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As thousands of Republican voters flocked to Milwaukee to officially declare former President Donald Trump as their nominee for the presidency, reporters and talking heads remain transfixed on what kind of vision Trump will lay out for a second administration.
Unfortunately, we already know.
Despite his best efforts to distance himself from Project 2025, Trump has made clear that his platform for a second turn as president will dismantle America's promise as a welcoming nation of possibility. No matter what he chooses to call it, he is committed to enacting disastrous immigration proposals that will set our country back for generations.
More Americans are learning about Project 2025, the 922-page far-right wish list authored by the Heritage Foundation and various Trump loyalists who either served in the Trump administration or aspire to work during a second term. It's a playbook that dramatically centralizes a president's executive power, dismantles regulatory agencies that safeguard Americans, and rolls back protections for civil and reproductive rights.
Specifically on immigration, Project 2025 promises to return to and expand Trump's worst policies on immigration.
On the first day of a new term, Donald Trump has promised to "begin the largest domestic deportation operation in the history of our country." This deportation effort—which Trump has explicitly compared to the shameful 1950s operation that removed Mexican immigrants, including American citizens—would devastate the lives of the 11 million people who call the United States home and contribute to our economy but lack documentation. For the jurisdictions that push back on his anti-immigration policies, Trump seeks to deputize local law enforcement to raid and unleash chaos on our schools, hospitals, and places of worship, and allow out-of-state agencies to tear communities apart.
Trump's advisors have already laid out plans to loosen migrant detention standards to enable the creation of sprawling detention camps in a haunting reimagining of the WWII internment camps that held Japanese Americans.
And let's finally rid ourselves of the lie that the Trump administration would ever actually encourage immigration or support immigrants seeking lawful residency or citizenship. Even the conservative Cato Institute found in a review of the first Trump administration that its policies exceeded its goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent.
None of this even begins to consider the other measures Trump has suggested when it's politically convenient for him: ending birthright citizenship, deporting protesters, restoring a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, and other policies that divide Americans instead of bringing us together. But that's the point and exactly what Project 2025 would advance.
Even as Trump and the RNC attempt to disassociate themselves from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, the overlap between their platforms is undeniable. In fact, Trump recently said he would appoint Tom Homan, a Project 2025 contributor and former ICE acting director, to his new administration.
This is the same Tom Homan who once said, "Shame on all of us," when Congress considered a clean Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals bill. That's why it's no surprise that Project 2025 calls for the elimination of legal status for half a million Dreamers, the suspension of legal immigration applications, punishments for citizens living with noncitizens, the elimination of family-based immigration, and rollbacks to asylum and Temporary Protected Status.
These federal policies would coincide with states already pursuing their own hostile measures against immigrant communities. Texas, for instance, now enables state police to detain and deport undocumented immigrants—a power constitutionally reserved for the federal government. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has signed sweeping measures requiring hospitals to inquire about citizenship status and imposing penalties on anyone "transporting" undocumented immigrants. Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Georgia have also passed laws imposing new immigration restrictions and penalties.
Together, these proposals will create a more isolated United States—one that rejects the strength of our diversity and abandons our longtime status as a global beacon of hope and freedom.
To remove immigrants from the American story is to remove the force that gives our country strength, vibrancy and economic might. The country's economy would be completely depleted without immigrants, who account for 17 percent of the country's GDP and pay nearly $525 billion annually in federal, state, and local taxes, regardless of their documentation status.
Immigrants fuel local economies by helping reverse population declines, bolstering our workforce and buying homes. Some jurisdictions are incentivizing immigrants to join their communities, with cities like Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Topeka, Dayton and others viewing immigrants as partners who can revitalize their economies.
Milwaukee's own population grew by more than 13,000 residents who came from other countries over the last year. Those new Milwakeeans are now giving back to their city. If given the chance, the RNC and Trump would put an end to that growth.
Let's not give them the opportunity.
Murad Awawdeh is president of NYIC Action, the 501(c)4 sister organization of the New York Immigration Coalition.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
