‘Sounding alarm for 10 years’: Mississippi residents warn of Project 2025 ramifications

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a second Trump presidency, has been used as a warning by Democrats to highlight what would be in store for the country if he were to win the upcoming election. But for some Americans, much of Project 2025 isn’t a distant possible future – it is a current-day reality.

In several states across the country, there are already extreme abortion bans that have led to the deaths of multiple pregnant women and at least one teen; restrictive voting policies that make it difficult for citizens to cast their ballots; defunding of education and censorship of books; and other such policies that have also been proposed by the authors of Project 2025. If the plan is successfully implemented, many policies that are already reshaping some states would become federal laws.

Project 2025 is “a fascist blueprint for governance”, said Lea Campbell, the founding president of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, a grassroots organization that supports lower-income communities. But Mississippi, she said, which has an entrenched conservative majority, is already dealing with many of the proposed policies, specifically the policing and surveilling of marginalized people.

Families across Mississippi are still rebuilding after the largest immigration raid in the country, which happened five years ago. In 2019, on the first day of school, scores of children returned home to find that their parents were part of 680 people who were taken into custody, some of whom were subsequently deported, after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided seven poultry plants. Under Project 2025, mass deportations would be expedited, further tearing families apart.

“We have been sounding the alarm for more than 10 years, just around the policies in this state, enacted by conservatives that target the most vulnerable among us,” Campbell said. “We’ve been saying about policies under this ultra-conservative legislature that we have here in Mississippi [that] the cruelty is the point, it seems, with a lot of this legislation that targets poor people and people of color, and women, and the queer and trans community.”

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

In 2011, 58% of Mississippians rejected a “personhood amendment”, which, had it passed, would have defined fertilized eggs as people. Opponents warned that because of the way the amendment defined life, it would ban all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, and it would have complicated in vitro fertilization.

Still, in 2013, the state, along with Kansas, Kentucky, Wyoming, Ohio and North Dakota attempted to pass so-called “fetal heartbeat” bills, in which abortion is banned after as early as six weeks once cardiac activity is detected. For several years, multiple states tried to pass similar bills and other restrictions. By 2019, 15 states introduced “fetal heartbeat” bills; six were successful in passing them.

Project 2025 aims to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old anti-obscenity law that prohibits the mailing of abortion-related materials. Doing so 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 indicates a goal of legally recognizing fetuses as people.

Currently in Mississippi, drug-sniffing dogs have been used to intercept abortion pills. And in nearby Louisiana, two common abortion pills that are also often used for miscarriage management, softening the cervix during labor and other procedures have been reclassified as “controlled substances”, despite doctors warning that doing so will harm women.

As it stands, organizers and activists in states that have proto-Project 2025 policies are able to push for change on a state and local level. If Project 2025 were implemented, however, many of those policies could become federally enshrined, drastically changing the way lawmakers and advocates can push to repeal such laws.

Nsombi Lambright-Haynes, the executive director of One Voice Mississippi, a civil rights organization, said that the non-profit has been encouraging people to vote by educating them about what Project 2025 would do to the public education system and to reproductive rights.

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

A ‘beacon’ to get people ‘fervent in their racism’

Two years ago, Jackson, Mississippi’s capital and the Blackest city in the country, was without water for more than a month due to decades of the state refusing to invest in infrastructure. Danyelle Holmes, an organizer with the non-profit Poor People’s Campaign, said that implementing Project 2025 nationwide would worsen the rest of the country’s infrastructure woes.

“Project 2025 supports removing clean water protection,” she said. “That puts marginalized communities really at a very vulnerable place and position, as we’re feeling the impact of not having access to clean and safe drinking water.”

Project 2025 would downgrade per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from being classified as “hazardous” to “contaminants”, and it would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Toxic Substances Control Act, preventing the government from adequately monitoring the cumulative effect of toxins.

The plan could “erode the country’s system of checks and balances”, according to an analysis by Salon, increasing the president’s power over all of the federal government. But many states have already given such extreme powers to their state officials.

In Texas, for instance, the “Death Star” bill prevents cities and counties from passing measures that are stronger than those passed at the state level across a broad range of policy areas. While in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the governor, has augmented his own power by using the state’s republican supermajority to cement his ideas into law.

Project 2025 would eliminate Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), an interagency law enforcement training body, increase the use of the federal death penalty, eliminate the use of consent decrees and increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, according to an 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 law enforcement officers in Rankin county were convicted for torturing two Black men, while a federal investigation found that police in a majority-Black town elsewhere in the state have “created a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law”.

Project 2025 would make it so that the rest of the country experiences the restrictive, conservative lawmaking that many southerners have been organizing against for years, said Courtney Jones, a writer and researcher with ‘SippTalk Media, a digital media platform, said.

“There’s no part of this nation that is untouched by the harm that racism does. Project 2025 is more of a beacon to get people to be more fervent in their racism,” he said. “Instead of whispering about it or doing political loopholes, now they’re just directly saying, ‘We’re going to take these small things that we’ve been doing to these specific populations and now we’re just going to amplify them. And we’re going to make this happen across the entire country.’”

Jones noted that organizers in the state and region had long been trying to warn the rest of the country about what was happening and what might soon come for them. Their warnings were met with dismissal, he said, as people believed “that’s just Mississippi for you”.

“The people here that are doing the work have always been doing the work,” he said. “A lot of people in Mississippi recognize that because we’ve always been overlooked, that we have to kind of look within in order to save ourselves. There is no grand agency or political candidate that’s ever going to come here and suddenly fix things for us.”