S7 E9: 60 Years Later: Defending the Civil Rights Act Against Project 2025 Rollbacks

Episode Transcript

Kanya Bennett
Welcome to Pod for the Cause, the official podcast of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund where we take on the critical civil and human rights issues of our day. I’m your host, Kanya Bennett, coming to you from our nation’s capital, Washington D. C. This year, we have been commemorating the 60th anniver-sary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We’ve been reflecting on its profound impact on disman-tling legalized segregation, securing voting rights, and expanding protections against discrimi-nation, and we’ve been celebrating the victories this major civil rights law represented for mar-ginalized communities and how it catalyzed further reforms in education, housing, and em-ployment. Look, the bottom line is that for the past 60 years, we’ve had the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to thank for significant societal progress, things that many of us may not even think about in our day- to- day, that our schools and businesses must open their doors to all of us, that we can’t be required to take literacy tests in order to vote, and that we have an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or the EEOC, to address discrimination in employment. These things are huge. As we celebrate this milestone anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, however, we are confronted with the ongoing challenges to civil rights, like Project 2025. Yes, I named it, Pro-ject 2025, and for anyone who has been living under a rock for the last few months, Project 2025 is an extremist agenda and wish list for a conservative administration wanting to roll back vital civil rights protections like those afforded by the Civil Rights Act. Project 2025 is counter to a fair and equitable democracy with its attacks on voting rights, education, economic oppor-tunity, LGBTQ protections, and reproductive justice, just to name a few. Joining me today to honor the transformative Civil Rights Act of 1964 and discuss how we continue its legacy in the wake of threats like Project 2025 are colleagues who reflect the scope and diversity of the Leadership Conference Coalition as well as a veteran journalist. We have a full house today, so let’s get to it. Let’s first welcome Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC. Thank you for joining us today, Juan.

Juan Proaño
Thank you, Kanya. It’s really a pleasure to be here, and thank you so much for assembling this really esteemed group of individuals.

Kanya Bennett
Next, let’s say hello to my former colleague, Cynthia Roseberry, my favorite former colleague. Cynthia is the Director of Policy and Government Affairs for Justice at the American Civil Lib-erties Union, or ACLU. Hi, Cynthia.

Cynthia Roseberry
Thank you, Kanya, for having me today, and thank you to the Leadership Conference for having me on.

Kanya Bennett
We also have Lisa Bland Malone with us. Lisa is Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs at the NAACP. Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Bland Malone
Thank you, Kanya, and thank you so much for asking us to join this morning to talk about this very important topic. We really appreciate it.

Kanya Bennett
And last but not least, Joe Williams is joining the show. Joe is Deputy Managing Director for Word In Black. Joe, thank you so much for being with us here.

Joseph Williams
Great to be with you and very much a pleasure to be talking with you all.

Kanya Bennett
So Juan, I’m going to turn to you. Let’s first acknowledge some of the significant civil rights gains resulting from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. LULAC is the largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the United States. LULAC has been around since 1929 and has been in-strumental in the fight for equality and justice for Latinos and other marginalized groups. Can you touch on some of those civil rights wins that are most important to LULAC?

Juan Proaño
Well, certainly. Thank you so much and thank you for highlighting a little bit of LULAC’s his-tory. One of the conversations we’ve been having since I came on board at LULAC is really the intersectionality between the Latino and the African American community. Quite frankly, it’s just something that we don’t talk about enough. LULAC has an absolutely incredible history, 95 years young or 95 years old, and we’re looking down what 100 years is going to look like. I had the privilege of actually being at the LBJ Library when they commemorated the 60th anniver-sary of the Civil Rights Act. I had a chance to hear President Biden’s remarks, and I was really, really moved. For us, and as we look at it from a Latino lens, there’s no question that Latinos benefited significantly from the Civil Rights Act. When we take a look at the areas, for exam-ple, as improved economic opportunities, Latinos really have been able to move into profes-sional sectors, primarily from the anti- discrimination provisions in the employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act. We’ve benefited from enhanced political representation as well. It real-ly set the precedent for the rise of Latinos to serve in public office. And in the areas of educa-tional attainment as well, we’ve made significant gains in that area too. And an area that a lot of people don’t talk about is legal protections for immigrant rights. It was not necessarily ad-dressed specifically in the Civil Rights Act, but the broader anti- discrimination principles we really use to protect the rights of Latino immigrants, particularly in the areas of labor and edu-cation. So it’s been significantly impactful for our community, it’s something that we should be more conscious of as well, and we will continue to stand side- by- side with our partners and allies to continue to support it and defend it moving forward.

