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Halfway to Chains: What’s Already Been Enforced Under Project 2025

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Republican Project 2025 (Photo by Douglas Rissing)

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

They said it would never happen here. Yet here we are. Forty-eight percent of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s fascist playbook for dismantling American democracy, has already been put into motion. Nearly half of this regime’s roadmap to erase civil rights, gut public programs, and reimpose racial hierarchy has been realized, with Black America once again standing at the edge of the abyss.

Project 2025 was never just a “policy plan.” It was a declaration of war on pluralism itself. A promise by Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller to chain the machinery of government to white nationalism, Christian dominance, and patriarchal control. The American Civil Liberties Union warned that it would replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals, reviving 19th-century bans on abortion, dismantling civil rights enforcement, and weaponizing federal agencies against immigrants and protestors. Now, the chains are tightening. The Center for Progressive Reform reports that 251 of the 532 Project 2025 actions have been executed. Entire agencies that were once meant to serve and protect have been hollowed out, their missions inverted. Within the Department of Justice, Trump’s appointees have revived the death penalty, reinstated the racist China Initiative, and authorized aggressive prosecutions of local officials who refuse to enforce his version of “law and order.” Civil rights enforcement has been stripped bare; instead of protecting citizens from discrimination, the DOJ now protects power from dissent.

At the Department of Education, Title IX protections for women and LGBTQ students have been rolled back, and the Office for Civil Rights dismantled. Public education is being replaced with privatized indoctrination, pushing “parental rights” that serve as a Trojan horse for white Christian control. Even special education programs have been gutted, leaving millions of disabled children abandoned in the name of “efficiency.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which was once a guardian of public welfare, has been turned into a moral police force. Abortion access is being criminalized, Planned Parenthood defunded, and data on gender identity erased from health surveys. The new public health priorities are “fertility awareness” and “family discipline,” language straight from the Heritage Foundation’s patriarchal gospel. In housing, Trump’s HUD has repealed fair housing protections and reintroduced policies that penalize single mothers while rewarding “marriage stability.” The echoes of Jim Crow are unmistakable. Homes and neighborhoods once opened through decades of civil rights struggle are being closed again under the pretext of “local control.”

Project 2025’s architects have already unleashed the machinery of cruelty on immigrants and communities of color. Thousands have been rounded up under ICE raids that blur the line between citizen and foreigner. It’s a calculated terror tactic meant to normalize the surveillance and detention of Black and brown bodies. Families have been separated again. Birthright citizenship is under attack. ICE, that iron emblem of modern slavery, now casts a shadow over the same soil where slave patrols once hunted the enslaved. This is not accidental. It is the vision of Russell Vought, who co-authored the 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” the Project 2025 manifesto. As Trump’s budget director and now his ideological enforcer, Vought believes in purging the federal government of “unfaithful” employees, which means anyone who resists his religious and racial orthodoxy. Stephen Miller, the same architect of family separation and Muslim bans, is back to oversee deportations, surveillance, and the silencing of dissent. Their fingerprints are everywhere, from the federal hiring purges to the empowerment of police forces granted immunity from prosecution. Nearly half of the Project 2025 vision has already been achieved, and it is remaking America into a parody of its democratic promise. The Environmental Protection Agency has reversed greenhouse gas regulations, the Department of Agriculture has reinstated draconian work requirements for food aid, and the White House itself now dictates loyalty tests for every federal employee. This is not governance, it is occupation.

The Center for Progressive Reform notes that Trump’s government shutdown in October 2025 was not a failure of management but a strategy. A deliberate effort to dismantle public programs while blaming “big government” for their collapse. He used the shutdown, as the report states, “as an excuse to advance his goals of slashing programs that benefit millions of Americans.” In this America, cruelty has become the operating principle. The poor are starved to feed the rich, the immigrant is caged to comfort the fearful, and truth itself is outlawed. He once warned that if we do not confront the truth of who we are, we will be consumed by it. Project 2025 is the truth of America unmasked. A nation willing to trade freedom for dominance, justice for vengeance, and compassion for control. Nearly half of the chains have already been forged. They rattle in our schools, our hospitals, our courts, our homes. And while they may not yet bind every wrist, they are ready. The architects of Project 2025 have made their intention plain. To enslave the will of a free people through law, bureaucracy, and fear.

We are halfway to chains.

The Lie About Immigrants and America’s Debt to Them

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Concept of difficulties that immigrants suffer trying to enter in Usa. (Photo by Marcos Silva)

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

There is a lie moving through America. It creeps through congressional halls and across television screens, whispering that undocumented immigrants live freely off the sweat of the American taxpayer. It is a lie told by those who know better and repeated by those who are too ignorant—or too hateful—to care. And while the lie spreads, the truth is being brutalized on the streets.

