A Homecoming for God, A Goodbye to the Republic
The Operational Blueprint Behind Trump’s Proclamation and What Comes Next
A Homecoming for God, A Goodbye to the Republic: The Operational Blueprint Behind Trump’s Proclamation and What Comes Next
By Robert J. Rei, May 10, 2025
The proclamation came quietly—just another item in the stream of announcements, press events, and political noise. But beneath its ceremonial title, “Project Homecoming,” and its language of dignity and return, something far more ominous had been set in motion. What was framed as a voluntary deportation program is in fact a signal flare: the first public articulation of a control apparatus years in the making.
Issued as a Presidential Proclamation on Friday May 9, 2025, not as an Executive Order, Project Homecoming avoids the legal scrutiny, judicial challenge, and procedural friction that typically accompany enforceable federal action. Its form alone reveals its function: to simulate the shape of law without exposing its interior to resistance. It is not a directive; it is a lure.
According to its terms, undocumented immigrants are given sixty days to leave the country “voluntarily.” The government offers free, taxpayer-funded flights and a $1,000 “exit bonus” to those who comply. The CBP Home app, newly launched, allows users to schedule their departure and access “concierge assistance” at participating airports—even if they lack proper documentation. At first glance, the tone is almost civil. Humane, even.
But this is the false flag. There is no intention to honor the offer. The “concierge assistance” is not humanitarian—it is most likely an ICE capture mechanism disguised as transportation help. The app itself is not about aid—it is a precision tracking system that allows DHS to identify, locate, and intercept individuals who make the mistake of trusting it. Project Homecoming’s opening gesture is not a choice. It is a lure designed to feed the enforcement machine.
Meanwhile buried in the same breath is the true mechanism: a trigger date, set just after the Fourth of July, when the offers expire and the enforcement phase begins.
After sixty days, the Proclamation declares, those who remain will face asset seizure, wage garnishment, and criminal prosecution. And the Department of Homeland Security will deploy 20,000 additional agents to carry out arrests and removals. The gentle invitation thus becomes a threat—and that threat is far from rhetorical.
Yet this escalation is not simply about punishment. It is, more subtly, a recruitment signal—aimed at those within the regime’s ideological base who are eager to become part of its enforcement arm. The proclamation functions as a call to arms for those aligned with the regime’s racial and religious worldview. It promises opportunity:
Federal employment in the new security state.
The chance to profit from civil asset forfeiture, often executed without conviction under long-standing but deeply controversial DOJ memos.
And perhaps most disturbingly, the implicit sanction to settle personal vendettas under the umbrella of federal power.
The state offers you not only authority, but a target.
This is not a proclamation of policy. It is the activation code for a vast operational structure—pre-existing, ideologically saturated, and ready to move.
And yet even this is not the whole story.
The sixty-day window is not random. It ends in early July for a reason—and that reason reveals the full breadth of what Project Homecoming is meant to inaugurate.
II. The System Behind the Signal
What the Proclamation signals, the state’s machinery is already prepared to enact. Beneath the visible offer-and-threat structure of Project Homecoming lays a complex architecture of enforcement—woven through immigration law, deputized local police networks, surveillance systems, and restructured intelligence bodies. This is not new terrain. It is long-set ground, now reactivated.
One of the most revealing examples can be found in Massachusetts, where a 287(g) agreement—initially signed in earlier years—remains quietly in force. Under this federal-local partnership model, state and municipal police are authorized to act as immigration agents. In a state often assumed to be a liberal stronghold, local officers are already embedded within DHS operations. This program, never revoked, becomes newly relevant under the terms of Project Homecoming: it provides a ready-made force for internal roundups. Publicly progressive cities may now serve as testing grounds for federal enforcement—without public knowledge or resistance.
But the real depth of coordination lies not in police partnerships, but in intelligence infrastructure.
In late 2023, the Department of Homeland Security convened the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group, composed of former senior intelligence officials tasked with advising on domestic extremism and emerging threats. It was quickly attacked by America First Legal Foundation (AFL), the legal weapon of Stephen Miller’s network, and a key arm of Project 2025. The lawsuit alleged the group lacked political balance and violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). It was joined by Richard Grenell, the former acting Director of National Intelligence—who, despite no longer holding office, appeared as co-plaintiff.
