Decoding Trump's Project 2025, Part 2

How Donald Trump and his wannabe oligarchs plan to turn the Department of Homeland Security into an Immigration Gestapo -- and risk another 9/11 in the process.

So at long last we finally recommence the Decoding Project 2025 series here on the Substack. We have a slew of these installments over on the podcast, if you like your information in audio form — but now we’re finally going to continue our journey into the heart of darkness, or the ninth circle of hell, or whatever literary reference you want to use for the fact that Donald Trump and his aspiring oligarchs have created a blueprint for evil, on which we must shine the very brightest of lights.

Immigrant detention tent cities - coming soon to America if Donald Trump gets his way.

We pick back up with the section on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is written by a man named Ken Cuccinelli.

Now where might you have heard that name before? Ah yes, Ken Cuccinelli was Donald Trump’s Acting Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and then Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Secretary. In other words, he was one of the most senior officials in Trump’s DHS — and he’s clearly angling to be the next Secretary of DHS (or Border and Immigration Czar) in a second Trump administration. Lest we fall for Donald Trump’s lie that somehow he’s not connected to Project 2025, when it was actually drafted by a cadre of Trump senior officials, to serve as the roadmap for Trump, for which Trump delivered the keynote address thanking and praising the organization (The Heritage Foundation) for “lay[ing] the groundwork and detail[ing] plans for exactly what our movement will do,” and Trump even traveled to that event on a private jet with the head of Heritage. You know, minor details.

Risking the next 9/11

Back to DHS. First off, well, the Trumpers want to get rid of the department. That’s right, only 20 years after a different conservative Republican president (George W. Bush) created the department and declared that it was absolutely imperative for our nation’s security, Trump and his cronies want to abolish it. So much for efficient government!

As part of this, they propose privatizing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Yes, you read that correctly. They want to take the very agency that was the most direct and immediate response to September 11 — which was caused in great part by lax airport security, run by the airlines and subcontracted to private companies — and destroy it, handing airport security back to private companies.

The TSA is not perfect, by any means. But there is no doubt that it has made air travel much safer, and turning back the clock to September 10, 2001 would risk a new 9/11.

And what’s more, it would be a massive boondoggle for whoever won the bid to buy the TSA from the government — landing a monopoly, with zero competition or accountability, perfect for an oligarch. Perhaps Ken Cuccinelli is hoping he’ll be able to land that plum. Or maybe some shadowy investors will back Donald Trump Jr. to buy it so it can become the Trump Security Agency, complete with a pump-and-dump stock scheme.

These things may sound like jokes. But only nine years ago, the idea of Donald Trump becoming president sounded like a joke. We need to remember that the long game of the far right is Kremlinization — carving off pieces of the federal government and handing them to a cabal of American Oligarchs, unaccountable millionaires and billionaires who will owe their loyalty to the dictator and be completely untouchable by anyone else.

Make America Weaker Again

But that’s just the beginning. At page 135, Project 2025 also proposes cutting and gutting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), including eliminating federal flood insurance and the grants to states that allow for disaster relief to occur.

Think of how this will work. After every major natural disaster, the governor of the state(s) affected declare a state of emergency — and they call upon the president to deliver federal aid. That aid — millions or billions of dollars, plus officials and equipment — comes from FEMA. And the Trumpers now want to eliminate that! So the states and localities will be completely on their own, which means the victims will be on their own.

Ironically, most of the states that will be the most devastated by this change are red states — states in the southeast battered by hurricanes and flooding, plus states in the Rockies battling wildfires.

Do you really think that Florida and Texas are going to be thrilled about having to face disasters on their own — with zero federal help?

Why haven’t the Democrats made this more of an issue?

Checks and balances? Separation of powers? What are those?

Perhaps the FEMA issue has gone unexamined because there is just so much awfulness packed into this document. Including banning unions throughout DHS, including TSA (because nothing says security like underpaying the security workers). And including the complete circumvention of the Senate. Cuccinelli proposes having political appointees seize control of the Department, concentrating all power with the Acting Secretary, and immediately engaging in mass firings by eliminating entire offices and units (pages 136-37).

Here’s a place where we need to start translating officialese into plain English. “Acting” before a government title means that the president appointed that person to that senior position without any Senate approval. And that Senate approval is required by the Constitution.

Yes, there are times that an appointee is truly and legitimately waiting for Senate approval. But there are other times that an appointee has zero chance of getting Senate approval and occupies the role as the “Acting” official indefinitely.

One such appointee was none other than Ken Cuccinelli — both of his senior roles at DHS were “Acting” with no Senate approval at all. In fact, leading Senators made it clear that he had zero chance of ever getting any Senate confirmation for anything. And the Trump administration put him into the roles anyway. His appointments were successfully challenged in court, but those challenges take time to mount.