Kanya Bennett
I really appreciate you urging for more synergy between our Latino and Black communities, and that actually gets me to Lisa. I want to turn to you. You’re at the NAACP, 115 years young. So like LULAC, the NAACP has several decades of advancing and protecting civil rights under its belt. So look, I know the NAACP is advocating, agitating, and litigating for the civil rights owed to Black America day in and day out. I want to talk to you about our efforts to preserve the legacy of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and what you see as the most pressing civil rights chal-lenges today as we attempt to do that.

Lisa Bland Malone
You know, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement achieved monumental gains for our com-munity. The passage of the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels. It banned discriminatory practices in employment in federally assisted programs, and ended segregation in places such as swimming pools, libraries, and public schools. The Civil Rights Act strengthened voting rights enforcement and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But you know, as soon as these victories were won, we saw a concerted effort by conservative forces to push back. Policies were introduced to slow down desegregation, restrict voting rights, and reduce federal protections that were meant to safeguard us from discrimination. Also in the’60s, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for instance, was a landmark achievement. However, subsequent decades have seen numerous attempts to undermine this progress, particularly through voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering aimed at diluting the Black vote. As we have made progress by the passage of these extraordi-nary bills, there has been and is ongoing conservative efforts to roll back these gains.

Kanya Bennett
I want to bring Cynthia into this conversation, and so Cynthia, talk to us a little bit about this fight for civil rights and civil liberties, particularly in a Project 2025 scenario. We just heard Lisa mention voting. What’s on your mind, what’s on your radar with respect to specific legal or legislative threats that could undermine what we have accomplished since the’64 Act?

Cynthia Roseberry
Unlike Juan, who was not around when LULAC was organized, I was around when the 1964 Civil Rights Act came into law. So what we see now through Project 2025 is really a plan to disassemble our government. It’s a plan to take the checks and balances that we have as part of our government for equality for people out of the picture so that there’s more of an authoritarian space. Let me just say these opinions that are expressed are my own and not those of the ACLU, but this is not a new idea, Project 2025. Justice Scalia was a big proponent of this idea years ago, but what is new is the mainstreaming of these ideas so that now that we have a conserva-tive majority on the Supreme Court, there’s the danger of this ideology becoming the law of the land. We can see that in the Supreme Court decision to grant broad immunity to a president, and that treats the president more like a king than an elected official. And the fact that this was done after watching the events of January 6th when we watched a violent attempt to overthrow the government and subvert an election should be shocking and should signal the extent to which the Supreme Court is now willing to go to move the ideas of Project 2025, which is dismantling our government and removing those protections, how far they’re willing to go. The ACLU doesn’t endorse any particular candidate, but Project 2025’s goal is to concentrate power in the hands of one particular person, and that person has expressed the idea that they will be an au-thoritarian leader. It should signal to us that there’s real danger writ large across the legal land-scape.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you for that, Cynthia. So Joe, you’ve been listening to this conversation, and as a journal-ist, you’ve been covering Project 2025 and you’ve given specific thought to the harms that this agenda will cause, just as our other guests have. But before we dig deeper on the policy, I want to ask what makes Project 2025 so unique? We just heard Cynthia say that Project 2025 is not new, and we know that anyone who’s engaged in politics in any way, even a little bit, we all have a policy wish list for electeds. Talk to us about our obsession with Project 2025.