The result? DHS disbanded the group in early 2024, capitulating to the pressure. But rather than abandon its function, the department quietly reconstituted it.
On May 17, 2024, while still under the Biden administration, DHS unveiled the Homeland Intelligence Advisory Board (HIAB). Its purpose was nearly identical—but this time, it was exempted from FACA requirements, meaning it could operate in complete secrecy. Membership lists, meeting records, and internal recommendations would no longer be subject to public scrutiny or legal challenge.
This was either a bureaucratic error born of institutional fatigue, or something more revealing: a misplaced confidence that Trump’s return was unlikely. By attempting to preserve capacity while dodging lawsuits, DHS inadvertently built a perfect black box—a tool now fully available to a regime that intends to use it for domestic preemption.
The story of the HIAB is not an isolated case. It is a parable. This is how a state’s internal immune system is turned against itself: laws are weaponized, advisory structures hollowed, and oversight evaded. What remains is the scaffolding of centralized intelligence, detached from visibility, and ready to serve.
What began as a proclamation is now revealed to be only the voice of a much deeper systemic body—already breathing, already prepared.
III. Two Mirrors: The Choreography of Asymmetry
To understand Project Homecoming only as a policy on paper is to miss the choreography unfolding across the map. While its language and threats appear national, the spatial distribution of enforcement reveals something more intricate: a theater of asymmetry. One coast is made to burn bright in controversy. The other is left quiet—unseen, but deeply in motion.
Nowhere is this asymmetry more visible than in the contrast between New England and the American northwest. In Massachusetts and the broader northeast corridor, enforcement is public and provocative: ICE operations in dense urban centers, local police enforcing federal detainer requests, immigrant families arrested in broad daylight. This activity draws legal challenges, media attention, and public protest—all of which serve the regime’s dual purpose: to stoke fear among immigrant communities, and to redirect national attention to a terrain of conflict that feels ideologically charged but geographically limited.
But the real movement—the one few are watching—is taking place elsewhere.
In the upper northwest quadrant, especially along the historical corridor leading to the Alaska Highway, enforcement is far quieter. There are no headlines, few protests, no mass raids. Instead, there is positioning: infrastructure upgrades, unexplained CBP activity, and the quiet reallocation of federal and state resources along routes that lead not to population centers—but to territorial corridors.
The geographic isolation of Alaska, severed from the contiguous United States, has long posed a strategic inconvenience. A northern land bridge—extending through Canadian territory—would solve this. And the rhetorical breadcrumbs have already been dropped: Trump’s talk of acquiring Greenland, of pressuring Canada, of expanding northward. They were not jokes. They were acclimatization tests—narrative primers for a move that, if executed swiftly and under cover of national emergency, could be framed not as invasion but as restoration.
At the same time, New England’s symbolic targeting is no accident. It is the cradle of American revolution, the site of philosophical and civic origin. Its proximity to Canada, cultural liberalism, and historic resistance to federal overreach make it the perfect foil—a region to be demonized, destabilized, and made complicit through legal instruments like 287(g) and ICE partnerships. It is not being policed. It is being ritually subdued.
This dual movement—spectacle in the east, deployment in the west—is not contradictory. It is engineered distraction, the state’s version of sleight-of-hand. While lawsuits and op-eds flare up in Boston, Spokane prepares for something else entirely.
The Republic, as we knew it, is being undone not in one place—but in two opposing mirrors, each reflecting only a partial truth. The full picture lies between them.
IV. The Infrastructure of Disappearance
Every regime built on removal must solve the problem of mass containment. You cannot deport what you cannot first detain—and you cannot detain en masse without a network of invisible logistics.
Project Homecoming, for all its theatrical language, is not merely about identifying targets. It is about controlling, housing, and processing bodies. And for that, the regime already has a system—quiet, dispersed, and fully operational.
At its core lies the federal-private detention complex, led by entities like GEO Group and CoreCivic—the two largest private prison corporations in the United States. These firms, long in contract with ICE and DHS, specialize in scalable incarceration. They offer modular expansion, minimal transparency, and a profit-driven model that aligns perfectly with the authoritarian logic of Project 2025.
