Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency, has been used as a warning by Democrats to highlight what awaits the country if he were to win the coming elections. But for some Americans, much of Project 2025 isn’t a distant possible future — it’s a present-day reality.
Several states across the country already have extreme abortion bans that have led to the deaths of several pregnant women and at least one teenager; restrictive voting policies that make it difficult for citizens to cast their votes; ending funding for education and censorship of books; and other similar policies also proposed by the authors of Project 2025. If the plan is successfully implemented, many policies that some states are already reforming would become federal law.
Project 2025 is “a fascist blueprint for governance,” said Lea Campbell, the founder and president of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, a grassroots organization that supports lower-income communities. But Mississippi, she said, which has an entrenched conservative majority, already has to deal with many of the proposed policies, especially the surveillance and surveillance of marginalized people.
Families across Mississippi are still trying to rebuild after the nation’s largest immigration raid, which took place five years ago. In 2019, on the first day of school, dozens of children returned home to find their parents were among 680 people taken into custody, some of whom were subsequently deported, after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided seven poultry factories. Under Project 2025, mass deportations would be accelerated, further tearing families apart.
“We have been sounding the alarm for more than a decade, specifically around policies in this state that are enacted by conservatives and target the most vulnerable among us,” Campbell said. “We’ve talked about the policies under this ultra-conservative legislature that we have here in Mississippi [that] it seems like the cruelty is the point in a lot of this legislation that targets poor people and people of color, and women, and the queer and trans community.”
Even when voters have made it clear they disagree with proposed conservative policies, lawmakers have found ways around their wishes.
In 2011, 58% of Mississippians rejected a “personhood amendment,” which, if passed, would have defined fertilized eggs as people. Opponents warned that because of the way the amendment defined life, it would have banned all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and would have complicated in vitro fertilization.
Yet in 2013, the state, along with Kansas, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio and North Dakota, tried to pass so-called “fetal heartbeat” laws, which would ban abortion as early as six weeks once heart activity is detected. For years, several states tried to pass similar bills and other restrictions. In 2019, 15 states introduced “fetal heart rate” bills; six managed to pass them.
Project 2025 aims to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. This could lead to a de facto nationwide ban on abortion, as abortion clinics and advocacy groups rely on the mail to send and receive abortion pills. The plan also sets out a goal to legally recognize fetuses as human beings.
Currently, drug-sniffing dogs are being used in Mississippi to intercept abortion pills. And in nearby Louisiana, two common abortion pills, which are also commonly used to treat miscarriages, soften the cervix during childbirth and other procedures, have been reclassified as “controlled substances,” despite doctors warning that this could harm women harm.
As it stands now, organizers and activists in states that adopt proto-Project 2025 policies are able to effect change at the state and local level. However, if Project 2025 were implemented, many of these policies could become federally enshrined, dramatically changing how lawmakers and advocates can push for the repeal of such laws.
Nsombi Lambright-Haynes, executive director of One Voice Mississippi, a civil rights organization, said the nonprofit has encouraged people to vote by educating them about what Project 2025 would do to the public education system and reproductive rights.
“We point out what we already have and then point out the danger that could arise if something like this were fully implemented,” she said. “It’s really a wake-up call.”
A ‘beacon’ to make people ‘ardent in their racism’
Two years ago, Jackson, Mississippi’s capital and the nation’s blackest city, was without water for more than a month because the state refused to invest in infrastructure for decades. Danyelle Holmes, organizer of the nonprofit Poor People’s Campaign, said the nationwide implementation of Project 2025 would worsen the rest of the country’s infrastructure problems.
“Project 2025 supports removing clean water protections,” she said. “That really puts marginalized communities in a very vulnerable place and position because we feel the impact of not having access to clean and safe drinking water.”
Project 2025 would downgrade per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the “hazardous” classification to “pollutants,” and it would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Toxic Substances Control Act, allowing the government to track the cumulative effect of these substances cannot monitor adequately. toxins.
According to an analysis by Salon, the plan could “erode the country’s system of checks and balances,” increasing the president’s power over the entire federal government. But many states have already given their state officials such extreme powers.
In Texas, for example, the “Death Star” law prevents cities and counties from implementing measures that are stronger than those adopted at the state level in a wide range of policy areas. While in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis increased his own power by using the state’s Republican supermajority to pass his ideas into law.
Project 2025 would eliminate the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), an interagency law enforcement training body, increase the use of the federal death penalty, eliminate the use of consent decrees, and increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, according to an analysis by the Thurgood Marshall Institute , the research arm of the Legal Defense Fund.
In Mississippi, police departments across the state are already embroiled in controversy. Six law enforcement officers in Rankin County were convicted of torturing two black men, while a federal investigation found that police in a predominantly black city elsewhere in the state “created a system in which officers can ruthlessly break the law.”
Project 2025 would ensure that the rest of the country experiences the restrictive, conservative legislation that many Southerners have opposed for years, said Courtney Jones, a writer and researcher at ‘SippTalk Media, a digital media platform.
“There is no part of this nation that remains untouched by the damage that racism causes. Project 2025 is more of a beacon to make people more fervent in their racism,” he said. “Now instead of whispering about it or using political loopholes, they’re just saying directly, ‘We’re going to take these little things that we’ve done with these specific populations and now we’re just going to amplify them.’ And we’re going to make this happen across the country.’”
Jones noted that organizers in the state and region have long been trying to warn the rest of the country about what is happening and what could soon happen for them. Their warnings were dismissed, he said, because people believed “that’s just Mississippi for you.”
“The people here who do the work have always done the work,” he said. “A lot of people in Mississippi are realizing that because we’ve always been overlooked, we have to look inward a little bit to save ourselves. There is no major agency or political candidate that will ever come here and suddenly solve things for us.”
