Project 2025’s Human Cost

There’s a point where “policy disagreement” stops being an honest description of what’s going on. When a government is building mass-detention infrastructure, tearing protections out of the law, and describing whole groups as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood” of the nation, you’re in something else entirely.

In the U.S. in 2025, that “something else” is taking shape around three pillars.

A Christian-nationalist policy blueprint (Project 2025) that explicitly targets LGBTQ people, migrants, and anyone outside the straight, cis, Christian nuclear family.

A record-breaking mass-detention and deportation machine aimed at immigrants but built in ways that could be turned inward.

A wave of dehumanizing rhetoric that recycles language used in the past to justify atrocities.

This post walks through how those pieces fit together, what warning signs experts look for, and what that actually means for people living inside the crosshairs—especially queer people and migrants.

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The playbook: dehumanize, then detain

Authoritarian and theocratic projects rarely start with camps; they start with stories. Trump has described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” “infestations,” and “animals,” language political historians have linked to Nazi metaphors that framed minorities as vermin and disease.

He has also labeled domestic opponents “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” a phrase historians note Hitler and Mussolini used to prepare the ground for violence. Research on political psychology shows that when leaders describe people as animals, pests, or disease, public support for harsh, even deadly policies rises.

That rhetoric is not a side show; it is the narrative fuel that makes people accept things they would once have called unthinkable.

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Project 2025: making some lives expendable by law

Project 2025 is a detailed plan, written by a coalition of Christian-nationalist think tanks, to remake the federal government around a specific social order: straight, cis, married, Christian families at the center, everyone else pushed out.

For LGBTQ people in particular, the proposed changes read like a blueprint for legal erasure and slow death.

Erase LGBTQ protections from federal law. The plan calls for removing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from nondiscrimination rules, grant conditions, and agency regulations so discrimination becomes legally invisible again.

End gender-affirming care and criminalize support for queer youth. It urges bans on gender-affirming care and penalties for adults, including teachers and librarians, who support LGBTQ youth.

Redefine family and block queer parenting. The plan privileges different-sex married couples in policy, protects agencies that refuse to place children with LGBTQ parents, and tightens access to adoption and assisted reproduction.

Dismantle DEI and equity efforts. It targets diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal agencies and higher education that counter bias against LGBTQ people, women, and racial minorities.

Doctors, legal advocates, and researchers warn that these moves mean worse health outcomes, more violence, and shorter life expectancy for queer and trans people, especially those already marginalized. The point is not merely to disagree with queer existence; it is to structure law and policy so that queer people have less care, less safety, less income, and fewer legitimate ways to form families.

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Executive orders: turning the blueprint into machinery

Since January 2025, the administration has been translating parts of this blueprint into executive orders. Civil-rights and LGBTQ legal groups document that key orders do the following.

Require federal IDs—including passports and visas—to reflect “sex at conception,” blocking trans and some intersex people from accurate documents and outing them at every checkpoint.

Push the Bureau of Prisons and DHS to house trans women in men’s facilities and withdraw medically necessary care, despite known risks of assault and suicide.

Direct agencies to define sex strictly as male/female at birth in policy, encouraging discrimination framed as “freedom to enforce” the new definition.

Legal trackers show dozens of anti-LGBTQ orders and guidance documents now moving through agencies, all pushing toward the same end: strip protections, encourage discrimination, and make daily life more dangerous for queer people.

For LGBTQ immigrants, the stakes are even higher. Immigration advocates warn that new orders on detention, asylum, and birthright citizenship will cost lives by trapping people in countries where they face violence and exposing them to abuse in U.S. detention.

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The detention state: labs for cruelty and a platform for escalation

At the same time, the U.S. is rapidly scaling up a mass-detention machine for migrants that hits multiple early warning signs researchers watch for.

Data projects and advocacy groups report that immigration detention has surged to record levels, with more than 68,000 people held on a given day in late 2025—the highest number ever recorded. Congress has approved long-term funding locking in billions per year for detention expansion and operations, an unprecedented investment in mass detention capacity.

New policies expand mandatory detention, limit bond, and put millions at risk of quasi-indefinite detention, according to detention-watch organizations. Arrests at courthouses and aggressive enforcement practices mean that simply showing up to defend your rights can become a trap.

Conditions inside these facilities are documented as violent and degrading, especially for queer and trans people. Reports describe trans and nonbinary people facing discrimination, solitary confinement, denial of care, and sexual violence. Orders that push trans women into men’s units, despite clear evidence of abuse and trauma, turn detention centers into laboratories of cruelty.

Right now, the official category is immigration status. But the combination of record detention capacity, looser due-process protections, and a propaganda machine that collapses “illegal immigrants,” “radical left,” “groomers,” and “vermin” into one contaminated enemy creates a framework that could be extended to other groups without inventing new tools.

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From discrimination to detention: which warning signs are already lit

Genocide and atrocity-prevention groups talk about stages: classification, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, and beyond. If you map the U.S. in 2025 against those models, several mid-stage warning lights are already on.

Dehumanizing rhetoric from the top. “Poisoning the blood,” “infestation,” “vermin” – these are historically loaded metaphors that have preceded persecution elsewhere.

Legal discrimination and rollback. Executive orders and draft plans explicitly move to strip LGBTQ protections, dismantle DEI, and redefine sex and family to exclude queer people.

Mass detention infrastructure. Record numbers in ICE custody, long-term funding for expansion, and policies edging toward quasi-indefinite detention for broad categories of people.

Erosion of due process. Arrests at courthouses and mandatory detention regimes that turn mere presence into a jailable offense.

Target “mission creep” in rhetoric. Public messaging that blends migrants, leftists, “groomers,” “gender ideology,” and “globalists” into a single enemy that must be rooted out.

What is not openly happening right now is a declared system of camps for queer or political dissidents as such. The line between here and there is not automatic—but it is thinner once a society has accepted the idea that some groups are verminous threats and that mass indefinite detention is normal.

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What this means if you’re in the crosshairs

For people who are LGBTQ, migrants, people of color, or politically outspoken—especially those at more than one of those intersections—this isn’t abstract.

If the current trajectory continues, you are looking at fewer rights on paper, more danger in practice, and a country that openly runs camps, even if they are not yet labeled for you by name. Protections vanish from the books; “religious freedom” exceptions make discrimination lawful again. Health care, housing, and employment get more precarious, while encounters with police, border agents, or prison systems become more likely and more dangerous.

The endgame doesn’t have to look like 1940s Europe to be deadly. A system that predictably shortens certain people’s lives—by denying care, exposing them to violence, and keeping them in constant fear—is already a death-dealing system, even if it never says that out loud.

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Why it matters to name this now

Naming this honestly is not about doom; it’s about clarity. Once you recognize that you’re not just dealing with “culture war drama,” but with a coordinated effort to reorder law, culture, and state power around a narrow, hierarchical vision of who counts as fully human, you can respond at the right scale.

That response is already underway—from litigation against new executive orders, to mutual-aid networks for queer and migrant communities, to local and state-level sanctuary policies. None of that guarantees victory. It does mean the script is not finished.

History is clear on at least one point: ignoring the warning signs because they feel “too extreme” to be real has never once kept them from coming true.

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