans.
“While there is little doubt that a second term for Trump would be grim for immigrants, the headlines do not capture the depth of the proposed changes or the lengths the administration would go to implement them. Based on a detailed playbook the far-right published last year [Project 2025], the reality of what could emerge is even more clever and destructive than previously imagined. The 920-page tome — a blueprint for a second Trump administration across all policy areas — spells out precisely how a new Trump administration will dismantle the U.S. immigration system and how those policy changes will impact jobs, housing, education, transportation, and commerce for both immigrants and Americans. [Project 2025] proposes overhauls to nearly every federal agency and includes over 175 immigration provisions. Unlike in the previous years when immigration policy changes were relatively insulated, Project 2025 elucidates how the administration would halt legal immigration, centralize power in the federal government, decimate privacy protections, and risk American security and prosperity, all in pursuit of a political obsession with immigration.”
See the full text of Esterline’s article here.
Cecilia Esterline is the Immigration Research Analyst at the Niskanen Center, where she focuses on employment-based visa policy, international student retention, and economic analysis. Her writing has been published in a variety of outlets, including The Washington Post, The Hill, and The Milken Institute Review. Her research and commentary have been featured on CNBC and NPR and in various print and online sources, including Bloomberg, Newsweek, POLITICO, and The Washington Post, among others.
