When You Hear ‘Remigration,’ Know That It Means Ethnic Cleansing

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

Back in 2018, a 19-year-old neo-Nazi going by the name “ThomasRyan” wrote in a private Discord server that a “vast remigration program” in the United States was the “best outcome we can stand to look at.” There was no mistaking what ThomasRyan meant by “remigration,” a term only he and his ilk were using at the time. It meant the forced removal of non-white people from the U.S., a process ThomasRyan imagined would begin with the U.S. government escorting “willing” non-white people to their “ethnic homelands.” The “unwilling” — that is, immigrants and U.S. citizens who refused to leave the country that is their home — would be rounded up in chains so the government could “dump them” somewhere abroad. 

Fast forward to the present and ThomasRyan — real name Thomas Rousseau — is the leader of Patriot Front, a growing white supremacist group known for committing hate crimes across America. The vision of “remigration” he articulated eight years ago in a neo-Nazi message board has become official U.S. policy. 

“The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now,” the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security posted on X last week. The post included a video — set to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” — showing border patrol agents shackling the hands and feet of immigrants before escorting them across a tarmac to a waiting Boeing 777. “Removal flight,” read text overlaid on the footage. The border patrol agents’ faces were blurred in the video. The immigrants’ faces, all belonging to people of color, and all filmed at the exact moment of their forcible expulsion from the Land of the Free, were not. The government propaganda celebrating putting people in chains even included a glamor shot of a tangled mass of shackles stored in a milk crate. 

As America celebrated its birthday with fireworks and fairs and speeches extolling our “freedom,” Rousseau led hundreds of masked Patriot Front members on a march through the streets of Washington, D.C. chanting “Reclaim America!” And the White House and the Republican Party have fully embraced the term “remigration,” a euphemism with the clearest, most traceable of fascist lineages, designed just over a decade ago to soften or obscure the atrocities associated with its actual meaning: ethnic cleansing. 

The story of how the term “remigration” traveled from the far-right fringes to the halls of power is one of the most defining, emblematic, and alarming of the 21st century. It is a story of how the “fringes” were never really that fringe at all; of the power of euphemism or, in far-right parlance, of “hiding your power levels,” to advance a white nationalist agenda; and of a tech platform taken over by a white South African immigrant to America who last month became a trillionaire. When you see or hear the word “remigration,” it is imperative that you know it means “ethnic cleansing” — a term considered by some genocide scholars to be a euphemism in of itself, one that masks the historic horrors of homes being raided, of human beings separated from their families, of concentration camps and mass murder. The stakes, to borrow DHS’ phrasing, really could not be higher. 

Back in 2014, a pan-European white nationalist group called Generation Identity held the inaugural Annual Meeting on Remigration in Paris. The meeting’s star speaker was French philosopher Renaud Camus, who coined the term “The great replacement” in a book of the same name. Camus’s book popularized the racist conspiracy theory that immigration into Europe and America was part of a scheme by “globalist” elites — in many later iterations, Jews — to “replace” white people and make them a minority in their own “homelands.” Unwittingly or not, Camus’ “great replacement” was a slick rebranding of an older American conspiracy theory called “white genocide,” popularized stateside in the 1980s by David Lane, leader of the neo-Nazi terror group the Order. 

The “great replacement,” however, gained traction in a way “white genocide” hadn’t. Camus’ solution to this purported demographic displacement, he noted in his speech, was “remigration.” From 2012 to 2019, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “remigration” was “used over 540,000 times” on Twitter, with use surging after Camus’ appearance at the Annual Meeting on Remigration in Paris. 

The term made its transatlantic voyage to America around 2017, with “alt-right” neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer adapting the term. Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group modeled after Europe’s Generation Identity, included “remigration” in its list of policy proposals. When Spencer and Identity Evropa members invaded Charlottesville, Virginia that year to hold the violent “Unite The Right” rally, they carried torches and screamed “you will not replace us!” — turning Camus’ “great replacement” theory into an infamous chant. (Rousseau, the young neo-Nazi who called for “remigration” in that private chat room, was also in attendance.) 

The biggest champion of “remigration” was still European, however. Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian chapter of Generation Identity, had spent his younger years in Stolz and Frei, a neo-Nazi group, and once put up a poster featuring a swastika on a synagogue. In 2017, he gained notoriety after spearheading a project called “Defend Europe,” chartering a boat on the Mediterranean to prevent rafts of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa from reaching European shores. His boat also attempted to intercept ships offering humanitarian aid to the migrants. 

In March of 2019 Sellner launched a channel on the chat app Telegram called the “European Compact for Remigration” as part of an effort to get conservative political parties to support “de-Islamisation,” or the expulsion of Muslims from Europe. That same month, one of Sellner’s fans from Australia, Brenton Tarrant, livestreamed himself massacring 51 Muslims in two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques. Tarrant had authored a racist screed beforehand titled “The Great Replacement.” In the ensuing investigation by authorities it emerged that Tarrant had donated $1,700 to Sellner, with the two exchanging friendly emails, even making loose plans to meet up in Vienna for a beer. 