But these are just the formal nodes. What gives the system its flexibility—its deniability—is the use of secondary and tertiary holding zones. During Trump’s first term, tent cities appeared in places like Tornillo, Homestead, and the outskirts of El Paso. These rapid-build mobile detention centers served dual functions: they absorbed overflow and shielded the administration from accusations of permanence. But in reality, they were structural rehearsals—proof-of-concept zones for a regime that intends to scale up fast.
Beyond ICE and emergency sites, there are the silent installations: decommissioned military bases that require only the flick of a bureaucratic switch to reactivate. Fort Sill in Oklahoma has already been floated. Concord Naval Weapons Station in California offers massive land with low civilian visibility. These are the landscapes of the next phase—detention without acknowledgment, containment without oversight.
And then come the local instruments of federal will:
County jails deputized through 287(g) agreements
National Guard units under state-level activation
Contracted security and transport firms, operating under DHS or state emergency declarations
Together, these create a geographically fragmented, legally obscured network of detention—where no single facility holds too many, no state bears full legal burden, and no reporter can capture the full scale of what has been built.
It is not one facility. It is a lattice of holding zones, woven invisibly across the nation.
And behind all of it is the same logic: break continuity, scatter visibility, fragment accountability.
This is not the infrastructure of justice. It is the supply chain of disappearance.
V. The Land Beneath the Machine
Every system of control must eventually root itself in land. Bodies require space. Camps require concealment. And industrial-scale detention demands territory unbound by civic oversight.
In the months following Trump’s return to power, the Department of the Interior—now under ideologically restructured leadership—has accelerated the de-federalization of vast swaths of protected land in the western United States. The rationale, according to official statements, is to “return control to the states,” to promote “local economic development,” and to reduce “federal overreach.” But beneath this libertarian packaging lies a different function altogether.
What is being created is a privatized geography of detention.
The sale or transfer of public land to state or private actors removes these areas from the standard regime of federal legal protections. Environmental restrictions disappear. Public access vanishes. Oversight becomes a matter of contractual discretion, not constitutional guarantee. In this new legal vacuum, such land becomes the ideal terrain for detention infrastructure:
Remote enough to avoid scrutiny
Legally ambiguous enough to deflect accountability
Financially lucrative enough to incentivize participation from contractors, corporations, and aligned state governments
In short, these lands are being prepared as logistical support zones for the regime’s next phase: mass containment, resource extraction, and wartime mobilization.
This is not speculative. History has already shown us what privatized detention looks like: from the expansion of prison labor under the Thirteenth Amendment loophole, to the migrant facilities operated with minimal regulation on contract lands.
What makes the current moment distinct is the alignment of motive and method.
The motive: a state preparing for domestic population control and external conflict.
The method: privatization, land transfer, and the hollowing of public commons.
The same land stripped from federal stewardship may soon hold detainees rounded up under Project Homecoming—migrants, dissidents, or “security risks.” But these sites will not be called prisons. They will be labeled logistics hubs, vocational training centers, or emergency response compounds—each cloaked in euphemism, each hidden in plain sight.
The land is not being sold. It is being conscripted.
VI. The Border That Moves
There was a time when “the border” was a line. It ran along the southern edge of Texas, Arizona, and California. It was visible—crossed, argued over, contested. But in the world of Project Homecoming, the border no longer marks the edge of a nation. It is a moving perimeter—elastic, unaccountable, and increasingly inside.
Building on lesser-known precedents from the prior administration, the Trump regime has begun reactivating and expanding pre-border inspection zones in several northern states—most notably Washington and Michigan. These are not situated at the border itself, but appear miles inland, intercepting outbound travelers before they ever reach Canadian checkpoints. Some of these operations materialize with little public announcement. Witnesses report surprise stops, probing questions about citizenship, and demands for identification—even for American citizens traveling domestically.
Simultaneously, a deeper incursion has begun in the American southwest. While CBP has long claimed authority to operate within a 100-mile zone from the national border, the current regime has pushed that perimeter further. New internal checkpoints have now been documented 30 to 50 miles beyond prior precedents, particularly in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. These are not symbolic placements—they are active enforcement nodes, pulling over vehicles, demanding papers, and detaining individuals under vague language tied to “homeland integrity.”