Joseph Williams
It’s an obsession that’s warranted, I would say. I mean, you heard in the debate, Donald Trump repeatedly said that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, which is this blueprint of conserva-tive wish lists, as you mentioned, to do everything from eliminate the Department of Education, to make all federal employees political employees, to basically breaking down the wall between things that make Washington and our country function and the politics that we elect and the leaders who are in charge of those parties. So what makes it so fascinating is that the conserva-tives are actually not only saying the quiet part out loud, i. e. getting rid of affirmative action, getting rid of any kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion language in government platforms, they’re putting it in writing. That, I think, is probably what makes it so fascinating is that it’s so bold and so brazen that people are kind of stunned by the fact that they’re actually writing it down. This is something that we’ve seen, the encroachment of these ideas, into the public sphere and into politics and therefore into governing over the last 25, 30 years, ever since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. We’ve been marching steadily towards the right with a few in-terruptions here and there, but generally, the country has been moved on this tectonic shift, and that shift has resulted in a Supreme Court with an unbreakable six- justice majority, and I think that even adds to the sense of urgency that people have talking about Project 2025 is that if this actually happens and if we get a conservative in the White House, if Trump returns to the White House, there won’t be very many guardrails or very many checks and balances to keep the worst ideas of Project 2025 from happening. Now, to be fair, they’ve said, ” Well, this is just a plan. This is not anything people should be taking seriously,” but you do have to recall that that Pro-ject 2025 not only was written by former members of Donald Trump’s administration, it also has a foreword by his vice presidential nominee. JD Vance has written a foreword. So he can disa-vow all he wants, but his fingerprints, or at least his ideological fingerprints, are all over this document. This document has been very much hailed by conservative power players and it’s reasonable to assume that should Donald Trump get elected, this very much might be the blue-print that he follows.

Kanya Bennett
I want to go back to some of what’s in that blueprint as it pertains to voting. Juan, want to circle back to you. and I’m thinking about Project 2025 and its rhetoric and agenda around voter fraud, and then I’m thinking about how that relates to your recent response to voter suppression in Texas and elsewhere in the South. Juan, talk to us a little bit about the work you’ve been doing in Texas to be responsive to those threats to voting rights and the progress that has been made since the’64 Act.

Juan Proaño
We’ve been really thinking a lot about LULAC’s position in the civil rights community because for LULAC, for the NAACP, we’ve always really been about protecting our civil rights of mi-nority communities, of the African American and the Latino community and the Asian Ameri-can communities. I’ve really set on this idea that there are laws that haven’t been written yet that will discriminate against minority communities. So we not only have to continue to do the work of protecting our civil rights, but also advancing the interests of our civil rights as well. And so when we take a look at things like, for example, technology and AI, it’s a wild, wild west, and so we see now a new version of digital redlining, for example, that will have a significant im-pact on home prices, for example, which will impact net worth for Latinos and African Ameri-cans, and could significantly restrict or limit our opportunities and pathways for homeowner-ship. In regards to Texas, on August 20th, Attorney General Paxton actually served 12 search warrants targeting Latino leaders, civic activists, Latinos running for public office and LULAC members. We’ve been tracking this very closely, quite frankly, even before the raids. We saw that he was targeting the Annunciation House, which provides respite services for immigrants coming into United States. He also sued the Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, Sister Norma Pimentel, who is the closest thing that we have to Mother Teresa, and so our expectation was that he was going to sue LULAC, basically using business tort law to say that the 501(c)3s that we run are using those resources for electioneering, including voter education and voter registration. So we were certainly very surprised when, at 6: 00 A. M., four of our LULAC members that we’ve been able to talk to got a knock on the door, police agents entering with firearms. In one case of Lidia Martinez, who is 87 years old, a 35- year member of LULAC, who was a volunteer and goes around to senior citizen centers to help Latinos register to vote, re-ceived a search and seizure warrant. They interrogated her for over three hours. They took her outside of her home at six, seven in the morning for 30 minutes in her nightgown, put her in front of the community, in front of her neighbors, if you will. It’s a search warrant. It wasn’t an arrest. She really had no context for what was going on. She was not read her Miranda rights. They just flat out told her, ” You need to give us your cell phone, your computer.” They searched through all of her drawers and cabinets, her dresser drawers. They searched through her car, trying to get information, not just about the work that she was doing for voter registra-tion, but also names of other Latinos that were actually doing similar work.

