Trump Allies Find Their Inspiration for Massive Deportation Campaign

Project 2025 associates shared new details Friday about their plans for an expansive immigration crackdown—including mass deportations—under Trump. The group’s focus on immigration seeks to have executive orders and policy memos ready for use on day one of a second Trump presidency, undoing portions of Biden’s immigration policies and setting the stage to realize Trump’s desire to mass-deport up to 20 million people

According to details shared to The Wall Street Journal, Trump allies have found one of their main sources of inspiration for the giant deportation campaign: the U.K. Rwanda plan. The group is working to identify countries that would accept people deported from the United States, much like a similar effort between the U.K. and Rwanda, which is currently mired in legal entanglements.

Trump allies are also working out ways to make asylum hearings move faster to speed up deportation eligibility and remove deportation protections created by Biden that would impact hundreds of thousands of people.

These new details of Project 2025’s agenda were revealed by The Wall Street Journal simultaneously with similar revelations shared with Reuters about Project 2025’s aspirations to neutralize the Department of Justice’s independent investigative authority and convert it into a conservative attack dog. Combining its efforts to alter the Department of Justice with legally murky mass-deportation initiatives could present an authoritarian dynamic that removes legal impediments to actualize its deportation goals.

Project 2025 is a coalition effort of conservative groups that seek to dismantle long-standing frameworks of democracy to turn the U.S. into an ultranationalist, hyperconservative, authoritarian society. While its objective prioritizes a Trump presidency, the coalition operates independently from the Trump campaign. Leading Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation, a heavy hitter in conservative policymaking, and the America First Policy Initiative, a newer group that has been described as “just a grift.”

Trump’s campaign has denied associations with efforts being crafted on behalf of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, with Trump senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita telling both Reuters and The Wall Street Journal: “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

LaCivita and Wiles claim details made public of Project 2025’s efforts to streamline Trump’s conservative agenda ahead of the election are “an effort to prevent a second Trump administration.” Neither adviser rebuffed the aspirations behind Project 2025, which are being crafted in line with Trump’s public statements regarding mass deportations and the Department of Justice.

Donald Trump received the day off from his hush-money trial to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation, and actually managed to show up for his youngest child Friday morning. But don’t worry—he has plans to dip almost immediately after.

Trump, his wife, Melania, and Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs, were among the guests in the audience at Oxbridge Academy’s graduation ceremony in Palm Beach, Florida, Friday morning.

The former president posted a very short message on Truth Social announcing his attendance Friday morning: “Going to Barron’s High School Graduation. Great student, wonderful boy! Very exciting!!! DJT.”

Trump had complained that the judge in his hush-money trial, Juan Merchan, was preventing him from attending the ceremony, when in reality New York state law requires criminal defendants to attend all of their trial proceedings. Reportedly, Melania was not happy with the former president mentioning their son’s graduation in court and bringing unwanted attention upon their son. The former president’s lawyers asked Merchan for the day off, which was later granted.

Oxbridge Academy said that its graduation ceremony this year was private and invitation-only, and asked the press not to attend.

After Barron’s graduation ceremony, Trump will be flying to St. Paul, Minnesota, to speak at the Republican Party of Minnesota’s annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner in the evening, which means that any graduation day plans Barron has will likely not include his father.

“We are thrilled to welcome President Trump back to Minnesota to headline our Lincoln Reagan dinner, an annual tradition that reminds us of the roots of our Party and the leaders who have been most impactful in promoting our American values. I can think of no one more fitting to join us this year than President Trump,” Minnesota GOP chair David Hann said in a statement.

As far as post–high school plans, Barron was chosen as an at-large delegate for the Republican National Convention, only to pull out due to prior commitments, according to a statement from his mother. He plans to attend college but is reportedly still deciding where to go.

President Joe Biden’s decision to invoke executive privilege to keep House Republicans from getting their hands on audio recordings of his controversial interview with special counsel Robert Hur has seemingly transformed into a fundraising opportunity for some of the lawmakers leading his impeachment probe.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer leveraged the fiasco in a campaign email Thursday afternoon, asking constituents if they would consider throwing cash his way over the issue.

“This could be the final blow to Biden with swing voters across the country,” the email read. “You and I know he’s not up for the job, but the mainstream media’s refusal to report on it is the only thing keeping him in the game.”

That might be a helpful line for Comer, since the chairman wasted months pursuing a baseless and unsuccessful impeachment inquiry into the president, largely based on the claims of an indicted former FBI informant who has since reportedly admitted the scheme was cooked up by top Russian intelligence officials.