Together, these operations point toward a single reality: the creation of a floating domestic perimeter—a shifting enforcement zone in which federal authorities operate without warrants, without probable cause, and increasingly without oversight.
In the logic of Project 2025, this becomes the prototype for something far more expansive:
A nationwide corridor of movement control, where freedom of travel is no longer presumed but granted.
A chokepoint architecture, woven into roadways, airports, and train routes, where federal access merges with biometric surveillance.
A domesticated border state, in which all persons—regardless of citizenship—are subject to algorithmic suspicion and real-time enforcement.
This is not about immigration. It is about territorial control. About dissolving the concept of “interior,” and replacing it with a total perimeter—geographic, digital, and psychological.
The border has not been secured. It has been turned inward.
VII. The Long War: Territorial Annexation, Resource Camps, and the Hidden Conflict to Come
What appears as domestic enforcement is also territorial staging. What appears as asset seizure is also wartime provisioning. The structures being erected are not just for today’s detainees. They are for tomorrow’s conscripts.
The annexation of Canadian territory—especially in the Upper Northwest Corridor—has long lingered at the margins of strategic planning. The geographic discontinuity of Alaska, severed from the mainland, has been an enduring logistical irritant for military planners and energy strategists alike. The Alaska Highway, originally built in 1942 as a wartime supply route, still stands as the most direct land corridor between the contiguous U.S. and its northern outpost. A land bridge—one that cuts through British Columbia and Yukon—would solve everything.
Trump’s past talk of “buying Greenland,” of “expanding north,” or even the revival of old claims on Arctic energy reserves were never spontaneous outbursts. They were narrative softeners—early vocalizations designed to inoculate the public against future territorial assertion. He was not inventing the idea. He was testing the acoustics of consent.
The sixty-day window of Project Homecoming, expiring just after Independence Day, now looks less like a compliance grace period and more like a staging calendar. Consider the convergence:
July marks the annual peak of National Guard mobilization, as part-time units fulfill their required training weeks—placing tens of thousands of troops on active footing across the country.
Summer ground conditions in the Pacific Northwest are optimal for rapid mechanized movement. Late spring is too muddy. Fall is too unstable. July is the window.
Congressional recess begins in early August—offering a quiet period in which any escalation, territorial maneuver, or military provocation will face minimal legislative resistance.
But the regime is not only preparing for territorial expansion. It is preparing for domestic collapse—and for the strategic use of that collapse as cover.
The United States is poised to enter a summer of devastating supply shortages, far beyond anything experienced during COVID. During the pandemic, international trade remained intact. But what is coming now appears to be an intentional cessation—the deliberate choking of imports, engineered through tariff warfare and diplomatic sabotage. And there is reason to suspect that even this escalation was not solely domestic in origin.
There are credible whispers that the tariff war strategy may have been suggested directly to Trump by foreign actors—possibly Vladimir Putin, conveyed through trusted intermediaries earlier this year. If true, this would mean the regime has introduced a destabilization variable it does not fully control—and that the economic chaos to come may exceed their containment plans, sparking mass protests, insurgent uprisings, or even civil unrest that throws Project 2025 off its rails.
In the face of this chaos, the vast tracts of de-federalized land in the West begin to show their second function: not just as detention zones, but as production and conscription centers for a coming war. Project 2025 does not conceal its intent to initiate conflict with China. In such a war, the infrastructure of control becomes the infrastructure of mobilization:
Detainees become labor battalions
Detention camps become logistics depots
Select conscripts become attritional combatants in a war that cannot be won quickly
What began as an immigration initiative thus becomes a military funnel—from asset seizure, to containment, to battlefield deployment.
And while many within the regime believe they are executing a plan, they may instead be lighting a fuse they cannot extinguish. If foreign sabotage is in play—if the supply chain collapse results in unrest beyond what can be suppressed—then the chaos they conjured may consume the very architecture they built to control it.
This is not the endgame. It is the ignition sequence.
VIII. The Architects Behind the Curtain: Chaos as Cover, Design as Destiny
The proclamation was never about flights or money. The checkpoints are not about safety. The seizures are not about justice. Every piece of the system described thus far is part of a design—long in the making, multi-generational in construction, and now reaching its executable phase. This is not Trump’s doing. This is Trump’s function.
