The Devastating Effect of Project 2025 on Hispanics in the United States

Maribel Hastings

Posted Sept. 5, 2024

If you think that Project 2025 — the nearly 1,000-page manual from the Heritage Foundation, full of extreme proposals that Donald Trump wants to implement if he is elected president for a second term — only affects undocumented people, with its plan for mass deportations, know that no one — including U.S. citizens and authorized residents — is safe from its severe initiatives on various fronts.

The Latino community in the United States would be one of the most impacted. There are cuts to Medicaid and increases in the price of prescription drugs. It seeks to abolish the Department of Education and preschool programs like Head Start. It affects civil rights and worker rights, eliminates protections against discrimination, makes access to abortion and reproductive health care more difficult, and halts initiatives to combat climate change and protect the environment, among other things.

The “cherry on top” is the plan for the largest mass deportations in the history of the United States, which will affect not only undocumented people but also their relatives who are citizens and legal residents, on top of being a humanitarian, legal, and economic nightmare.

A broad coalition of labor, civil rights, immigration, and civic engagement groups announced last Tuesday a bilingual campaign called “Defendiendo Nuestro Futuro: Latinos Against Project 2025,” which seeks to inform the Hispanic and Latino community about the danger that Project 2025 represents, and mobilize them in the runup to the November 5th general election.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), America’s Voice, Latino Victory Project, and Poder Latinx, among others, are sounding the alarm about the catastrophic effect of Project 2025.

Project 2025 threatens Medicaid coverage for Latinos by establishing temporary or lifetime caps on the so-called “poor people’s health insurance.

Yadira Sánchez, Executive Director of Poder Latinx, said, for example, that they are expanding their canvassing efforts to register and mobilize voters so that they can explain what Project 2025 is, and how it will negatively impact the most vulnerable.

The Latino community in the United States is bombarded with constant disinformation on social platforms, participants said, and that is why Latino voters must understand the real danger that this extremist blueprint represents.

Project 2025 was designed and written by former officials and allies of the former Trump Administration to alter the democratic structure of our government, extending enormous power to the president — in this case, Trump, if he wins. The idea is to surround him with officials who are loyal to him. The plan is to fire more than 50,000 federal employees and replace them with employees loyal to Trump in order to eliminate obstacles to implementing these extreme public policies.

The negative coverage surrounding Project 2025 led Trump to try to distance himself from it, but the former president defends the same ideas in his rallies.

Project 2025 threatens Medicaid coverage for Latinos by establishing temporary or lifetime caps on the so-called “poor people’s health insurance.” It also increases the cost of medications used by older Hispanic people, who currently cannot even afford them, leading them to not take medicines or to reduce their doses, severely impacting their health. Thirty percent of Medicaid beneficiaries are Hispanic.

Moreover, it impedes Hispanic women’s access to reproductive healthcare. Latinas, the coalition says, are the largest group of women of color affected by state restrictions on abortion.

The plan also cuts Latinos’ overtime pay, threatening their families’ food security.

It eliminates environmental protections and reverses actions to confront climate change by dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And it’s not only about climate change. Low-income Hispanics and other groups tend to live in areas with high environmental contamination, which impacts their health.

It proposes eliminating the Department of Education, reducing school funding, and eliminating preschool programs like Head Start and those that pay back student debt.

On immigration, apart from the raids, detentions, and mass deportations, it proposes extreme measures that will affect citizens. For example, it blocks federal financial help for U.S. university students if their states allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. And prohibits U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing subsidies if they live in families with mixed immigration status with a relative who is undocumented.

With less than 70 days to the election, one has to stay vigilant. Whether it’s called Project 2025 or Agenda 47 — Trump’s platform — these measures could destabilize entire communities and, in the process, the nation.

Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.