Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is planning to pursue a series of legal challenges if President-elect Donald Trump tries to implement Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda championed by Trump’s allies.
“We have been analyzing Project 2025 for months now,” Mayes told reporters. “I am reorganizing some things inside this office to be ready for this, including and especially my solicitor general's office, and so we're taking it very, very seriously.”
The 900-page plan was crafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and lays out a roadmap for reshaping the federal government.
As controversial portions of Project 2025 received attention during the course of the campaign, Trump claimed he had no knowledge of the plan or those that created it. However, Trump has ties to Heritage Foundation leadership, and over a dozen members of his previous administration contributed to the document, according to the New York Times.
Mayes said she and other Democratic state attorneys general from around the country are crafting plans to push back against parts of Project 2025 that they believe violate the law and constitution.
“I'm not the only AG that was assessing, analyzing and getting ready for the parade of horribles that are in Project 2025,” Mayes said.
Mayes said that includes the plan’s call to restrict access to abortion nationwide. According to the document itself, Project 2025 calls on the federal government to end the use of public monies to pay for abortion care and to restrict access to mifepristone, a drug used for medication abortions, using the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that bans mailing any item used for an abortion.
Mayes said she would challenge the next Trump administration if it tries to “reinstate” the Comstock Act. It is unclear what power her office would have to fight enforcement of a federal law that remains on the books, though Mayes argues it would violate state constitutional protections, including the right to privacy and the right abortion approved by voters this November..
“We're going to make arguments that it does [supersede federal law],” Mayes said. That, you know, our citizens have constitutional rights that would be abridged by a law that was passed in … 1871.”
Mayes also said she drew other “lines in the sand,” including putting “migrant kids in cages.”
“I became a Democrat because the Trump administration started putting migrant kids in cages,” Mayes, a former Republican, said.
Project 2025 calls for the expansion of detention centers for migrants, using military resources at the border and the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants.
Though Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, he campaigned heavily on the promise that his administration would carry out a record number of deportations of those in the country without legal status.
"Trump comes back in January," Tom Homan, who Trump tapped as his next “border czar,” said earlier this year. "I'll be on his heels coming back. And I will run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen."
Mayes said she could use the legal authority of her office to fight the Trump administration’s deportation effort if it becomes too broad and violates the law by, for instance, attempting to remove legal residents.
“And I think that's likely to happen in a situation in which they're trying to deport 15 million people,” Mayes said. “I mean, American citizens are going to get caught up in that dragnet, and that's not acceptable.”
Mayes said she would also fight efforts to end DACA, a program that provides temporary protection from deportation and work permits to some undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
Again, it is unclear what Mayes could do to stop Trump if he decides to rescind DACA, which was established via executive order by former President Barack Obama.
Mayes said she believed there were “constitutional underpinnings” to support DACA and that the program is broadly popular with Americans, but she did not specific legal theory she would use to defend the program.
Still, Mayes acknowledged that Trump’s election sent a signal about what is important to most voters.
“I think what happened this month was that Americans expressed their frustration over a broken border and over inflation,” she said, arguing the Trump Administration should target “drug traffickers” for deportation.
“But that is not 15 million people,” she said.
Still, Mayes said she hopes there is still room for cooperation with the incoming Trump Administration — though, even that sentiment was tinged with criticism of the former president.
Specifically, she said she hopes Trump will send more Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Arizona and now support the bipartisan border legislation he helped kill earlier this year that would have sent more resources to the border.
“If that bill had been passed, we wouldn't have had fentanyl scanners sitting scandalously in a warehouse on the border,” Mayes said. “If that bill had been passed, when it should have been passed, then we would have had more boots on the ground.”
