On Monday, sixteen states, led by Texas and Idaho, blocked the Biden administration’s new immigration program helping keep American families together. While the lawsuit was entirely expected – anti-immigrant officials and activists have repeatedly used the federal judiciary to shut down lawful policies helping keep families together – its implications are no less cruel, coming as the very first applications to be a part of Keeping Families Together have just been approved. While families can continue submitting their applications, no new beneficiaries may enroll while the lawsuit continues.
Unsurprisingly, some of the most toxic and weird figures of the anti-immigrant movement are behind this despicable effort seeking to separate American families.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton leads the helm on the state’s side as the foremost purveyor of the notorious anti-immigrant judicial pipeline when he hasn’t been busy defending himself in criminal court. Per the court docket, Paxton and 15 states are being represented by America First Legal, an extremist and xenophobic group led by former Trump administration officials Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton. Both men were architects of that administration’s most cruel and xenophobic policies.
Miller, now President of America First Legal, was responsible for the attempt to end the popular and successful DACA program as well as the early implementation of the traumatic “zero tolerance” policy, which ultimately resulted in the state-sanctioned kidnapping of 5,500 children from their parents at the southern border. Behind the scenes, Miller reportedly pushed for the separation of as many as 25,000 kids. Hamilton, AFL Executive Director, was Miller’s partner in his cruel endeavors, authoring key memos, including on family separation, as a top aide to then-Trump Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
Both Miller and Hamilton have gotten a lot of attention lately, not just for their efforts to use the courts to separate American families but also for being key figures behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for mass family separation from coast to coast. They actually made no secret of their participation in the dark and dystopic agenda, with Miller appearing in a recruitment video and Hamilton authoring its chapter on the Justice Department. America First Legal was on the plan’s advisory board, and during a Congressional hearing in May, Hamilton boasted that he and his colleagues “are proud contributors to Project 2025.”
Oh, they were proud of it, until more and more Americans began to find out the details about Project 2025 (thank you, Taraji P. Henson.) What followed was a failed PR strategy that sought to create public distance between Miller’s group and Project 2025, including a public denial from Miller. In further proof of the toxic unpopularity of this agenda, Miller also asked to be removed from Project 2025’s advisory board – after two years of membership. We think that cat was already out of the bag, fellas.
Other key advisors behind Project 2025 are also committed to a mass family separation agenda. Still, they are purposefully keeping the sinister details of their plans under wraps from the American public, which by a wide margin favors a balanced immigration approach that combines border management and a pathway to citizenship. As recently detailed by America’s Voice Senior Research Director Zachary Mueller, Russ Vought, another former Trump official and a key author of Project 2025, was caught confessing on secret videos to drafting the necessary regulations and orders that would be necessary for a GOP administration to carry out mass deportation. “Those plans will not be made public, Vought said, but instead will be ‘very, very close hold,’” CNN reported:
A Centre for Climate Reporting journalist, under the guise of the fake donor’s relative, also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides, who went into more detail about the process. Micah Meadowcroft, the research director for CRA, said the drafts the group was preparing would be provided to an incoming Trump administration in a way that would protect them from ever being publicly disclosed.
“It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video – while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
He described Vought’s work preparing executive orders and policy playbooks as “the second phase” of Project 2025.
Indicative of their strategy to undercut common sense, one of the long-settled folks that these anti-immigrant weirdos seek to deport is Celicia (she asked ABC to withhold her last name for safety reasons), who was among the first applicants to be approved for the Keeping Families Together program. She has lived in the U.S. since she was four and is now raising an American child with her U.S. citizen spouse. She said that her husband couldn’t believe his ears when she got the news she had been approved. “They went to celebrate as soon as he got home,” ABC News reported. Other excited prospective applicants have included DACA recipient Brenda Valle. “It’s something that we’ve been waiting for many, many years,” she told ABC 7 News.
“We always try to celebrate little moments in our lives, even if they’re small, because we never know when one us might not be there and we try to be united as a family,” Cecilia continued to ABC News. Right now, the litigants behind this lawsuit are trying to ensure their fears of separation do become a reality. Other mass deportation proponents, like Vought, are being much more secretive about their plans – and that’s a huge tell. The plans are ugly, destructive, will hurt working families all across the US — and they’re doing everything they can to avoid discussing it.
Biden immigration order is a light at the end of a long tunnel of hope
