In Both Campaign Rhetoric and Policy Proposals, Immigrants Face Worsening Climate

Project 2025 and other proposals would terrorize immigrant communities, weaken our economy, and undermine due process and fundamental fairness. For immigrants, these proposals come at a particularly bad time. 

In recent months, immigrants in our country have faced a barrage of xenophobic rhetoric that is matched by only a few other periods in our history. In many cases, those attacks have also given rise to extreme and inhumane policy ideas. Most notably, former President Donald Trump repeated baseless, racist claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which led to bomb threats and school closures, and his campaign events have been rife with xenophobic rhetoric. At the same time, in his party’s campaign platform, he has called for creating the “largest deportation program in American history.”  

Many leaders in Congress have also been driven by, and contributed to, a hostile atmosphere towards immigrants. This summer, the House of Representatives amplified false narratives about non-citizens voting (which has long been illegal under federal law) in order to pass a bill that makes it harder for citizens to vote. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R. S.C., spreading xenophobic narratives about immigrant mothers, reintroduced a blatantly unconstitutional bill that aims to rewrite the 14th Amendment in order to eliminate birthright citizenship. And other members of Congress, using anti-immigrant narratives that echo the white nationalist “Great Replacement” theory, have called to exclude immigrants from the counts conducted under the census used to determine congressional seats.  

In the midst of these attacks, Project 2025 has emerged as the definitive policy agenda for a potential new conservative administration and Congress. What it proposes to do around immigration policy is staggering. In a chapter authored by Ken Cuccinelli, a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, Project 2025 calls for several policies that would not only terrorize immigrant communities, but also weaken our economy and undermine notions of due process and fundamental fairness. It would effectively build a mass deportation machine, and it is deeply troubling that people aligned with Project 2025 are resorting to xenophobic and racist tropes about immigrants in order to develop public support for anti-immigrant policies. Here is some of what Project 2025 would do around immigration policy: 

  • Project 2025 calls for allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to drastically expand the use of “expedited removal,” a fast-track deportation process normally only used near the border, raising significant concerns about due process and increasing the likelihood of tragic mistakes.  
  • Project 2025 would militarize the border, “using military personnel and hardware” to prevent crossings. It would raise hurdles for asylum seekers, increase wall construction, and shut down border entries. Instead of controlling immigration, these steps would only create humanitarian crises just south of our border.  
  • Project 2025 calls for more than doubling the number of immigrants, up to 100,000 on any day, who can be locked up while facing deportation — a process that can take months or years. In doing so, it would likely expand the federal use of private, for-profit prison companies that maintain notoriously inhumane conditions. 
  • Project 2025 would end protections for more than half a million DACA recipients who arrived here as children, 176,000 Ukrainians who fled the war in their country, and nearly 700,000 others granted Temporary Protected Status. Many of these people have been living and working here for decades. It would also cut back or eliminate numerous categories of temporary and permanent visas.   
  • Project 2025 would expand E-Verify, a system intended to prove that employees are eligible to work in the United States, but which relies on highly error-prone systems that have shut out eligible workers — especially people of color.  
  • Project 2025 calls for the expansion of state and local police enforcement of federal immigration laws, and it calls for penalizing “sanctuary cities” and other jurisdictions that don’t fully cooperate — including requiring the sharing of motor vehicle and voter registration databases.  
  • Another chapter of Project 2025 calls for adding a citizenship question to the census, which would severely reduce the count of immigrant and other communities, result in a less accurate count, and distort congressional representation and federal funding. 

The Leadership Conference has long believed that the best path forward in fixing our broken immigration system is a comprehensive approach that: 

  1. creates paths to citizenship for longtime immigrants,  
  2. utilizes fair and humane enforcement strategies that are consistent with our values,  
  3. helps families quickly move through visa backlogs and towards reunification, and  
  4. instills strong civil rights and labor protections for both new working immigrants and for people who have been here all their lives.  

In 2025, we will once again call on Congress and the administration to pursue these goals because they are the right thing to do for our economy and for our communities, and they reflect the best of who we are as a country. Inclusion is a better path forward than demonizing our immigrant neighbors who live and work among us, contributing to our society. By valuing the dignity and contributions of all, we build a stronger, more resilient community for everyone.