According to data from the Cato Institute, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has intensified its war on peaceful people. As of this past summer, ICE was arresting 1,100 percent more noncriminal immigrants than it did in 2017. By June 2025, its agents were seizing nearly 3,800 men, women, and children each week, most with no criminal record at all. They are landscapers, caregivers, construction workers, restaurant staff—the quiet hands that build this nation’s comfort. Yet ICE agents, masked and faceless, now stalk them at bus stops, schools, and home improvement stores. These are not arrests made in the name of safety—they are acts of terror disguised as law. The architects of this cruelty justify it with another lie: that these people are bleeding America dry, taking what they have not earned. But every ledger, every study, every dollar collected proves the opposite.

Undocumented immigrants, forbidden from accessing almost every public benefit, pour billions into the U.S. economy. In 2022 alone, they paid $96.7 billion in taxes—nearly $9,000 each—into the same systems that exclude them. They paid $25.7 billion into Social Security, even though the law bars them from ever receiving a penny of it. Their effective state and local tax rate, 8.9 percent, exceeds that paid by the top 1 percent of U.S. earners. And still, politicians like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump tell America that these workers are stealing from it. They insist that Democrats shut down the government to hand health care to “illegal immigrants.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called that accusation what it is: a lie. “Nowhere have Democrats suggested that we’re interested in changing federal law,” Jeffries said. “The question for the president is whether he’s interested in protecting the health care of the American people.”

NBC News confirmed that the GOP’s narrative was false. So did NPR, which reported plainly: “People living in the U.S. who are undocumented do not qualify for Medicaid. They do not qualify for tax credits on the ACA health care exchanges.” But facts no longer seem to matter. Lies feed fear, and fear feeds votes. While the powerful argue over fiction, the reality on the ground has become unbearable. Cato’s research shows that fewer than 6 percent of immigrants detained by ICE had violent convictions. In Los Angeles, more than 70 percent of those taken in early June had no criminal record at all. One senior White House adviser was quoted as asking ICE agents, “Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”—as if immigrant workers were quarry to be hunted.

This is what America has become: a nation that criminalizes the hands that feed it. While undocumented families harvest crops, clean hospital rooms, and care for the elderly, their wages are taxed to fund public schools, emergency services, and the very agencies that terrorize them. They pay, but they cannot claim. They build, but they cannot belong. Then came the 2025 tax and budget law—Trump’s latest cruelty written into policy. It stripped 1.4 million lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and asylees, of their health coverage. It punished not only the undocumented but also those who had done everything right. America, it seems, has decided that suffering is the price of entry.

What the numbers reveal is not an invasion—it is a sacrifice. Undocumented immigrants have become the unacknowledged benefactors of a country that feeds on their labor while denying their humanity. They are propping up Social Security, sustaining state budgets, and fueling industries that would collapse without them. And yet they are chased, detained, and deported under the pretense of justice. The real theft in America is not committed by the undocumented. It is committed by those who steal their dignity, their freedom, and the truth. This is not a debate about borders. It is a reckoning with the lies we tell to justify cruelty. The undocumented are not taking from America—they are keeping it alive.

And one day, when the history of this era is written, the numbers will still speak. They will tell of millions who worked, paid, and gave everything they could, while a government lied about their worth. They will tell how America, built by the hands of the unfree, once again turned its back on the very people who held it upright. The lie about immigrants is as old as America itself. But the truth endures: they are not our burden—they are our debt.

From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration

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Close up of anonymous black man wearing handcuffs sitting at table in police department with hands clasped, copy space

The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) has relaunched its global news feature series on the history, contemporary realities, and implications of the transatlantic slave trade as today’s leaders try to erase this history. This is Part 7 in the series.

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out. We are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“We live in the most incarcerated country in the world. There are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.”
― Singer John Legend

The United States has just five percent of the world population yet holds approximately 25 percent of its prisoners. From the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery deprived the captive of legal rights and granted the master complete power. Millions of slaves in America were humiliated, beaten, and killed while black families were torn apart. Slavery was abolished in 1865 with the end of the Civil War and passing of the 13th Amendment, but America found what many see as a disingenuous way of continuing its slave master ways – mass incarceration.

The NAACP recently released statistics that revealed that, in 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34 percent, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites, and the imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women. Nationwide, African American children represent 32 percent of children who are arrested, 42 percent of children who are detained, and 52 percent of children whose cases are judicially waived to criminal court. Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32 percent of the US population, they comprised 56 percent of all incarcerated people in 2015.