Still, Sellner’s push to make “remigration” go mainstream was finding success, with Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right political party, adding the term to its policy platforms later that year. 

In 2023, Sellner coordinated a secret meeting with AfD officials, business leaders, and neo-Nazi activists to discuss a plan for “remigration.” Per an undercover investigation by Correctiv, the plan involved the mass deportation of asylum seekers, legal immigrants, and “unassimilated citizens” to a “model state” in Africa. Historians noted that Sellner’s plan had alarming parallels to the “Madagascar Plan,” the German Nazi Party’s idea to expel Jews en masse to the island country. The Nazis, of course, ended up shipping Jews to concentration camps in Europe instead.  

In 2024, the Freedom Party (FPOe) in Sellner’s native Austria proposed creating a “remigration commissioner.” Later that same year, a presidential candidate in the U.S. would use the term for the first time. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will save our cities and towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and all across America.”

Sellner was ecstatic. “#Remigration has had a massive conceptual career,” he wrote on X in German. “Born in France, popularized in German-speaking countries and now the term of the hour from Sweden to the USA!”

Sellner had previously been banned on X, when it was called Twitter, but had his account reinstated when Elon Musk acquired the social media platform and rebranded it. Musk, who in 2024 emerged as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, had dramatically cut back on content moderation on X, changing the algorithm as well in a way that allowed bigotry — and the term “remigration” itself — to flourish. In 2024, “remigration” saw a “dramatic surge” in usage on X, alongside Telegram, according to the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, receiving “467,000 total mentions originating from 133,000 unique authors.” Mentions of the term nearly doubled in 2025, with “952,000 total online mentions originating from 303,000 unique authors.” 

Musk himself was one of those unique authors, albeit one with hundreds of millions of followers. He has advocated “remigration” multiple times on the platform, declaring once that “remigration is the only way.” 

The Trump administration, meanwhile, created the Office of Remigration last year as part of the State Department. The administration has remained relatively mum about what the Office of Remigration actually does, but reporting from Wired recently revealed its remit revolves around processing “payments possibly worth tens of millions of dollars to facilitate the deportations of immigrants to countries they may not even be from.” 

Last month, the State Department also issued a statement rejecting a non-binding U.N. resolution calling for improved conditions for migrants and refugees, specifically women and children. The statement called immigration into the U.S. an “invasion” that has allowed “crime and chaos“ to thrive. “Opening our doors to mass migration was a grave mistake that threatens the cohesion of our societies and the future of our peoples,” the statement said, before adding: “Our goal is not to ‘manage’ migration, but to foster remigration.” 

Trump himself has used the term on multiple occasions, borrowing “great replacement” framing to depict immigrants as a monolithic horde of criminals: “We will not let America become a Third World Country filled with Crime, failing Schools, collapsing Hospitals, and total Social Dysfunction. It’s called ‘REMIGRATION’ and, it will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Sellner has credited Trump for the explosion of “remigration” rhetoric across the globe. (Some 16 political parties in Europe now include remigration in their policy platforms.) Sellner has also developed relationships with people in Trump’s orbit. Gregory Bovino, the recently retired “Commander At Large” for U.S. Border Patrol, who oversaw Trump’s brutal immigration sweeps in Chicago and Minneapolis, spoke at Sellner’s “Remigration Summit” in Portugal in May. Bovino admitted to a friendship with Sellner during his speech, and the pair posted a video of themselves discussing mass deportations together. 

Sellner has also been shopping around a remigration plan he hopes governments will adapt. The three primary “target groups” of Sellner’s mass deportations include “illegal” immigrants, immigrants with legal visas who are nevertheless a “burden” on society, and citizens who are “non assimilated” and part of “foreign parallel societies.” These are so many more euphemisms, of course. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GRAPHE) describes Sellner’s plan as nothing but a call “for the systematic deportations of anyone who is not white.” 

What’s scary, GRAPHE notes, is the “eerie similarities” between Sellner’s plan and what the Trump administration and the GOP is already doing, especially in targeting undocumented and legal residents. There is evidence that the third “target group” in Sellner’s plans — ”non-assimilated” U.S citizens — will be targeted soon. 

Trump’s most fawning loyalists in Congress are clamoring for a program of “denaturalization.”

In June, after the Supreme Court narrowly struck down a Trump initiative to end birthright citizenship, an angry Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) took to X to call for “More deportations, more denaturalizations, more remigration, no amnesty.” 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TK), meanwhile, introduced the “Remigration Act” in Congress, which he said in a statement would “denaturalize felons, fraudsters and terror supporters”; “remove anti-American agitators from the U.S.”; “strip green cards from welfare abusers”; and “set up a federal denaturalization task force.” 

Among Ogles’ first targets for denaturalization? The first Muslim mayor of New York City: Zohran Mamdani, a man with no criminal history. 

“He is a threat to the security of this country,” Ogles said in an interview about the bill. “He’s from a faith that hates this country.”

Meanwhile, a photo from Patriot Front’s July 4 march in Washington D.C. is going viral. It shows the masked white supremacists aboard the metro on the way to the national mall. They take up every seat of the train car, save for one occupied by a Black woman, who stares up at the camera.