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CARCERAL IMPERIALISM, PROJECT 2025, AND THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS  
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Lyle C. May
April 15, 2025
Prism
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_ Whether in the past or present, imperialism that is reframed in
patriotic language does not make it less brutal to those who lose
their land, liberty, and lives—or have their identities folded into
American conquest. _

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Many state and federal efforts over the last 20 years have sought to
reduce prison and jail populations, provide more rehabilitative
programming inside, and address recidivism. Indeed, in North Carolina
prisons, we’ve had a sense of hope for the future and the cautious
belief that maybe mass incarceration has reached a significant turning
point, one that recognizes our humanity and comes to the understanding
that filling prisons with people in perpetual confinement is not the
answer. 

Yet, many of us also knew the outcome of the election would
potentially erase the last two decades of progress. The same
conservative ideology that shaped America’s carceral state was
biding its time through the Biden administration until it could build
and fill even more prisons. With the election of Donald Trump,
draconian approaches to crime and punishment found a new form that
borrows from old ideas of totalitarian and fascist governments. 

That form is Project 2025, and it is a roadmap to carceral
imperialism.

Reinforcing dehumanizing approaches

Published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a collective of
conservative groups that fund MAGA Republican campaigns, Project 2025
was created to be a policy framework for the next Republican
administration. The manifesto lays out a plan that removes independent
oversight from all levels of government and puts in place MAGA
Republican loyalists committed to unquestioningly carrying out the
president’s agenda. Though Project 2025 immediately alarmed many in
the Democratic Party and the media—both of which tried to warn the
public of the manifesto’s troubling goals—their efforts were
largely drowned out by the massive amount of disinformation during the
election cycle. On the campaign trail, Trump claimed to be unfamiliar
with Project 2025. However, once in office, his appointees and
executive orders told a different story. 

Project 2025 seems to inform the Trump administration’s decisions
and much of its operation. This is evidenced by billionaire Elon
Musk’s oversight of the so-called Department of Government
Efficiency that is currently dismantling federal agencies without
approval from Congress, engaging in unlawful federal employee buyouts,
and purging agencies like the FBI.

When it comes to the criminal legal system, Project 2025 detaches from
statistics, facts about crime and punishment, and evidence-based
corrections—in other words, the application of social science to
develop effective criminal justice policies. Instead, the doctrine
reinforces punitive, dehumanizing approaches to crime proven to be
ineffective and, in some cases, unconstitutional.

For example, Gene Hamilton, author of Project 2025’s chapter on the
Department of Justice (DOJ), relies on crime myths that are often used
to manipulate beliefs about the causes of crime and the effect of
certain responses to it. Hamilton is an attorney and co-founder of
the far-right, Trump-aligned law firm
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First Legal Foundation, which he leads with Trump’s deputy chief of
staff, Stephen Miller. 

Despite an overall decrease in serious violent crime in the U.S. over
the last three decades, Project 2025 calls for incarcerating more
people while also perpetuating the myth of rampant migrant crime.
Indeed, the central messaging of the MAGA platform is that all
immigrants are “illegal,” and therefore, their presence in the
U.S. signals a crime wave. 

According to Hamilton, the DOJ focused too much on “imaginary,
politically convenient threats” instead of investigating “elected
officials and other public officers who conspired with outside allies
to target and harass parents who were merely exercising their
constitutional and statutory rights” under former Attorney General
Merrick Garland. This is a reference to an October 2021 memo
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Garland decrying the escalating threats of violence
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at school board meetings in response to COVID-19 policies. While
Hamilton makes it appear as if soccer moms were being denied the right
to free speech, Garland’s concerns were aimed at the death and
terroristic threats
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at school board members at the time. 

More broadly, Project 2025’s false claims about rampant crime tap
into public fear and ignorance regarding actual crime statistics,
which makes it easier to replace effective solutions and working
policies with political agendas. Crime myths begin by condemning
others, playing into prejudices toward a class of people, and then
building esteem through policy comparisons. The rhetoric—racist,
xenophobic lies cloaked in “America first” language—demonizes
nonwhite, non-U.S. citizens to justify everything the government does
to them, no matter how unconstitutional, brutal, or deadly. This is
the bedrock of carceral imperialism.

