'Alarm has been sounding for 10 years': Mississippi residents warn about impacts of Project 2025 | Project 2025

PProject 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency, was used by Democrats as a warning to highlight what the country would face if he won the upcoming election. But for some Americans, much of Project 2025 isn't a distant possible future — it's a current reality.

Several states across the country already have extreme abortion bans that have resulted in the deaths of several pregnant women and at least one teenager; restrictive electoral policies that make it difficult for citizens to cast their votes; cutting education funding and censoring books; and other such policies also suggested by the authors of Project 2025. If the plan is successfully implemented, many policies already shaping some states would become federal law.

Project 2025 is “a fascist blueprint for governance,” said Lea Campbell, the founding president of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, a grassroots organization that supports low-income communities. But Mississippi, which has a deeply entrenched conservative majority, is already addressing many of the proposed measures, particularly surveillance and surveillance of marginalized people.

Families across Mississippi are still rebuilding after the nation's largest immigration raid five years ago. In 2019, on the first day of school, scores of children returned home to discover that their parents were among 680 people taken into custody and some of them subsequently deported after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seven had searched poultry factories. Project 2025 would accelerate mass deportations, tearing families even further apart.

“We have been sounding the alarm for more than a decade, particularly about policies enacted by conservatives in this state that target the most vulnerable among us,” Campbell said. “We've said about the policies of this ultra-conservative legislature that we have here in Mississippi, that cruelty seems to be the point of many of these laws that target poor people, people of color and women. and the queer and trans community.”

Even when voters have made it clear they disagree with proposed conservative measures, lawmakers have found ways around their wishes.

In 2011, 58% of Mississippi residents rejected a Personhood Amendment that, if passed, would have defined fertilized eggs as human beings. Opponents warned that because of the way the amendment defines life, it would ban all abortions without exceptions for rape or incest and make in vitro fertilization more difficult.

Still, in 2013, the state, along with Kansas, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio and North Dakota, tried to pass so-called “fetal heartbeat” laws, banning abortions as early as six weeks after cardiac activity is detected. Several states attempted to pass similar laws and other restrictions for several years. As of 2019, 15 states introduced fetal heartbeat bills; six managed to overtake them.

The goal of Project 2025 is to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old obscenity law that prohibits the mailing of abortion-related materials. This could lead to a de facto nationwide ban on abortion, as abortion clinics and advocates rely on the mail to send and receive abortion pills. The plan also points to the goal of legally recognizing fetuses as human beings.

Drug-sniffing dogs are currently being used in Mississippi to intercept abortion pills. And in nearby Louisiana, two common abortion pills that are also commonly used to treat miscarriages, soften the cervix during labor and other procedures have been classified as “controlled substances,” even though doctors warn they harm women.

As it stands, organizers and activists in states that have Proto-Project 2025 policies can push for change at the state and local levels. However, if the project were implemented in 2025, many of these policies could be made federal, which would dramatically change the way 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 encouraged people to vote by educating them about Project 2025's impact on public education and reproductive rights.

“We point out what we already have and then point out the danger that can arise if something like this is fully implemented,” she said. “It’s really like a wake-up call.”

A “beacon” to get people to “become fervent about their racism”

Two years ago, Jackson, the capital of Mississippi and the blackest city in the country, was without water for more than a month because of the state's decades-long refusal to invest in infrastructure. Danyelle Holmes, an organizer with the nonprofit Poor People's Campaign, said implementing the project nationwide in 2025 would worsen the country's other infrastructure problems.

“Project 2025 supports eliminating clean water protections,” she said. “This really puts marginalized communities in a very vulnerable position as we feel the impact of lack of access to clean and safe drinking water.”

Project 2025 would downgrade per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from classification as “hazardous” to “contaminants” and repeal the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Toxic Substances Control Act, preventing the government from assessing the cumulative effect adequately monitor toxins.

According to a Salon analysis, the plan could “undermine the country's system of separation of powers” and increase the president's power over the entire federal government. But many states have already given such extreme powers to their civil servants.

In Texas, for example, the Death Star bill prevents cities and counties from adopting stricter measures than those passed at the state level across a wide range of policy areas. While in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded his own power by using the state's Republican supermajority to enshrine his ideas into law.

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), a multi-agency law enforcement training facility, would increase the use of the federal death penalty, eliminate the use of consent decrees, and increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, according to a Project 2025 analysis by the Thurgood Marshall Institute, the research arm of the Legal Defense Fund.

In Mississippi, police departments across the state have already been embroiled in controversy. Six Rankin County police officers have been convicted of torturing two black men, while a federal investigation finds that police in a majority-black city elsewhere in the state “created a system in which officers can relentlessly violate 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 is spared from the harm that racism causes. Project 2025 is more of a beacon to get people to be more passionate about their racism,” he said. “Instead of whispering about it or closing policy loopholes, now they're just saying outright, 'We're going to take these little things that we've done and apply them to 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 tried to warn the rest of the country about what is happening and what may soon be coming. Their warnings were met with rejection, 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. “Many people in Mississippi are realizing that because we have always been overlooked, we must somehow look within to save ourselves. There’s no major agency or political candidate that ever comes here and suddenly runs things for us.”