So what Ken Cuccinelli is really proposing is that extremists like him (people so extreme that even Senate Republicans look at them and cringe) can be named to the senior-most jobs in a new Trump administration, up to and including the cabinet-level Secretaries, and you simply label them as “Acting” officials — and voila, no Senate approval needed, and you can just start tearing up the department and acting without authority. Oh, and if the courts want to intervene? They propose ignoring any court decisions to the contrary (146), and eliminating all civil liberties and civil rights protection within DHS (164)

It is nothing short of a bureaucratic coup d’etat — and completely unconstitutional.

The Immigration Gestapo — and ethnic cleansing by deportation

Yet we haven’t even arrived at the most extreme parts of Commandant Cuccinelli’s battle plan for Trump.

They lay out an absolutely diabolical plan that would effectively be ethnic cleansing by deportation — and make no mistake, many thousands of people would likely be killed in the process.

Right now, if an immigrant faces removal, they are sent a legal notice, and there is a legal process that must unfold, often with hearings and a chance for the immigrants to state their cases. The Trumpers would instead detain the person first, then maybe do a legal process. Eventually. If they get to it.

The detentions will be carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials — who in a major change will be permitted to operate away from the border. Anywhere nationwide. Under Trump and Cuccinelli, they will be a roving warrantless detention squad — a sort of super-police, effectively an Immigration Gestapo.

That Gestapo will be run by an official with almost limitless powers. Project 2025 proposes that DHS be replaced by a new Border and Immigration Czar at the cabinet level — and that Czar will have access to his own private jets, access to classified records, emergency powers at his sole discretion, and be completely above any of the due process of Title 8 or of the Administrative Procedures Act, with a total rubber stamp from agency counsel.

The section then proposes the creation of new facilities to house at least 100,000 immigrants at a time — and then they make it clear that even those facilities will just be tent cities.

Refugee camps are often some of the most horrific places on earth: inhumane levels of density, waste, disease, violence, and hunger. They are massive tent cities, fenced in, and the people living and suffering and dying there are trapped, not permitted to leave. That is what the Trumpers are proposing to build in the United States of America. In 2024.

And who exactly will be subjected to this hell on earth? The list keeps growing. At first it was just undocumented immigrants, including Dreamers. But Project 2025 also singles out immigrants from Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Venezuela, many of whom are legal asylum seekers. Even victims of human trafficking and violent crime would be singled out for deportation.

Yet there is one more word in this document that — especially when tied to Trump’s recent comments about legal Haitian immigrants — should send a chill through the spine of every single immigrant and every single family member of an immigrant.

That word is “denaturalization.”

Trump himself has now said that he will deport Haitian immigrants like those in Springfield, Ohio, even though most of those people are legal immigrants.

Being a legal immigrant is not enough to protect someone from the Immigration Gestapo — and if “denaturalization” is on the table, then even fully legal immigrants who have become naturalized American citizens are not safe either. These people have not only followed all the rules, filled out all the paperwork, waited patiently for years, finally received their green cards, and then took the extra step to commit themselves to America by becoming citizens — but Donald Trump and Ken Cuccinelli would forcibly tear them out of their homes, stick them into detention tent cities, and exile them from America forever.

And it does not even stop there. Cuccinelli, like many ultra-right extremists, wants to kill what we know of as “birthright citizenship,” whereby anyone born in the US is automatically a citizen. If Cuccinelli were to get into power, especially as an all-powerful Border and Immigration Czar reporting only to Trump, what would stop him from issuing an order that birthright citizenship is suspended? Yes, birthright citizenship is codified in the 14th Amendment — but he already writes in Project 2025 that the new Czar should disregard court orders, and what if the issue ended up before the Supreme Court? Couldn’t SCOTUS find some creatively diabolical way to rewrite the plain text of the Constitution?

If we are clear and rational about reading all of these proposals and their implications, then the overall picture is unmistakable — Donald Trump and his cronies are proposing nothing less than a complete rewrite of the definition of who’s an American. And anyone they deem not American — potentially tens of millions of people — will be forcibly removed from the country, either without due process or only the token appearance of due process, completely circumventing the courts and Congress, and completely ignoring the Constitution.

It is ethnic cleansing by deportation. And it is on the ballot in November.

Next: we will continue Decoding Project 2025, with Project 2025’s section on foreign policy. In the meantime, you can check out Decoding Project 2025 on the podcast. And you might want to check your voter registration to make sure you’re registered, you know where your polling place is, and that you sign up for early voting or mail-in ballots if those are available where you live.