Tucked into the immigration priorities of the Heritage Foundation’s radical Project 2025 plan is a provision that, despite its two-sentence brevity, would have devastating consequences by allowing Stephen Miller’s red state deportation army to invade the most personal and sacred of spaces to carry out mass family separation. Under Project 2025, “all ICE memoranda identifying ‘sensitive zones’ where ICE personnel are prohibited from operating should be rescinded,” the plan states.
In other words, locations that ICE has previously classified as mostly off-limits to immigration enforcement except in extreme circumstances – namely schools, hospitals, and houses of worship – will now be vulnerable to deportation raids by armed federal agents.
Just picture the potential inhumanity. In schools, young children become startled and some weep after an imposing uniformed figure enters their classroom in search of their friend or teacher’s aid. In a nearby church, immigrant worshippers are greeting each other following services with no idea that a team of armed agents is waiting just outside the exit. Perhaps one congregant, a grandmother with U.S. citizen children and grandchildren, missed church that day due to an illness. An agent goes to the hospital in search of her room.
This is not hyperbolic speculation. Remember that throughout the Trump administration, unshackled federal immigration agents intentionally tiptoed around the edges of the sensitive zones policy, including detaining a group of unhoused immigrant men who were leaving a church hypothermia shelter just weeks after Trump took office in January 2017.
“On Feb. 8, a group of six men left the hypothermia shelter at Rising Hope Mission Church at about 6:45 a.m., according to local news station WRC, and were surrounded by ICE agents immediately after crossing the street,” Vice reported at the time. Reverend Keary Kincannon of Rising Hope Mission Church said the agents “were clearly targeting the church because they knew that they stayed here in the hypothermia shelter. So they were waiting for them to cross the street and then jump on them.”
ICE also tried to bully immigrants out of the churches where they’d taken sanctuary by using little-used law to try to impose hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines on the parents. “One of the affected immigrants, Edith Espinal Moreno, had been living in an Ohio church for two years before she received a letter from ICE last week saying that the agency had rescinded her $497,000 fine,” Vox reported in 2019. The agency would eventually back down from the effort.
ICE agents also tried to skirt the rule barring school arrests by targeting dads after they’d dropped their kids off. In New Jersey, “Roby Sanger of Metuchen was detained after he brought his daughters to school,” PIX11 reported in January 2018. Another dad, Harry Pangemanan, spotted agents just as he was to step outside his house to drop his daughter off at school. “He ran inside the house and refused to open the door. His pastor came and recorded on camera the agents knocking on the door.” A third father, Gunawan Liem, was detained “after he dropped his daughter off at the bus stop.”
“We had one night when 35 dads were taken in one night from Avenel, New Jersey, from the same apartment complex,” Reverend Seth Kaper-Dale told PIX11. “I had 60 kids become orphans that night or become fatherless.”
Some of the most inhumane acts that preview Project 2025’s ghastly vision for America was the targeting and detention of immigrants who were taking loved ones to a hospital or were themselves in the process of receiving urgent medical care. In Texas in September 2017, Border Patrol agents arrested two undocumented parents at a hospital they had traveled to for their newborn child’s critical condition. “Oscar and Irma Sanchez had been told they’d need to go to a different hospital a few hours away that could better help their child, but for them it was a world away,” NPR reported at the time. “The Sanchezes, who are undocumented, would need to pass a Border Patrol checkpoint.” But then an agent showed up to the hospital waiting room. “Oscar Sanchez suspects a nurse turned them in,” the report said.
The following year, Border Patrol agents detained a ten-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who had been rushed to the emergency room by her family in October 2018, again in Texas. The New York Times was among top outlets to report on immigration officials’ shocking actions:
The girl, Rosamaria Hernandez, who was brought over the border illegally to live in Laredo, Tex., when she was three months old, was being transferred from a medical center in Laredo to a hospital in Corpus Christi around 2 a.m. on Tuesday when Border Patrol agents stopped the ambulance she was riding in, her family said. The agents allowed her to continue to Driscoll Children’s Hospital, the family said, but followed the ambulance the rest of the way there, then waited outside her room until she was released from the hospital.
By Wednesday evening, according to family members and advocates involved in her case, immigration agents had taken her to a facility in San Antonio where migrant children who arrive alone in the United States from Central America are usually held, even though her parents, who both lack legal status, live 150 miles away in Laredo.
Rosamaria was released after nearly two weeks in custody, following national blowback that featured outcry from “members of Congress and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the musical ‘Hamilton,’” The New York Times reported. However, silent on Rosamaria’s detention was her senator, Ted Cruz, who along with his colleague John Cornyn, did not publicly comment on her detention. “The United States should not be a place where children seeking life-sustaining medical care are at risk of apprehension,” Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro said at the time.
“ICE doesn’t make arrests at sensitive locations like hospitals, schools, or churches except in the case of a serious public safety threat,” ICE claimed in a tweet the day after she was taken into custody. But exactly what kind of threat did a ten-year-old child with cerebral palsy pose?
And while courthouses do not technically fall under this policy, the Biden administration in 2021 issued guidance that “essentially extends ICE’s existing ‘sensitive locations’ policy to courthouses, effectively overruling a Trump-era ICE directive issued in 2018 that permitted such enforcement activities,” the National Immigration Forum said. The guidance came after courthouse arrests skyrocketed under the Trump administration, which ignored pleas from advocates and top judicial voices, including then-California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Gorre Cantil-Sakauye, who warned that courthouse arrests “have a profound effect on access to justice in our state.”
Now picture these sorts of incidents exploding a second Trump administration where guardrails have been eviscerated and civil servants deemed disloyal to MAGA have been purged from the government and replaced with “yes men” who go as far as they can because they know there’ll be no internal accountability. We do know that Thomas Homan, a key Project 2025 author and former Trump official who oversaw many of these actions as acting ICE director, has been confirmed by Trump to be returning for a potential second Trump term.
During his time in the Trump administration, Homan openly took pleasure in terrorizing families. “I’m enjoying it,” he said about his job in 2018. The previous year, Homan had warned immigrant families that they “should be uncomfortable, you should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.”
Homan also joined in on Trump’s attacks on so-called sanctuary cities, defending attempts to defund localities that have implemented these sorts of policies and urging the prosecution of local officials. “We gotta take [sanctuary cities] to court, and we gotta start charging some of these politicians with crimes,” Homan said. He has since made clear that the mass roundups and deportations envisioned by Trump would include U.S. citizens, saying during a recent interview with 60 Minutes that “families can be deported together” and that the Trump administration’s cruel and traumatic family separation policy at the southern border “needs to be considered, absolutely.” During a July gathering of paleoconservatives explicitly embracing nationalism, Homan promised to be unsparing.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” We should believe him.
