Project 2025 Remains a Serious Threat
Paul Dans has now stepped down as director of Project 2025, but his resignation has done nothing to quell the controversy surrounding the deeply unpopular conservative agenda. As Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist and central figure in the Project admitted in a covertly-recorded interview, the Project is “doggedly” working on a detailed policy playbook for the first 180 days of a conservative presidency. In that same interview, Vought exposed additional secrets of the Project’s conservative agenda, including aspirations for a full pornography ban.
By now, however, the Project has learned its lesson. Understanding that the Project’s extremist views are a political liability, Vought conceded that moving forward, he and his team are shielding this new playbook from the Freedom of Information Act and keeping it hidden from the general public.
Meanwhile, Project 2025 continues to quietly barrel ahead with its plans to recruit and train the conservative loyalists who could be tapped to replace thousands of civil servants. And while Project 2025 has mostly focused on a potential conservative presidency, it is unclear that the plan stops there. The Plan’s sponsor, the Heritage Foundation, just partnered with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue the federal government over workplace protections for transgender employees, which Project 2025 aims to eliminate (p. 584).
In any case, it is clear that Project 2025 is alive and well, but merely going underground to stave off political blowback.
Given its unabating importance, Wren will continue to highlight some of the key provisions of the manifesto. This week, we focus on Immigration and Reproductive Rights.
Immigration
“Enforcing the customs and immigration laws is a matter of life and death” (Project 2025, p. 556).
- Attacking Legal Immigration. Project 2025 vows to erect more barriers for asylum claims (p.146-48), making it all the more difficult for victims of crime, persecution, and human trafficking to find relief. The Project also hopes to limit employment authorization and cap temporary work programs, which could impact not only migrant workers but the many businesses that rely on their labor (p.145).
- Sweeping Raids, Immigration Camps, and Military at the Border. Project 2025 lays out a “draconian” vision of immigration enforcement that would reinstate some of the more inhumane practices against undocumented people, like the widely rebuked horseback-mounted Border Patrol (p.139) and raids in schools, hospitals, and religious institutions (p.142). The Project promises to expand ICE agents’ power to arrest and detain people accused of immigration violations (p.142) and anticipates quadrupling the need for bed space in detention centers (p.143). The Project would resume constructing the Border Wall (p.147) and even implement new policies like placing active-duty military personnel and National Guardsman at the border–something the Project concedes “has not been done” before (p. 555).
Reproductive Rights
“But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning, (Project 2025, p.6)…HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care…” ( p. 489).
- De-Facto Abortion Ban. Project 2025 advocates for an effective national ban on medical abortions, which the Project says could be achieved in two ways that circumvent the courts:
- Gutting FDA approval of abortion pills–According to the Project, “abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world” (p.458) and FDA approval of mifepristone should therefore be rescinded.
- Reviving the Reconstruction-Era Comstock Act–If the mailing of abortion-related material is prohibited, as the long dormant anti-obscenity act proscribes, abortion clinics could not send or receive abortion pills, but could potentially also be forbidden from transmitting abortion medicine, supplies, and equipment, which would then function as a de facto abortion ban (p.458-9).
- Limit Access to Contraception. But it is not just abortion access that is on the chopping board. Contraceptives like the morning-after pill are, too. According to the Center for American Progress, if Project 2025 prevails, “nearly 48 million women of reproductive age would lose their guaranteed no-cost access to emergency contraception.” (See p.484-5).
- Other Downstream Effects. Given Project 2025’s interest in purging “abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights” from the federal lexicon (p.5) and promoting “married, nuclear families” (p.451), many other related aspects of family life are implicated. The Project takes swipes at non-traditional families, IVF and surrogacy (“the desires of adults” should never be exalted “over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them,” p.451); calls for defunding stem cell and fetal cell research (p. 459-460); and advocates ending policies that allow for life-saving abortions for pregnant people who live in anti-abortion states but are experiencing medical distress (“stabilization of the unborn child” should take precedence, p.473-4).
In Other Democracy News
States Try To Create Their Own Immigration Enforcement Schemes In Unconstitutional Power Grabs
The United States Constitution gives the federal government sole power to enforce immigration laws. In 2012 in Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that states cannot enact their own immigration enforcement laws, striking down key provisions of Arizona’s SB 1070 while upholding others that aligned with federal enforcement.
Recently, some states have capitalized on claims that President Biden is “weak” on border security by passing anti-immigrant measures, including attempting to set up state immigration systems. Texas’ SB4, a law that makes it a state offense to cross the Texas-Mexico border between ports of entry and mandates local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities, opened the floodgates for other states to attempt to encroach on the federal government’s sole jurisdiction over immigration law. States like Iowa, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia are trying to unconstitutionally seize immigration enforcement power from the federal government.
By creating their own immigration crimes, states are requiring their law enforcement officers to identify and arrest noncitizens for alleged violations, essentially requiring them to racially profile their residents. Many of these laws would also authorize state actors to forcibly remove noncitizens to a port of entry – which could violate international law if those individuals are at risk of torture or persecution in their home countries.
So far, appellate courts have prevented these laws from going into effect. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals halted enforcement of SB4 in March, but the Supreme Court of the United States issued a stay and said it could go into effect, which the appellate court quickly halted again. The Supreme Court’s actions, however, and the confusion caused in the few hours the law was in effect, were an ominous sign of where these cases may lead.
A federal court just blocked Iowa’s similar law, SF 2340, from going into effect. This law would have set up a state-run punitive immigration system. Showing lawmakers’ intent to completely subvert federal immigration law, SF 2340 would even apply to noncitizens who obtain lawful federal immigration status or reenter the country with federal permission.
Fighting Back: What’s Working
Michigan’s Supreme Court overturned a corrupt anti-democratic legislative bait-and-switch to thwart direct democracy laws in the state. Voters were poised to approve popular minimum wage and paid leave ballot measures in 2018. However, before the election, the right-wing legislature passed both laws, which eliminated them from appearing on the ballot, only to repeal the same laws after voters went to the polls. The blatant anti-democratic maneuver was smacked down by the state’s high court in a blistering decision. Both measures have now been reinstated.
Utah’s Supreme Court unanimously overturned a similar end run around voters, when the legislature re-wrote a popular anti-gerrymandering bill, gutting it after voters approved it at the ballot box. Days later, Idaho’s Supreme Court dismissed the right-wing attorney general’s attempt to remove a ballot measure to create open primary and ranked-choice voting systems.
Last issue, we highlighted the movement around the country to get reproductive rights on the ballot in the Fall. Since then, Missouri has joined the growing list of states where citizen-led efforts are giving the voters a chance to protect fundamental rights that are under attack by anti-democratic state governments and a politically-captured Supreme Court.
In election results, Andrew Warren has won his primary in his path to win back his State Attorney seat after Ron DeSantis removed him from office in 2022. Duly-elected 9th Judicial State Attorney Monique Worrell, removed by DeSantis in 2023, also won her (unopposed) primary.
Coming Up
Canary in a coal mine? Georgia’s SB 63 and the implications for pretrial release nationwide
On September 24 at 2 ET, we will have our next Wren Collective Briefing. You can register here.
This year, the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation that would remove judicial bail-setting discretion and require cash bail for 30 new offenses including non-violent misdemeanors, charges linked to poverty, and charges associated with protected protest. The law also makes it nearly impossible for charitable bail funds and mutual aid organizations to operate in the state by limiting their bail-outs to three people per year.
Panelists will discuss the impact of the law on Georgia’s pretrial landscape, how grassroots, grass-tops, and faith communities are pushing back, and what other states should be looking out for during their legislative sessions.