Joseph Williams
Can I interrupt real quick? What was the probable cause?

Juan Proaño
Well, I mean, supposedly they’ve got evidence in regards to why these search warrants were ac-tually issued. We did talk with the ACLU and they provided us really good counsel from a na-tional and local level, but I don’t know, Joe. The fact of the matter is it’s not really in the war-rants specifically. So we’ve been working with the DOJ. We met with the DOJ last week asking them for an investigation, and we coordinated this very closely with Derrick Johnson at the NAACP. Marc Morial was instrumental from the Urban League with Maya Wiley from the Leadership Conference. And so the requests that we had are, first and foremost, we want elec-tion monitors in Texas and in San Antonio. We want a field hearing. The DOJ does have the discretion to actually conduct a field hearing to collect information relative to these searches that Attorney General Paxton has actually been conducting. And then of course we want an open investigation as well. Just given where we are in the election cycle and how close we are to election day, we probably won’t get confirmation that an investigation has been opened or even ongoing. We probably won’t hear anything until after the election. Yesterday, we actually sent a letter to the DOJ and to Attorney General Garland with over 117 organizations that sup-port an open investigation in Texas of Attorney General Paxton, and you start to hear from the Texas Democratic Caucus, for example, CHC, CBC as well. All the civil rights groups are get-ting together, and again, back to the approach, it’s going to be intersectional. This is not just im-pacting Latinos in Texas, it’s impacting African Americans in Georgia and Virginia and Nevada and Arizona. And so we continue to call on our allies for their support and we will continue to fight back because there’s no end. He’s just doubling down. I mean, he basically sued Harris County and Bexar County, which by the way, are the two most populous counties in Texas with Latinos, one is 49% Latino, one is 60% Latino, essentially telling the counties, ” You cannot mail voter registration forms out to your citizens or your residents,” because in transit in the mail, they may be… I guess someone’s going to take them and fill them out and send them in with false or misleading information. It really is absolutely disgusting what’s going on there and something that we’re tracking very, very closely.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Juan, for sharing that. And Joe, I appreciate you interjecting, and I see and hear your wheels spinning around more investigation here. So I wanted to go back to you for any other reaction, and also, you’ve given thought to how Project 2025 were to impact the Black community. So I want to hear you talk a little more about that and obviously offer any other fol-low- up for Juan that you may have.

Joseph Williams
To me, it’s just outrageous. Paxton has been running roughshod over a lot of organizations in Texas for quite some time. What’s really interesting to me is that they’re now doing these door knocks and searches without probable cause with these secret warrants that just seem like it’s clearly voter suppression. I’m curious about some of the particulars about that, but also in terms of, to answer the initial question, in terms of how it’s going to affect the Black community, if the Department of Education, let’s say, is eliminated, which is top of wish list on Project 2025, Trump again talked about it last night, how he thinks education policies should reverse to the states, the Education Department is the sole agency that’s responsible for enforcing civil rights law in our schools. That is Title IX funding, Title I funding, funding for special education, han-dling complaints about discrimination in schools. All of that goes away if project 2025 is im-plemented and that top priority happens. Number two is voting rights. They want to eliminate mail- in ballots. They want to do the same thing that’s happening in Texas on a national scale. The third thing that comes to mind most readily is the fact that they’re going to eliminate diver-sity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices in the federal government, which means even if the federal government is hiring nothing but white people, that’s okay by them and you won’t have a leg to stand on to complain about it because those protections and restrictions will be gone. That’s just the top of the iceberg. We’re talking again about funding for healthcare. We’re talk-ing again about funding for housing and equity and protections of civil rights at the local level. All of that goes away if Project 2025 happens and Trump gets elected. But I did want to ask Juan a question about how this came to be. I mean, is this something, and clearly it’s something new, but I want to know, are other organizations seeing the same things, night raids, people’s doors being knocked in, and what kind of probable cause do they have to carry this out?