Making totalitarianism more brutal

To reinforce the idea that all immigrants are criminals who
“deserve” punishment, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan
claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will focus on
the “public safety threats first,” but clarified that no
undocumented immigrants are safe from deportation.

American otherism of immigrants is not new and neither is the
intersection of immigration and the criminal legal system, nor the
false morality of Christian nationalists who pursue cruel exclusionary
policies under the guise of public safety. American history is
threaded with such efforts. 

As one example, in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched
America’s largest mass deportation. Named for a racist slur
“Operation Wetback
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Border Patrol used military-style tactics to round up undocumented
Mexican immigrants and Mexican American citizens without due process
or notification to their families. Shoved into trucks and ships, they
were then dumped in unfamiliar towns across the border, where many
suffered and died of dehydration. A congressional investigation later
described the conditions on ships to that of an “eighteenth century
slave ship.” Though the government claimed 1.3 million were deported
during the operation, historians believe the number was closer to
300,000.

Trump is well aware of this history. While campaigning, he referenced
Eisenhower’s operation and told a crowd, “On day one, I will
launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of
America.” 

The Clinton administration helped set the stage for Trump’s promised
mass deportations. 

As Prism previously reported
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the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, known
collectively as the 1996 laws, expanded the grounds of deportation to
include misdemeanors; stripped judges of the ability to grant pardons
on a case-by-case basis; allowed for prolonged and indefinite
detention; and subjected asylum-seekers to fast-track deportations
without ever seeing a judge. 

“Crimmigation”—a term coined by legal scholar Julie Stump to
describe the intersection of criminal law and immigration
law—expanded further when ICE established the Criminal Alien Program
(CAP). Under CAP, ICE agents were empowered to carry out wide-scale
immigration enforcement operations.

It is misleading to think Trump’s agenda is his own. Trump’s
agenda is Project 2025, and if he changes anything, it is to make the
totalitarian recommendations more brutal—especially when it comes to
prosecuting the “war on terrorism.”

In the initial flurry of executive orders, Trump designated
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and transnational gangs as “foreign terrorist organizations” and
“global terrorists,” ordering their “total elimination” in the
U.S. This opens the door to harshly punish and prosecute immigrants,
U.S. citizens, and businesses alleged to have ties to these groups,
allowing the government to virtually suspend the Constitution to
prosecute, confine, and torture. The effects are already being felt. 

The Trump administration transferred dozens of migrants to the U.S.
military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, alleging that they are
dangerous, violent, or otherwise have criminal records and ties to the
Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The administration has provided no
evidence of these claims. Most of the migrants whose identities have
become public do not have criminal records
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and some were apprehended and detained for arbitrary reasons, such as
tattoos
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U.S. carceral imperialism does not stop at Guantánamo Bay. In
defiance of a court order
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their removal under Trump’s invocation of the wartime declaration
known as the Alien Enemies Act, the administration sent more than 200
Venezuelan migrants to a maximum security gang prison in El Salvador.
The U.S. government will pay an annual fee for their incarceration,
according to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. 

Dismantling reforms

When Trump rescinded
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President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14006, which ended DOJ
contracts with private prison corporations, it paved the way for the
mass incarceration of immigrants and revitalized the commercialization
of confinement. GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private prison
companies, just signed
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15-year, $1 billion contract with ICE. Executives with the company
recently told investors in an earnings call to expect “unprecedented
opportunities
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under the Trump administration. 

For asylum-seekers and other migrants seeking safety in the U.S.,
criminalization should not be expected. Yet their very presence
appears to justify abuse by xenophobes that voted into office a
president without moral boundaries, ethics, or mercy. Who better to
fulfill the fascist agenda of Project 2025? The same holds for any
company or hedge fund equally willing to profit from human suffering
to build more prisons. 

Within 24 hours of Trump’s reelection, the stock of GEO and
CoreCivic, another leading private prison profiteer, soared
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The Trump administration has fully embraced the private prison lobby
and now allows these companies to contract with other federal
agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service. 

In addition to delivering a resurgence in private prison profiteers,
Project 2025 emphasizes the restoration of “law and order,” a
euphemism for being tough on crime. This partly means taking legal
action against local prosecutors who conservatives allege have been
“too soft” on crime. 

