Across immigration, voting, and LGBTQ+ rights, overlapping systems are quietly redefining identity, access, and belonging in America, writes Joshua Ackley.
Project 2025 is not a future scenario. It is already unfolding, visible in the quiet failures and the louder substitutions that are beginning to define daily life.
What we are watching is not the collapse of government, but its reconfiguration, as the systems meant to serve people weaken while the systems built to monitor, track, and control them become more visible, more coordinated, and more difficult to question.
That shift has moved into airports, one of the most routine and widely shared spaces in American life. A recent case at San Francisco International Airport made that visible in a way that is difficult to dismiss. A woman and her nine-year-old daughter were identified before they ever reached their gate, flagged through passenger data, and located by federal agents inside the terminal. She was detained in public, in front of her child, and deported within days.
You can’t get people to coordinate on voting because voting, with few exceptions, doesn’t do shit. There are things that do shit (mutual aid, ICE watch, labor action, etc) that it’d be more realistic to build a national movement towards. Also it’s possible to shoot ICE agents with only a local movement; it’d just be an insurrection and treated as such.