Juan Proaño
I talked about the Annunciation House. I talked about the Catholic Charities of Rio Grande Val-ley. There were also 12 other Latino nonprofit organizations that also had been sued. All the cases have really been thrown out at a local level basically saying it’s unconstitutional, but we expect that they’re going to be appealed. We have a retaining legal counsel. We’re looking at a cause of action on our side. We’re organizing our community and the community at large to fight back because for me, what they’re doing is sort of twofold. Number one, Texas is the test-ing ground for the rest of the country. They control the House, they control the Senate, they control the courts essentially, all the way up to the circuit court. If we let them get away with this, this election cycle, you’re going to see 100 of these cases literally around the country be-cause it’s going to signal to every Republican governor, every Republican AG that they can do this and they can get away with it. Number two, they’re basically laying the foundation for a contested election. So in 2020, they had to argue after the fact that the election was stolen, and now what they’re doing is laying the foundation by saying that there’s voter fraud and voter har-vesting. The crazy thing about it, Joe, is that the Friday following, because they were getting so much pressure from the media about this story, is that they announced that they have purged 1.1 million voters from the voter rolls, and we took a very close look at what those numbers were. 457,000 of them effectively were deceased. Another 430,000 of them were suspended, so over 80% of them essentially were either deceased and/ or suspended, and only 6, 500 were actually classified as noncitizens, which is half of a percent would effectively be classified as nonciti-zens, 1, 900 with voting history, so 1/1000th of a percent of those 1. 1 million. It really under-mines their entire argument. There is no systemic voter fraud. There’s no systemic voter har-vesting that is happening. It has been proven from third- party independent research organiza-tions that there is nothing that would effectively swing an election one way or another, especial-ly in the state of Texas where there was over 11 million voters. Donald Trump actually won by over 600,000 votes in that state. There’s no way you can tell me that even those 1, 900 nonciti-zens, who by the way, may not even be noncitizens because they’d be naturalized citizens and their databases just were not updated, there’s nothing there. These are just accusations that they’re using to lay down their argument for the upcoming election.

Kanya Bennett
Juan, thank you for taking us through that. And listening to some of the exchanges around the various electeds or various candidates who would like to be in office or return to office, I started thinking about the ACLU, Cynthia, and certainly the ACLU has no permanent friends, has no permanent enemies. So I wanted to have you offer, just as we think about these folks who are in power and the policies they’re advancing, how the ACLU is going to ensure accountability re-gardless of who is in the White House next Congress. I know the ACLU has some memos teed up for the next administration and you’re responding to Project 2025 there, so wanted to give you some space to talk about that.

