Donald Trump is hoping to expand his “America First” agenda as he makes his third run for president, this time against Democratic rival Kamala Harris.
When he was defeated in the 2020 presidential election, the US was in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and he left the White House on the heels of a violent attack on the Capitol fueled by a false narrative of his loss.
Trump has campaigned on a theme of “retribution” to return to an office he wrongly believes was “stolen” from him, and he has broadly embraced reshaping or eliminating federal regulations and agencies while opening the door to staffing the government with a politized federal workforce to do what he could not in his first administration.
The former president has distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the next Republican administration, though the policies he has publicly supported largely mirror the expansive document.
Here are some of those proposals, based on his public statements and limited policy documents.
The first two points on Trump’s 2024 agenda, which consists of 20 all-caps single sentences and phrases, are “SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION” and “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”
Trump has repeatedly promised the “largest deportation operation in American history,” which would rely on a defunct, centuries-old and likely unconstitutional law infamously used to detain Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
His invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 would target foreigners for removal, without a hearing or due process, based solely on their place of birth or citizenship.
Trump would direct his administration to deploy federal resources to use local law enforcement to arrest, jail and deport people living in the country without legal permission — a plan that would be swiftly met with legal challenges. The operation would also require the construction of “vast holding facilities” — detention camps — to hold people marked for removal.
People who have been removed from the country under that plan would face an “automatic 10-year sentence in jail with no possibility of parole” if they return, according to Trump.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has also said the administration would end programs that grant tens of thousands of immigrants legal permission to live and work in the US, which he has derided as “mass parole” — suggesting that immigrants who are granted Temporary Protected Status could be required to find other legal pathways to stay in the US or face deportation.
Trump also vowed to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, after the Supreme Court blocked his first attempt in 2020.
Trump has celebrated the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which was made possible by his appointment of three justices during his time in office. At the end of his presidency, Trump had appointed 28 percent of all active federal judges, which radically reshaped the judiciary with ideologically like-minded jurists who now wield significant influence over abortion laws that have been taken to court.
He now says that he does not endorse a national “ban” on abortion care, and he denies that he would sign legislation from Congress that would enact such a ban. But Trump opposes abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy, and he does not support Florida’s constitutional amendment that would enshrine a right to abortion care in the state, effectively voiding the state’s six-week ban.