To be clear, prosecutors are rarely ever soft on crime—except when
it comes to white collar crime
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committed by law enforcement
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What Hamilton and others frame as softness in the charging decisions
of progressive prosecutors is actually a greater awareness that people
from BIPOC communities are disproportionately given the harshest
punishments
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that extreme sentences have a limited effect
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crime or recidivism. When it comes to plea bargains that occur
in approximately 98%
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all federal criminal cases, getting “tough” almost always means
longer sentences. In Project 2025, Hamilton goes so far as to threaten
legal action against district attorneys who—in an effort to address
disparities—choose not prosecute certain crimes in their
jurisdictions.

Project 2025 is inherently antidemocratic and punitive, and it
disregards the humanity of marginalized people. As such, it calls for
the restoration and expanded use of capital punishment. Trump supports
this objective by way of an executive order
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at restoring the death penalty—largely in response to the Biden
administration’s decision to halt federal executions
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the sentences
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37 people on death row. 

Trump’s executive order on the death penalty directs the attorney
general to evaluate whether the 37 people whose sentences were
commuted “can be charged with State capital crimes.” Additionally,
it instructs the attorney general to “ensure that each state that
allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to
carry out lethal injection” and encourages state attorneys general
and district attorneys to pursue the death penalty for “all capital
crimes.”

On the campaign trail, Trump floated the possibility of expanding the
application of the death penalty for those convicted of drug and human
trafficking and for migrants who kill U.S. citizens. The latter was
included
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Trump’s executive order on the death penalty, which received little
public scrutiny. 

Repeating history

“Manifest destiny” guided the early days of the American
government. This ideology posited that Americans were destined to
extend the nation across the continent, and it was used as
justification to carry out a genocide against Native Americans. During
his inaugural speech in January, Trump invoked the phrase when
discussing his goal of “taking back” the Panama Canal. 

“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation,
one that increases our wealth … carries our flag into new and
beautiful horizons,” Trump said. “And we will pursue our manifest
destiny into the stars.”

Whether in the past or present, imperialism that is reframed in
patriotic language does not make it less brutal to those who lose
their land, liberty, and lives—or have their identities folded into
American conquest. Evolving standards of decency helped civilize
American society, and for a time, it seemed that we were making
progress toward better understanding how race, gender, and class shape
American life. But the last election tells the story of a country that
is resisting the necessary exorcism of its wrongdoing, much like
Germany after the Holocaust. In effect, evolving standards of decency
simply exposed the big lie behind our country: that we are a society
interested in liberty and justice for all. 

What is unique to the American electorate is that, headed into the
2024 election, Trump was a known quantity. There was a lot of
misinformation, and voters were probably not connecting immigration
with carceral expansion or the top-to-bottom purge of government with
anything truly nefarious, like purposefully obliterating checks and
balances. However, it is wrong to think Trump is the mastermind or
that Project 2025 is a new manifesto. Neither is true. The
acceleration of carceral imperialism is little more than a heavy swing
of the pendulum in an unfortunate cycle we have yet to break. 

Indeed, the reelection of Trump draws from a tired period of history,
repackaged under a red hat and sold as rabid patriotism for the
ignorant. Project 2025 copies from a propaganda technique coined by
Adolf Hilter in his political manifesto “Mein Kampf,” which
states, “The great masses of the people … will more easily fall
victim to a big lie than to a small one.”

It would be fitting to include a trite point here about how those who
fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But it seems we
are proving the point just fine.

_Lyle C. May is an Ohio University alum, member of the Alpha Sigma
Lambda Honor Society, an incarcerated journalist, and author of the
books Witness: An Insider's Narrative of the Carceral State (Haymarket
Books, 2024), and The Transformative Journey of Higher Education in
Prison: A Class of One (Routledge Academic Press, 2024)._

_When Prism was established in 2019, it was because we knew that the
status quo media landscape wasn’t reflecting enough of the
truth—and it wasn’t bringing us closer to our vision of collective
liberation and justice. We saw a different path forward, one that we
could forge by disrupting and dismantling toxic narratives, uncovering
the hard truths of injustice alongside the people experiencing the
acute impacts of injustice, and providing a platform for people of
color to tell their own stories, and those of their communities._

* Project 2025
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* carceral state
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* imperialism
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