Cynthia Roseberry
At the ACLU, we’re trying to take a long view in much the same way that the folks who created Project 2025 have taken a long view. Our strategic campaigns go over a number of years. We’re focused on driving this long- term change but also dealing with the immediate threats, protect-ing first amendment rights, reproductive rights, LGTBQ rights, and so we’re working with activ-ists and even government officials now to prevent some of the things that have been promised by Project 2025. Of course, we’ll always fight in court. You think about the ACLU and you think about, ” We’ll see you in court,” but we are also walking the halls of the Capitol, speaking with legislators and staff about what we can do to prevent some of the tragedies that might oc-cur if Project 2025 is able to be enacted, and not just in the federal space, but we’re also reach-ing out in state and local spaces with advocacy and legal action to try to have some prophylactic effect. If we do get to a point where Project 2025 is being enacted, of course we’ll be in court as well. Of course we’ll continue to work, depending on how the landscape looks, with folks who are progressive and want to maintain constitutional protections. But we’re also engaging with our 40 million supporters who will not stand for the erosion of civil rights and we will engage them in all forms of advocacy. As we look back on the Civil Rights Act, we see some parallels. You don’t have the courts, you don’t have the legislatures, so the people stood up, and we may be at that point where the people have to stand up. But I want to mention one thing. Juan and Joseph talked about the things that might be taken away under Project 2025. I just want to men-tion a little bit what might be added. My specific area of focus is justice and criminal justice, and I think about how Project 2025 has promised to promptly and properly eliminate all existing consent decrees. As you know, we fight police brutality in localities by trying to establish a use of force standard, by doing some of the work that you did, Kanya, on the 10- 33 transfer of mili-tarized weapons to local law enforcement, but we’ve also worked and advocated with the DOJ to obtain consent decrees from jurisdictions that are violating civil rights. Project 2025 promises to release those consent decrees, and we’ve heard the supporters of 2025 talking about increas-ing stop- and- frisk again, talking about broader immunity, if you can get that, for police offic-ers, and now removing these consent decrees. So what would be added under Project 2025 is an absolute police state, like Juan is seeing in Texas in voting. This would impact First Amend-ment protesters. It would just impact our nation writ large. And so that’s a concern that we have. A lot of the advocacy that we have constructed is in our memos and I’d encourage folks to read them, but that’s something that would be added, tragically, with Project 2025.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Cynthia, for going over that and for drilling down on public safety and what we stand to gain, though really lose, if we see Project 2025 advance. Lisa, I want to go to you and I want to talk about the NAACP’s Our 2025. So what some organizations have done, like the NAACP, is counter Project 2025 with an agenda that is protective of our civil rights. And so Li-sa, I want to give you some time to talk about Our 2025 and why that is an agenda that folks should subscribe to.

Lisa Bland Malone
You know, instead of the regressive policies in Project 2025, the NAACP put forward Our 2025, which is a collection of policies aimed to benefit Black Americans and the entire nation. Our 2025 advocates for higher wages, investments in our schools, pathways to progress within our criminal justice system. In Our 2025, access to comprehensive reproductive health services, in-cluding contraception, family planning, and safe abortion services is a fundamental right. Our 2025 calls for access to capital to address the high cost of housing, and ensures connectivity to reliable and affordable broadband internet, which is so very essential in today’s digital age. Al-so, Black communities must be protected from gun and police violence, and Black history and diversity is protected and not banned. Ensuring robust voting rights protection and improved election administration is vital for empowering Black communities and communities of color and fostering full participation in democracy. The NAACP is committed to pushing for these essential reforms and resisting any efforts to undermine the progress made in voting rights. And in addition to those issues, we call for opportunities for all. It’s critical that all progress made on diversity, equity, and inclusion from the federal government perspective is maintained and ad-vanced. The NAACP opposes efforts to ban the teaching of Black history, including critical race theory, in schools because we know Black history is an integral part of American history and understanding the contributions, struggles, and triumphs of Black Americans is essential for fos-tering a comprehensive and accurate understanding of our nation’s past. We must increase high-er education financial aid. We must prioritize opportunities for Black entrepreneurs in the grain economy. We must support food security for all and expand Medicaid and guarantee health coverage for all, calling for a universal healthcare system. And as I mentioned, we must address high housing costs and access to capital, which is the lifeblood of revitalization, infrastructure, business, and economic stability. So I invite folks to our website. It is quite a comprehensive plan. It is our advocacy plan, one that we have been steadily working on, and so we just must move beyond Project 2025’s regressive policies, and we must focus on the issues and policies that are important to us and use that as we move forward to the election.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you so much, Lisa, for lifting this counter agenda, this proactive, progressive agenda in response to Project 2025. So Joe, I want to go back to you as we bring a close to this conversa-tion. Lisa’s trying to get us focused on Our 2025, right? Let’s get focused on the alternative. But with respect to the news cycle, is Project 2025 going anywhere? We know these policy threats will remain after the media stops reporting on it. How do we get people to stay engaged and in-formed on the state of civil rights when we do not have a Project 2025 or civil rights anniver-sary hook? How do we get people to pay attention to the NAACP’s Our 2025?

