The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.
Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.
“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.
Two other people – a professor and her spouse – recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.
None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.
In a statement to the Guardian, Roberts denied ever killing a dog with a shovel. He did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.
“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”
The people who say they heard Roberts talk about killing a dog at the time said they found the apparent admission to be unsettling and said they did not ask Roberts – who as a conservative Republican was already seen as something of an outsider among the university’s mostly liberal academic staff – to provide any more detail about the incident.
“I think that probably people were not eager to engage with him over this. It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.
News of Roberts’s alleged comments to colleagues comes as Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate, JD Vance, have engaged in a racist and false propaganda campaign to demonize Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming that they have been killing and eating people’s pets. The xenophobic claims, which are probably meant to strengthen support among white, racist and anti-immigrant voters, have incited multiple bomb threats that have disrupted the Springfield community.
Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation under Roberts’s watch, has become a focal point of the 2024 presidential election as Democrats warn that its radical policy prescriptions – such as the eradication of the Department of Education and imposing further restrictions on abortion – will serve as a blueprint for Trump’s administration if he is elected. Both Trump and Vance have sought to distance themselves from the 900-page report, with Trump claiming he had not read it. But in a foreword to Roberts’s book written by Vance, the vice-presidential nominee praises Roberts’s “depth and stature within the American Right” and says that, “in the fights that [lie] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon”.
Roberts is one of the most prominent rightwing voices in Washington. He has close ties to Opus Dei, the Catholic group, and has spoken openly about how he considers the outlawing of birth control to be one of the “hardest” political battles facing conservatives in the future.
Twenty years ago, Roberts – now a staunch supporter of Trump – was an academic who may have been uneasy among fellow professors who were not politically aligned with him. Yet, Hammond said, colleagues treated him with respect and kindness – including bringing food to his home after his wife had a baby – and were happy to have him working at the university.
One former colleague remembers being reprimanded by Roberts after she used her university email account to tell colleagues she was going to help campaign for John Kerry, the then Democratic nominee for president, because she recalled him saying – rightly, she now admits – that it was inappropriate. But relations were generally good.
Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.
“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she said.
To make matters worse, she recalled Roberts saying that the neighbor in question also had puppies and that he had considered killing them, too. Weisiger’s husband, who asked not to be named, recalled Roberts saying he had complained about the dog to the police, who were not responsive, and that the dog sometimes got into his yard.
Roberts, public records confirm, was living with his wife and young family in a modest and mostly immigrant community in Las Cruces at the time, in a historic neighborhood lined with traditional adobe homes and chain-link fences.
In his statement, Roberts claimed that the city later arrived and removed “more than ten dogs” from his neighbor’s property, citing animal abuse. He said he was “incredibly grateful” to animal control for rescuing the “abused animals” and was grateful that he and his daughter did not have physical contact with the dog.
Roberts also identified the man who he called the “animal owner”: a native of Las Cruces named Daniel Aran who, a spokesperson for Roberts pointed out in an email, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for cocaine trafficking in 2017, more than a decade after the alleged incident occurred.
Public records and the Guardian’s reporting confirm that Aran and his mother lived nextdoor to Roberts at the time that Roberts lived there.
The Guardian could not independently verify whether Roberts actually killed a dog or whether Roberts’s account of his interactions with his neighbor’s dog was accurate. The Guardian has repeatedly sought out public records to try to verify the alleged accounts. The city of Las Cruces, the police and animal control authorities said public records were not available for the time frame in which the alleged incident occurred.
But the Guardian did track down Daniel Aran, whose mother Norma Noriega still lives in the adobe home next to where Roberts previously lived in Las Cruces.
Noriega’s family moved into their home in about 2002 with her husband and children – Denise Aran, who was about seven at the time, and Daniel, who was about 16.
Daniel Aran, who has been released from prison and is now the owner of a small construction company, spoke to the Guardian from the front yard of the small stone house. Aran is lean and muscular, with a chiseled face and hardened stare.
“When I was younger, I was wild. But I gave respect to get respect. Now I’m more about work and family,” he said, dusting off his clothes from a day of construction. “And I’ve always been a dog lover, an animal lover, since I was a little kid. I’ve always had dogs.”
Aran said he was diligent about watching his dogs – small pit bulls – which he bred, selling the pups as a way of making money for his family’s household.
When asked if he had a dog disappear around 2004, he said: “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female”. She had been his favorite, he said.
“I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing like this,” he said, holding up his hands in an affectionate gesture. “She was a tiny, cute little thing.”
When he was asked by the Guardian about comments Roberts allegedly made to colleagues about killing a neighborhood pit bull with a shovel, he grimaced. “Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head.”
“I’m not here to make up stories or to say he did it,” he said. “But it was right around 2004 when all that happened, that Loca was missing,” he said. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catchers.”
Aran also denied Roberts’s claim that dogs had been taken away from the property.
“We had three dogs that we kept, and then there were puppies occasionally that I would sell,” he said.
His mother, 53-year-old Norma Noriega, sitting out in the front yard, also disputed Roberts’s account.
“That never happened,” she said in Spanish. “[Animal services] never came and took dogs. Sure, [the dogs] would get out on occasion, and we’d go find them and bring them back. But there was never an incident where our dogs were taken, for abuse or whatever, that is simply not true.
“It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened. She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found,” said Noriega.
The family has had a number of pit bulls over the years – Brownie and Casper were their longtime pets – but it was the disappearance of Loca that had always distressed the family.
“She’s the one that disappeared. We went out looking for her, we went out to the dog catchers, and we never found her,” Aran said quietly. “And I know the dog catchers never got her.”
Asked about his recollection of Roberts, Aran said: “Well, it’s been more than 20 years,” and he did acknowledge that his dogs could be noisy.
“I’m pretty sure he had to have some patience,” said Aran. “But, as far as I can remember, he never came across as disrespectful,” he said.
Additional reporting by Melissa Segura