But Comer didn’t seem keen to campaign on other recent instances in which a president leveraged executive privilege to cover up his behavior, as Trump did over the Mueller report or to avoid consequences for taking several thousand sensitive or classified documents from the White House—even if some of those actions resulted in criminal charges.

Biden’s move to keep the interview tapes under wraps came at the request of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who warned that cooperating with the GOP request could jeopardize future investigations and witnesses’ willingness to participate in them. In his letter to Biden, made public Thursday, Garland said that lawmakers’ efforts “are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that the production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”

White House counsel Ed Siskel also questioned the motivations of Republicans seeking the tapes when they already possess a lengthy report and full transcript of the interview, accusing the caucus of seeking to “chop them up” and “distort” the recordings for “partisan political purposes.”

Democratic Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz was quick to call Comer out about the fundraising email, delivering a spirited reading of the message during an Oversight Committee hearing late Thursday.

New details have emerged of plans by Trump allies to dismantle democracy under a second Trump administration by packing the Department of Justice with Trump loyalists and shrinking the independent scope of the FBI. The plans, as detailed by Reuters, seek to craft a DOJ to advance conservative agendas, heavily curtail civil liberties, and impede investigations into corruption by Trump and his allies.

The plans laid out by Trump allies to convert the FBI into a politically charged conservative attack dog come from the authoritarian aspirations of Project 2025, a sprawling network led by conservative think tanks that comb through existing law to find loopholes and precedent for Trump—or any conservative president—to enact extreme right-wing policies and consolidate power at a moment’s notice.

Trump allies plan to nuke consent decrees, a sort of contractual oversight agreement between the Department of Justice and local police departments, to curb civil rights abuses. They also want to downgrade the FBI’s access to the attorney general, instead making the FBI head report to two politically installed assistant attorneys general.

Steve Bradbury, who served as transportation secretary under Trump and who spoke with Reuters about these plans, claimed in backward fashion that the DOJ acting independently from the president’s wishes poses a “recipe for abuse of power.”

“Whenever you have power centers ... that have enormous resources, coercive power and investigative tools at their disposal, and they are presumed to be independent of any control down the chain of command from the president, that is a recipe for abuse of power,” Bradbury told Reuters.

Conservatives have long called to dismantle the FBI following investigations into Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign and indictments by the DOJ of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump allies want to reduce the scope of the FBI’s investigative authority, leaving the department to focus solely on “large-scale crimes and threats to national security,” from which insurrection and sedition by conservatives are, naturally, excluded. A January report by the National Institute of Justice found far-right extremism has continued to outpace all other forms of domestic terrorism since 1990.

Plans to dramatically alter the DOJ to act as an extension of conservative ambitions rather than an independent agency follow a similar pattern to Trump’s overhaul of the Supreme Court and packing conservative judges throughout the federal circuit as president—changes that led to the overturning of Roe after Trump left office and a continuation of attacks on LGBTQ+ freedoms and civil rights today. If reelected, Trump’s allies would replicate that process at the Department of Justice.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s ballot drive in Texas may have unintended consequences for a Lone Star politician seeking reelection: Senator Ted Cruz.

While Kennedy is still working to get his name on the ballot for the presidential race, pollsters predict that his mere presence will summon more voters to the booth come November—voters who won’t necessarily join Cruz’s camp when they see his name elsewhere on the ballot. Instead, experts predict that voters who turn out for Kennedy will more likely support Democratic Representative Colin Allred, Cruz’s opponent in the November race.

“This is definitely not good for Cruz,” Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told The Hill. “Kennedy’s presence on the ballot could actually help Democrats.”

Kennedy’s campaign announced earlier this week that more than twice as many people as required—some 245,000 Texans—had provided signatures to get him onto the ballot.

“If you can get on in Texas, you can get on everywhere,” Kennedy said at a campaign rally.

The demographic likely to turn out for the 70-year-old independent candidate includes both Democratic and Republican voters, meaning Kennedy is expected to pull support from President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But Kennedy’s camp also, surprisingly, includes a swath of young voters who historically don’t participate in elections—but their presence this year could reshape Texas politics.

“RFK Jr. is likely to mobilize a group of voters to turn out and vote in the presidential race who, absent his presidency, would not have participated,” Jones told The Hill. “Once those voters are through casting a vote in the first race as president, they’re going to start to go down the ballot.”