If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites,
Prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40 percent, according to the NAACP. “Five hundred years after the transatlantic slave trade, the strife and hate that remains is largely due to miseducation. To date, there has not been an honest evaluation accepted by the general public about the true relationship between African people in America and the European settlers, typically referred to as just Americans,” said activist and television personality Jay Morrison. “This is one of the reasons that I wrote my book, ‘The Solution: How Africans in America Achieve Unity, Justice and Repair.’ In it, there is informative dialogue on the true experience of Africans in America during the enslavement era, the post enslavement era, and current-day America, which I refer to as the mass incarceration era. Most Americans choose to live blindly and accept the political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation of Africans in America,” Morrison said.

The longing by blacks for independence often threatens and offends many Americans, and many people don’t believe in African Americans’ right to liberation and cannot fathom their desire to be in their true and original state, often leading to a fight, he said. “I believe there is an opportunity in this millennial-led age to get past the hate if there is true atonement. Until America can take full responsibility for its past and correct what is still purposefully occurring – mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, unequal school systems, gentrification, police brutality – the tension will continue to exist,” Morrison said.

He continued:

“Until all people can be honest about our history and lack of repair, the hate will be hard to get past. These human rights violations against Africans in America must be treated with the same seriousness as other communities that have experienced similar imprisonment, oppression, exploitation, and genocide. When that playing field is levelled, I imagine a greater peace in America.” Added Je Hooper, of the American Ethical Union and the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture:

“The black, brown, and beige community continues to seek a remedy for their post-traumatic slave syndrome, particularly in a time of a socio-political climate that is fueled by discriminatory political rhetoric, violent, sensationalized media, and disjointed cultural information. “Our country has lived in fear because of its own nationalist amnesia. I feel we must rise to the occasion for communities of color to unapologetically shine,” Hooper said. In Montgomery, Alabama, attempts to educate Americans and others about the transatlantic slave trade and its ties to mass incarceration continue at The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which has dedicated exhibits detailing the topic.

Opened on April 26, 2018, the 11,000-square-foot museum is built on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved black people were imprisoned and is located midway between a historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery’s proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slave-owners amassed large, enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery’s prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states in America. To justify the brutal, dehumanizing institution of slavery in America, its advocates created a narrative of racial difference, according to Bryan Stevenson, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery.

Stereotypes and false characterizations of black people were disseminated to defend their permanent enslavement as “most necessary to the well-being of the negro” – an act of kindness that reinforced white supremacy, Stevenson said. “The formal abolition of slavery did nothing to overcome the harmful ideas created to defend it, and so slavery did not end; it evolved,” he said. In the decades that followed, these beliefs in racial hierarchy took new expression in convict leasing, lynching, and other forms of racial terrorism that forced the exodus of millions of black Americans to the North and West, where the narrative of racial difference manifested in urban ghettos and generational poverty. Racial subordination was codified and enforced by violence in the era of Jim Crow and segregation, as the nation and its leaders allowed black people to be burdened, beaten, and marginalized throughout the 20th century, according to museum officials.

Progress towards civil rights for African Americans was made in the 1960s, but the myth of racial inferiority was not eradicated. Black Americans were vulnerable to a new era of racial bias and abuse of power wielded by our contemporary criminal justice system. Museum officials said mass incarceration has had devastating consequences for people of color, including that, at the dawn of the 21st century, one in three black boys was projected to go to jail or prison in his lifetime. “Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape,” Stevenson said. “This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society, Stevenson said. “I know the 13th Amendment provides the means for the criminal justice system to continue the practice of institutional slavery in the United States, for it is very clearly stated, ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,’” said Shawn Halifax, a cultural history interpretation coordinator at the Charleston County Park & Recreation Commission in Charleston, South Carolina.

“There is plenty of evidence, since its passage, that individual states and the United States have chosen to exercise the entirety of this amendment to the Constitution and have manipulated the institution of criminal justice to make it happen,” Halifax said.

UP NEXT: From Slavery to Civil Rights and Environmental Racism

UN Observes International Remembrance of Slave Trade

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International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition poster, card, August 23. Vector illustration.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade is not just Black history—it is American history, and Black Americans lived it. Their ancestors were violently torn from their homes, forced into brutal labor, and stripped of basic humanity. That legacy of injustice echoes loudly in every aspect of our society—because the slave trade wasn’t just cruel, it was foundational.

Yet today, that truth itself is under attack. President Donald Trump denounced the Smithsonian Institution as allegedly “out of control” for telling the unvarnished history of slavery—claiming museums focus too much on how bad slavery was and not enough on “brightness” or success, even as his administration reviews exhibits and threatens funding cuts to sanitize the narrative. He dismissed honest reflection as “woke,” arguing it undermines national pride.