Joseph Williams
Well, I guess that’s the trick, right? I mean, mainly because if people were super focused on civ-il rights and those sorts of issues that are under threat or that were under threat with the Trump administration, we still wouldn’t have Trump running neck and neck in the polls with Kamala Harris. So that’s a vexing problem that everybody’s been trying to solve ever since Trump came down that golden escalator back in 2015. But I think the thing to do is conversations like this, to meet people where they are and talk about how this relates to their everyday lives, what it means to vote, what it means to have a school that’s functioning, what it means to have your child protected if he or she has a disability or looks different than the other kids in the rest of the class. Those are very much everyday issues that people think about, but only in the abstract eve-ry four years when we talk about it during an election cycle. I think what needs to happen is people need to be confronted, or at least need to be exposed, to things like night raids on chari-table organizations in Texas. That’s pretty outrageous and it’s gotten a lot of news coverage and that has to be built upon and it has to be extrapolated to talk about, ” This is not just them prob-lem. This is an us problem.” If that affects LULAC and some charitable organizations in Texas, what’s to stop it from affecting a charitable organization that you’re affiliated with or something that you feel like is important to your life and that brings meaning and civic participation? So we’ve seen rates of civic participation drop precipitously over the last couple of decades. This is one way to re- engage with it, and certainly since Kamala Harris has come into the election, we’ve seen a surge of young voters going to get registered, preparing to vote in the fall. We need to make them aware of the fact that this is not something that you can take for granted. This is something that not only ancestors died and bled for, but that an opposition administra-tion is very much trying to restrict, at the very least, and take away at most. We need to connect abortion rights to civil rights, and we need to connect prices and the economy to civil rights, union participation to civil rights, things about everyday lives that people can relate to. We need to tie that thread. We need to let people know that this doesn’t just happen out of magic or out of the goodness of someone’s heart, but that it does in fact require effort, require work, and is the result of all of these organizations working together to try to make life better for everyone as opposed to just helping a marginalized few. That, I think, is the trick. That, I think, people are starting to get their minds around, especially with Our’25, especially with LULAC making some noise about things that are going on and suing people and making sure that we understand that this is going to keep happening if we don’t do something, stand up and stop it.

Kanya Bennett
Absolutely, Joe. So Juan, LULAC was just lifted a couple of times by our colleague here, Joe, so any last words that you want to raise with our audience? How can they engage with LULAC? How can they plug in?

Juan Proaño
I am not a skeptical person, but I’m a paranoid person. We took a look at Project 2025 from a Latino lens and I wanted to maybe share a little bit about what we found because it hasn’t been mentioned in today’s conversation. So first and foremost, Project 2025 would call for mass de-portations, so increasing use of detention centers, repealing parts of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which would allow the federal government to use large- scale use of these detention facilities. They would also implement mandatory detention. They would increase ICE capabilities and they would also deputize local law enforcement. In addition to that, they would cut off legal immigration, limiting H- 2A visas and H-2B visas. They would eliminate the T and U visas. They would remove TPS status. They would end DACA. They would make federal funding and benefits contingent on immigration laws, FEMA grant re-strictions, mandatory E- Verify, prohibited use of federal housing, and also denying students loans. And then finally, they have all these welfare cuts and reforms, which would impact Lati-no and African American communities. So increased SNAP requirements, eliminating the Head Start program, restricting free school meals, and also re- evaluating the Thrifty Food Plan. This cuts across race. It really hits at the core of socioeconomic factors that impact Hispanic, African American, non- Hispanic white communities around the country. So yes, a big part of it is sounding the alarm. If you believe that Donald Trump is going to cut your taxes because that’s what he says, then you should also believe that he’s going to deport 15 million Latinos, which is what he has said he will do. He has not backed away from that. He has tried to back away from Project 2025, but he repeated it last night. He wants to deport 15 million Latinos. 22 million La-tinos live in mixed- status family households. We could talk an hour about it. It’s troubling. It’s very troubling.