Project Homecoming is the public face of an operational schema that has been under construction for decades—woven through legal theory, Christian nationalist theology, libertarian anti-federalism, and white grievance politics. What appears as policy is in fact a final expression: the software overlay on a regime that has already hollowed out the architecture of governance and repurposed it for control.
At the center of the media spectacle stands Donald Trump—blustering, posturing, proclaiming. But he is not the author of this program. He is its disruption engine, its narrative camouflage, and its messianic vessel. While the public watches him, the real mechanisms are installed behind the curtain—authored by the Heritage Foundation, activated through Project 2025, and enforced by an increasingly decentralized web of ideological actors.
This movement does not fear contradiction. It thrives on asymmetry:
While one coast is inflamed with ICE raids and legal outcry, the other is being structured for silent territorial annexation.
While Project Homecoming offers cash to leave, it threatens seizure and imprisonment for staying.
While Trump bellows on stage, Stephen Miller writes the scripts and Richard Grenell clears the legal terrain.
This asymmetry is not a flaw. It is a strategic rhythm—chaos on the surface, control beneath. Public confusion becomes the camouflage for private clarity.
And at the deepest level, this movement is not political. It is theological.
The name Project Homecoming is no accident. To its architects, this is not merely a removal program—it is a ritual return: the homecoming of God to government, of white Christian authority to the center of state power, and of Dominionist ideology to its rightful throne. The United States is not being reformed. It is being re-consecrated.
Under this theology, Trump is not a politician. He is a chosen tool, flawed but necessary, sent to destroy the old order and prepare the vessel. Project Homecoming is not a policy. It is a proclamation of spiritual conquest.
And Project 2025 is its scripture.
This is why opposition to Trump as an individual misses the mark. He is not the mind behind the curtain. He is the curtain itself—and the longer one stares at him, the more invisible the machine becomes.
To see clearly now is to understand this: the election was not the moment of power transfer. It was the seal on a project already built. What comes next will not be authored. It will be executed.
IX. The Lock Is Almost Shut
Project Homecoming was never just a proclamation. It was a signal. A mask. A threshold. It marked the beginning of an irreversible sequence, unless it is named—and disrupted—before its final lock clicks into place.
What has been revealed here is not a conspiracy. It is a design; A deliberate orchestration of narrative, enforcement, geography, theology, and time. From the repurposing of intelligence structures, to the quiet annexation of land, to the redirection of economic pain into militarized logistics—this is the convergence point of decades of planning.
And yet, the designers have made a mistake.
They moved too fast. They centralized too early. They elevated a figurehead too chaotic to contain. And they provoked a level of economic destabilization—perhaps influenced by foreign actors—that may fracture their own foundation. If there is to be resistance, it will not come through party platforms or editorial boards. It will come from those who can still see clearly, and act quickly.
The American public is not asleep. It has been asleep-walked—lulled not by ignorance, but by exhaustion; by the erosion of civic trust, by the slow, invisible rearrangement of the rules beneath their feet.
But now the mask is slipping.
There is no time left for neutrality. No middle space between “wait and see” and “stand and speak.” The logistical system is already in place. The calendar is already moving. The assets are already being reassigned. And the border is no longer where you thought it was.
To understand Project Homecoming is to realize that you are already inside its perimeter. The only question now is whether you remain there in silence—or break its rhythm while the gates are still unfinished.
You will not be asked for permission. But you may still refuse to comply.
Thank you for reading,
Robert J. Rei, May 10, 2025
A Homecoming for God, A Goodbye to the Republic: The Operational Blueprint Behind Trump’s Proclamation and What Comes Next © 2025 by Robert J. Rei is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Thanks for this barnstormer of an essay. The US is not alone in suffering under vicious greedy tyrants in all their many guises.
It sheds light on the dark deeds and vicious criminality of our present age.
You have fleshed out what I had inferred along the way, and it rings true. I see no single point of potential convergence to identify and facilitate countermeasures. Chaos has its place, but it usually fails to show up in the right place at the right time. At present, we are going for sabotage every place we can find to chuck a sabot --- hardly efficient. .