We are re-rerunning this series, which we originally published in 2019, each day because confronting our painful past is urgent—and because critics who erase suffering do so to keep oppression alive.

A people without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots — Marcus Garvey.

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

The night of Aug. 22 to Aug. 23, 1791, in Santo Domingo – today Haiti and the Dominican Republic – saw the beginning of the uprising that would play a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

The slave rebellion in the area weakened the Caribbean colonial system, sparking an uprising that led to the abolition of slavery and gave the island its independence. It also marked the beginning of the destruction of the slavery system, the slave trade, and colonialism. Each year, on Aug. 23, the United Nations hosts an International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition to remind the world of the tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade.

U.N. officials said it provides an opportunity to think about the historic causes, the methods, and the consequences of the slave trade. Experts said it’s important to never forget. And, with the approaching 500th anniversary of the date Africans were first forced into slavery in America, many like Felicia M. Davis, the director of the HBCU Green Fund, which invests in sustainable campus solutions for historically black colleges and universities, said she believes African enslavement demands reexamination.

“The fact that slavery was underway for a century in South America before its introduction in North America is not widely taught nor commonly understood,” Davis said. “It is a powerful historical fact missing from our understanding of slavery, its magnitude, and global impact. Knowledge that slavery was underway for a century provides deep insight into how enslaved Africans adapted,” she said. Far beyond the horrific “seasoning” description that others have provided, clearly generations had been born into slavery long before the introduction in North America, Davis argued. “It deepens the understanding of how vast majorities could be oppressed in such an extreme manner for such a long period of time.  It is also a testament to the strength and drive among people of African descent to live free,” she said.

The history of the United States has often been described as the history of oppression and resistance to that oppression, said David B. Allison, the editor of the book, “Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders.” Slavery and the resulting touchstones stemming from slavery throughout the history of the United States run as a consistent thread that illuminates the soul and essence of America, said Allison, a historian with a master’s degree in U.S. History from Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.’ “From the compromises and moral equivocation in the founding documents during the Revolutionary Era – statements like ‘All men are created equal’ were written by a man who kept Black men and women as decidedly unequal as slaves – to the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement, the tragedy and terror of slavery are fundamental to the history of the United States,” Allison said.

Today, the fallout from the events of Aug. 2017 in Charlottesville – brought about by a white supremacist rally and touched off the debate around the potential removal of a statue to a leader of the Confederacy – continues to weigh down the collective psyche of this nation, Allison continued. “Moreover, the rise in police profiling and brutality of Black men and the resulting rates of incarceration for African Americans highlight the ongoing oppression that was initially born in the crucible of slavery,” he said. Allison added that it’s “absolutely essential to understand and remember that 2019 is the 500th anniversary of slavery in the United States so that we can understand both how our country became how it is now and how we might envision a more just future for all citizens.”

Each year, the UN invites people all over the world, including educators, students, and artists, to organize events that center on the theme of the International Day of Remembrance. Theatre companies, cultural organizations, musicians, and artists take part in this day by expressing their resistance against slavery through performances that involve music, dance, and drama. Educators promote the day by informing people about the historical events associated with the slave trade, the consequences of the slave trade, and promoting tolerance and human rights. Many organizations, including youth associations, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations, actively take part in the event to educate society about the negative consequences of the slave trade.

Here in America, many organizations, activists, and scholars are focused on 2019 as the anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to be enslaved in Jamestown and 160 years since the last slave ship arrived, Davis said. Also, there’s a growing list of apologies for slavery from colleges and universities, local governments, and corporations. Efforts are underway by the HBCU Green Fund to organize a national convening under the theme “Sankofa Remix” with three tracks: past, present, and future. The goal is to examine history from an African American perspective, explore current impacts, including backlash from the election of the first Black president, and craft a vision that extends at least 100 years into the future that features presentations from artists, activists, technology, scholars, and other creative energy. “It is encouraging to know that BlackPressUSA is focused on this topic.  It is our hope that plans are underway to cover activities throughout the entire year,” Davis said, noting that 2019 also marks the 100th anniversary of the Red Summer Race Riots.

“The UN Decade of African Descent 2015-2024 should also be highlighted as the BlackPressUSA leads this important examination of history,” she said. “Interestingly, the first and last slave ships to arrive in the U.S. both arrived in August. The HBCU Green Fund is working to put together a calendar of dates and observances. “We would love to work with Black Press USA to promote a year-long observance that helps to reinvigorate and support the important role that the Black press plays in the liberation of Black people across the globe. “We would be honored to have Black Press USA as a Sankofa Remix partner organization and look forward to collaboration opportunities,” Davis said.

Up Next: The Catholic Church Played a Major Role in Slavery