Kanya Bennett
It is, Juan. And for our listeners, I encourage you, you’ve heard the threats here articulated by Juan, plug in to LULAC’s efforts, get connected, and figure out how you can spend some time and energy countering this Project 2025 agenda. Cynthia, let me ask you, how do you want folks to plug in to what the ACLU is doing around Project 2025?

Cynthia Roseberry
You know, I have to first mention one thing that I didn’t mention before, and that is the acceler-ation of the use of the death penalty. We saw that during the last Trump administration. We know there are people currently on death row now. Many of them are people of color and disa-bled. That is a real threat as well. The ACLU is available and present in every state, so you could get involved locally with your ACLU to work on issues that are on your doorstep. You can also get involved nationally with the ACLU by going to ACLU. org. I think it’s important to translate this idea. When we talk about democracy and ending constitutional protections, what we’re really talking about is freedom. The freedom that we’ve come to expect and enjoy under the rights that are included in the US Constitution and in state constitutions are in danger. Those freedoms are directly being threatened. It is the freedom to speak as you will, to do as you will within legal grounds, to exist as a being as you are, irrespective of your gender or your race or your economic status. It’s the freedom to be that is at stake. And if we sit back and say, ” Oh, it can’t happen here,” then we are deluding ourselves. Many people who suffered under the Nazis said that on one day, things seemed normal, and on the very next day, they were under an au-thoritarian regime. It can happen here. We have to act to protect democracy and protecting de-mocracy means protecting our freedom.

Kanya Bennett
Thank you, Cynthia, for that charge.

Lisa Bland Malone
I would just sing one last thing.

Kanya Bennett
Please, Lisa. Yes.

Lisa Bland Malone
The only way to keep Project 2025 from becoming our future is to educate and mobilize voters so we’re ready to cast our ballots in local, state, and federal elections this fall. We must be trust-ed messengers against all of the myths and disinformation out there. We certainly heard a lot of it in the debate, and so we must get out there and educate people about the realities and encour-age everyone to please vote in this election.

Cynthia Roseberry
There are so many people who are disenfranchised by virtue of the criminal legal system, and I just want to express that if you cannot vote or don’t have the right to vote, first, make sure that you can’t vote, but also, there is something that you can do. You can mobilize, you can get edu-cated, you can educate other people. We need everybody involved.

Lisa Bland Malone
Agreed.

Joseph Williams
Amen.

Kanya Bennett
Yes. We are voting. We need to be voting. Freedom is on the ballot. You heard everything that will be on the ballot. So thank you, everyone, for joining us today, Cynthia, Joe, Lisa, Juan. This has been such an informative conversation and the Leadership Conference is honored to be in coalition and partnership with everyone here today. I should also point our listeners to the Lead-ership Conference’s resources on Project 2025, which can be found on civilrights. org/ pro-ject2025, or you can go to our website and search Project 2025. You will find it. As we have talked about today, Project 2025 is everywhere. Thank you for joining us today on Pod for the Cause, the official podcast of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund. For more information, please visit civilrights. org, and to connect with us, hit us up on Instagram and Twitter @ CivilRightsOrg. You can text us. Text civil rights, that’s two words, civil rights, to 52199 to keep up with our latest updates. Be sure to subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five- star review. Thanks to our production team, Shalonda Hunter, Dena Craig, Taelor Nicholas, Oprah Cunningham, Eunic Epstein- Ortiz, my colleagues at the Leadership Conference, and shout out to Podville Media, our external production crew. The Leadership Conference would also like to take a moment to acknowledge JPMorgan for their sponsorship of our 2024 We the Majority Reception. And that’s it from me, your host, Kanya Bennett. Until next time, let’s keep fighting for an America as good as its ideals.

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