Greg Bovino’s Retirement Plan? Go Full Fascist 

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Greg Bovino was welcomed like a celebrity at one of the world’s pre-eminent fascist confabs this past weekend. The former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-At-Large — whose MAGA star turn came when President Donald Trump cast him as the lead in White House’s lethal immigration sweeps across America — mingled with Hitler admirers, avowed racists, and far-right politicians at the Salmanha Residence near Porto, Portugal for the “Remigration Summit 2026.” 

“The interest around him is enormous,” the event’s account on Telegram gushed, posting a photo of Bovino arriving at the hotel, giving an impromptu press conference to a gaggle of journalists outside. “I am very happy to come over and lend some expertise to the Europeans” to stop “illegal aliens destroying European culture,” he told them.

The veteran American border cop appeared to leave his famous Nazi SS-style trench coat stateside, donning a suit jacket instead. But if his attire wasn’t a nod to violent ethno-nationalism, the speech and interviews he delivered at the conference were. Bovino opened his 15-minute lecture, to a crowd of about 500 mostly white men, by calling “remigration” the “most important topic perhaps of our lifetime,” according to a video provided to Talking Points Memo by Jacopo Di Miceli, an independent Italian journalist.

“Remigration” is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and refers to the forcible removal of non-white people from Western countries; it is the “solution” offered up by white supremacists to the “Great Replacement,” the racist conspiracy theory that global elites — and in many iterations, Jews — are orchestrating waves of immigration as part of a nefarious plot to eradicate white people from their “homelands.” 

As a term, “remigration” was popularized by one of the Portugal summit’s main organizers, the Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner, who Bovino indicated was a friend. “Martin Sellner, you’ve invited me here today. Thank you,” Bovino said in his speech. “Your ideas, we’ve talked a lot on that, and those ideas mirror each other. We’ve never talked before, face-to-face, until yesterday and we were on the same sheet of music almost immediately.” 

It should be a giant scandal that an only-recently retired top American immigration official — who led the Trump administration’s siege and occupation of Chicago and Minneapolis by border patrol agents, terrorizing immigrant families and killing two protesters — has admitted to an ongoing relationship with someone like Sellner. 

At age 17, Sellner admitted to vandalizing a Vienna synagogue with a swastika. Years later, he became a leader in Generation Identity, the pan-European white nationalist group. In 2019, he accepted a donation from, and exchanged emails with, a man named Brenton Tarrant, who a short time later massacred 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2023, an investigation by the news outlet Correctiv found that Sellner orchestrated a clandestine gathering with members of the German political party AfD to hash out a “remigration” plan that would expel all refugees and immigrants, regardless of their legal status, along with “unassimilated citizens,” from Germany, sending them to a “model state” in North Africa. The scheme was Sellner’s idea, and hearkened back to “The Madagascar Plan,” the German Nazi Party’s initial idea to send all Jews to the African island country. 

In his speech in Portugal, Bovino described his own conversations with Sellner as “very special.” 

Ever since the White House forced him to retire in March amidst blowback to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — protesters shot and killed by agents under his command — Bovino has seemed to relish his newfound fame. He has done multiple interviews with the media, become a prolific shitposter on X, and was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas, where he called for the deportation of 100 million people, or roughly a third of the U.S. population. (Such a plan, like Sellner’s in Germany, would invariably involve deporting citizens, as there are roughly 14 million undocumented people in America.) 

Still, his appearance at the Remigration Summit felt like another escalation of his — and the wider MAGA movement’s — extremism; as if Bovino, derided by his political opponents as “Gestapo Greg,” might be leaning into his nickname.  

A photo of Bovino and Sellner in Portugal shows a third man standing alongside them: Alfonso Gonçalves, the summit’s other main organizer. As noted by independent journalist Charles Davis in The Redoubt, Gonçalves is a white supremacist and the founder of Reconquista, a Portuguese far-right group named for “the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula.” He has referred to women as “whores” and “cockroaches” who “should not have political rights.” He has bemoaned the “Africanization” of London and falsely stated that Black men in America are “12x times as likely to commit murder than white men.” 

He once stated that “Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions,” referring to supposed decadence of pre-war Germany before the rise of the Nazis. 

The summit Gonçalves and Sellner organized, where Bovino was the star, was rife with other extreme figures — some of whom have held elected office in Europe. They included Milan Mazurek, a Slovakian member of parliament once convicted by the country’s supreme court for hate speech targeting Roma people, and who has called the Holocaust a “fairy tale and a lie.” Also in attendance was Dries Van Langenhove, a former Belgian MP also convicted for hate speech and three members of the German Bundestag affiliated with the AfD, the political party that Germany’s own intelligence agency has labeled an extremist group. 

“Could we do…the same in Germany?” Kay Gottschalk, AfD’s cofounder, asked Bovino during an interview at the summit, referring to the brutal methods Bovino employed while rounding up immigrants in America. 

“Kay, absolutely,” Bovino responded, before offering his services. “I’m a phone call away.” 

“Maybe I can invite you to the Bundestag and you give us some ideas for Germany?” Gottschalk  suggested. 

“You bet,” Bovino said, before assuring Gottschalk that the Germans would be “very good” at remigration.

Bovino also granted an interview to Keith Woods, the Irish white nationalist influencer who has described himself as a “raging antisemite.” 

“This is the most exciting movement I’ve seen probably in my entire life,” Bovino told Woods at the summit, “because immigration, remigration, mass deportations, are the number one issue for the preservation of our culture, our values, our customs, our beliefs.” 

Bovino had been doing the European media rounds even before this weekend’s fascist gathering, granting an interview to the far-right site VoxEuropa. In that interview, Bovino — unprompted — pointed to the military tactics of Erwin Rommel, Nazi Germany’s head general, as an inspiration. 

And just before he boarded his flight to Portugal, he posted a message of encouragement to ICE agents brutally attacking protesters at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in New Jersey. “Give them hell and live the moment!!” Bovino wrote on X, along with a photo of himself in his Border Patrol uniform. 

The photo showed Bovino’s right arm extended upward, palm facing down.