Project 2025's DHS Dismantlement Plan: Centralizing Enforcement, Gutting Asylum, and Abandoning Due Process

Project 2025's centerpiece DHS proposal is the merger of every immigration-related agency — including the immigration courts (EOIR) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement — into a single enforcement cabinet department. This is not administrative streamlining; it is the institutional elimination of the firewall between enforcement and adjudication. The Refugee Act of 1980 codifies asylum as an affirmative statutory right, and its implementation depends on neutral adjudicators insulated from enforcement pressure. Placing EOIR inside an agency whose explicit mission priority is 'detention and deportation' creates an irreconcilable structural conflict of interest that courts — including the Supreme Court in immigration due process jurisprudence — have consistently treated as a constitutional concern. Advocates and oversight bodies have documented a consistent pattern in which ICE and CBP expand their operational powers at the margins of legal authority even under the current separated structure; consolidation would accelerate that dynamic with no institutional check.

The document frames 'detention and deportation' as the primary metric of a 'successful DHS,' while simultaneously proposing to absorb the Office of Refugee Resettlement — the agency responsible for the welfare of unaccompanied migrant children under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. The Flores Settlement Agreement requires that children be held in the least restrictive setting and released promptly to sponsors; subordinating ORR to an enforcement-dominant agency structurally pressures case managers to treat children as enforcement assets rather than protected minors. Pediatric and developmental psychology research has documented measurable and lasting harm from detention and family separation — harm that is a policy choice, not a legal necessity, as the Flores framework itself demonstrates.

The Migration Policy Institute has documented that the Trump administration has simultaneously shut down legal immigration pathways while pursuing mass deportation agreements with 27 countries — yet those third-country arrangements 'account for a fraction of overall deportations,' suggesting the agenda is, in MPI's words, 'more about creating a climate of fear than facilitating large numbers of removals.' Project 2025's restructuring would institutionalize that climate by giving a single enforcement-oriented secretary control over who gets to claim asylum, how long they wait in detention, whether their children are held or released, and whether their removal order is reviewed by a functionally independent tribunal. That concentration of power over life-altering decisions in a single chain of command without structural independence is constitutionally suspect under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and the suspension clause protections for habeas review.

The rule-of-law alternative is not the status quo either — the immigration system is genuinely dysfunctional — but the functional reforms are the opposite of what Project 2025 proposes. TRAC Immigration data consistently shows that the primary driver of backlogs is a shortage of immigration judges, not a surfeit of asylum claims. The Migration Policy Institute and Doris Meissner's work at MPI have repeatedly identified expanded legal pathways, robust consular processing, and an independent immigration court system as the structural solutions. Moving EOIR out of DOJ and into a fully independent Article I immigration court — rather than subordinating it to an enforcement agency — would provide the neutral adjudication the Refugee Act requires. Expanding USCIS capacity, funding ORR adequately as a child-welfare agency, and creating orderly processing at ports of entry rather than metering and expulsion would reduce the chaotic pressure at the border that enforcement-only proposals consistently fail to resolve.