Posted by Dara Lind | Aug 23, 2024 | Enforcement, Immigration 101, Reform
What would a second Donald Trump presidency mean for immigrants?
It’s often hard to answer these questions using politicians’ own words – you have to parse what they wish to do versus what actions they’re willing to take.
But one way to answer the question is to look at what former Trump administration officials see as their highest priorities for a future Trump presidency. That’s why Project 2025, a task force run by the Heritage Foundation, has gotten so much more attention than Trump’s official campaign plans or the GOP platform.
The Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document is a comprehensive plan of attack for an ultraconservative federal government. It has become an object of mockery among Democrats – but also a source of fear and rage over what might happen if its authors were to come to power.
The immigration agenda, in particular, is a carefully considered wish list for remaking federal immigration policy to suit the dreams of the most hawkish restrictionist: with a clear plan to restrict legal immigration of all kinds, while laying the foundations for a potential campaign of mass deportation.
Why Project 2025 matters
When Donald Trump ran for president the first time, in 2016, his team didn’t do much to plan for what would happen if he won – leaving them scrambling to set up a presidential transition and be ready to take office on January 20. It took a while for them to figure it out.
Over the course of Trump’s term, however, the administration strengthened its command of immigration policy. It asserted more control over institutions (like offices of legal counsel) that had been obstacles to the president and his advisers getting their way. Immigration advisor Stephen Miller reportedly made a practice of calling mid-level Department of Homeland Security employees to pressure them on Trump’s behalf.
So one way to understand Project 2025 is as an attempt to ensure that a second Trump administration picked up where the first one left off – without the learning curve.
Many contributors to the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” guide had high-ranking positions under the Trump administration. The chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, for example, was written by Ken Cuccinelli, who was in the upper echelons of department leadership at the end of Trump’s term; the chapter on the Department of Justice was written by Gene Hamilton, who was known in the Trump administration as second only to Stephen Miller in his knowledge of immigration policy and fervor to move it in a more restrictionist direction.
Despite these connections, once Project 2025 started to gather unwanted attention, many conservatives have attempted to distance themselves from it. The guide was removed from the official Project 2025 website (an archived version is available here). Trump claims he had nothing to do with it; advisers like Miller have downplayed their input. This has been interpreted as Trump “distancing himself” from the contents of the Mandate for Leadership plan.
However, Russ Vought —a former Office of Management and Budget head and key Project 2025 contributor — believes this is just spin. In a private meeting earlier this summer, secretly recorded and leaked to CNN, Vought noted that Trump was trying to distance himself from the Project 2025 “brand,” but that “he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy” — meaning that it’s impossible to tell which, if any, of the hundreds of ideas in the blueprint are actually off the table.
Furthermore, he said, the public guide is just the tip of the iceberg; Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, has been drafting “hundreds of executive orders” and memos that a president could issue within days of taking office.
The bottom line is this: the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” is the most detailed agenda for what might happen under a second Trump term, written by people who could make it happen.
Laying the foundations for mass deportation – while keeping much of the plan secret
The most interesting thing about the immigration agenda laid out in “Mandate for Leadership” is what isn’t there: a detailed plan for how, exactly, the government could conduct a campaign of mass deportation, arresting, detaining, and deporting millions of people.
That doesn’t mean that Cuccinelli and the other Project 2025 contributors are in any way dovish on immigration enforcement. To the contrary, the document represents an effort to start with the aggressive posture on interior enforcement that the Trump administration took in 2017 – before rising border crossings forced it to divert enforcement resources to recent arrivals – and go from there.
The document includes proposals that have become standard parts of Republican immigration proposals. In the world of Project 2025, the U.S. would tear up the Flores settlement (which generally prevents the government from detaining children and families indefinitely). It would reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy of forcing non-Mexican citizens to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases are pending. It would stiffen penalties on countries that refuse to accept deportees from the U.S., and force states and cities that receive Federal Emergency Management Agency grants to share databases with the federal government (such as their DMV databases) for immigration enforcement purposes.
It also goes further than the Trump administration dared to during its first term. The guide says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials should be directed to take all unauthorized immigrants with criminal records, prior deportation orders, or who have been identified by local police under 287(g) agreements into custody. Homeland Security Investigations officers – who are generally tasked with complex investigations that may not be directly immigration-related – would be told to focus on immigration crimes, freeing up ICE manpower for a deportation effort. (Department of Justice attorneys would similarly be urged to focus on prosecuting immigration offenses.)
The biggest obstacle to a mass deportation effort is likely to be the resource constraints: the money and space required to round up, detain, and process millions of people. Project 2025 calls on Congress to raise ICE’s budget, increasing its detention capacity to 100,000 beds at any given time (by comparison, in 2019, the Trump administration asked Congress to fund 52,000 beds). But it also calls for loosened detention standards – which would, in Cuccinelli’s telling, prevent states from setting higher standards for detention facilities, and allow ICE to operate “soft-sided” facilities (tents or camps) wherever it chose.
But the report doesn’t actually call for those camps to be constructed. Nor does it mention the idea, attributed to Miller, to deploy National Guard forces to assist in enforcement efforts. And there’s no reference to the goals thrown around by former and potentially-future Trump officials, such as deporting 15 to 20 million people, or starting with a baseline of 1 million deportations a year.
To a certain extent, this might be an acknowledgment that the executive branch can’t do all that on its own, without congressional appropriations. But it’s also plausible that plans are being made for mass deportation, just not being published.
That’s what Vought said in the secretly-taped meeting. He mentioned mass deportation, specifically, as a policy that would require advance drafting of official documents: “You may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation.’ What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not… having to scramble or do that later on.”
But he added that those documents would be kept “very, very close hold.”
Attacking every type of legal immigration you can think of
The Project 2025 blueprint is a reminder that, while many politicians stress that they support legal immigration, the immigration hawks who staffed Trump’s first term (and could staff his second) do not.
Pretty much every way someone could come to the U.S., or receive legal status after they’ve arrived, is under attack in the document. The Biden administration’s expansion of legal pathways using the parole authority? Gone. Refugee admissions? Slashed (of course). Student visas? Heavily scrutinized, with the State Department directed to “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations.”
Temporary Protected Status? Project 2025 issues a blanket call for protections to be stripped, completing a job Trump attempted to start as president (but was held up in court).
Family-based immigration (derided here as “chain migration”) would be a priority for Congress to reduce or eliminate, in the name of “modernizing” the immigration system. But that wouldn’t mean the Project 2025 administration would be issuing more work visas. To the contrary, the Department of Labor would start winding down both the H2-A and H2-B “low-skilled” seasonal work visas, with an aim toward eliminating both in 10 to 20 years. H1-B “high-skilled” visas would also be reduced. Fewer immigrants would be legally allowed to work.
The “Mandate for Leadership” saves perhaps its highest level of scrutiny for T and U visas – given to survivors of crime (including trafficking and violence against women) who are helping law enforcement investigate and prosecute their cases. The visas are intended to encourage survivors to come forward, by giving them a safe future in the United States even if they are targeted for retaliation by criminal organizations. But Project 2025 calls to “significantly reduce eligibility” for both types of visas. One regulation it proposes would restrict eligibility for U visas to people who are “actively providing significant material assistance to law enforcement.” Given that U visa backlogs are measured in years, it’s hard to see how someone who was eligible when the application was filed would still be eligible when it was reviewed – assuming, of course, that they came forward to law enforcement at all.
And the government would have an off switch for legal immigration. The Project 2025 guide calls for USCIS to “pause” receiving applications for a given immigration type if backlogs become “excessive.” Because USCIS has a great deal of flexibility in how many employees it assigns to each type of processing, this would essentially allow the government to engineer a backlog by understaffing a given form – then use the resulting backlog as a reason to “pause” new submissions, indefinitely.
Remaking the executive branch
The “Mandate for Leadership” guide sometimes specifies that a certain agenda item would require action from Congress, or a formal regulatory process. But in other cases – like the legal immigration kill switch – it’s left unclear.
Because immigration policy is so often discretionary – with government officials expected to choose how best to deploy limited detention space, which application backlogs to try hardest to reduce, and how to apply terms like “significant possibility of persecution” or “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to individual human beings – a lot can be done by memos, budgets and staffing models. And the Project 2025 handbook goes into detail about how to reorganize immigration policymaking so that the hawks are in charge.
The DHS Office of the General Counsel, for example – responsible for assessing the legality, and litigation risk, of proposed policies — would be dissolved, with each agency at DHS instead housing (and in charge of) its own counselors. Both the immigration judges union and the USCIS union would be dissolved. USCIS would be reorganized to put the vetting agents in charge of the show, and decentralized so that scarcely any employees remained in DC full-time.
These changes – in addition to more sweeping proposals to allow political appointees much more leeway to fire career civil servants who didn’t follow the program (a proposal known as “Schedule F” when they tried it in 2020) — would have two essential functions for immigration policy. They would empower more hawkish employees on the ground, who might be more willing to arrest first and seek permission later, or to tell people that they couldn’t ask for asylum anymore.
Importantly, unlike regulations, changes like this aren’t easily visible to the public. Without transparency, it’s hard to know when the government is following the law – and what it thinks the law is.
More than anything else, reading the immigration provisions of Project 2025 makes it clear that former Trump officials have learned that lesson: that they need to assert control of the executive branch both to increase their efficacy and reduce transparency. That’s a mindset the Trump administration had when it was in office – and whether a future Trump administration carries “Mandate for Leadership” into the White House with it or not, it’s spent the last four years mulling over how to do it better this time.