Did you know that the U.S. government has an agency called the “Office of Remigration”? In case you’re unfamiliar with the term “remigration,” it’s typically used by white nationalists to describe the mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, done in the quest to ethnically cleanse “Western” countries. It’s mostly a European term, but Trump himself employed the phrase “reverse migration” last year, mainstreaming “remigration” on the American right—and true to its name, the office now helps facilitate mass removals in some very dark and sordid ways.
So let’s lay down a marker: If Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate, they should make it their business next year to ensure that this agency faces truly withering scrutiny. As many Americans as possible should know what their government is doing in their name.
The Office of Remigration, after all, has mostly managed to remain a very low-profile, poorly understood affair. It’s housed inside the State Department, where its roughly 15 employees toil in anonymity inside a vast bureaucracy, unnoticed by just about all Americans.
But a blockbuster Washington Post investigation just flushed the Office of Remigration’s activities out into the light. Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.
It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.
Here’s the result, per the Post:
The contracts require minimal oversight over how the money is spent and how the migrants are treated, even though some of the third countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes.
Incredibly, some of these deals are made with governments that the State Department itself has called out for serious human rights abuses, and predictably enough, some migrants are already reporting that they’re experiencing terror themselves. Though a federal court just ruled for now that Trump’s third-country deportations unlawfully violate migrants’ due process rights, this will likely make its way to the Supreme Court, where anything can happen.
The truly vile kicker here? Also at Miller’s direction, this agency is turning the original purpose of the State Department’s refugee architecture on its head. The Office of Remigration is a part of the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which has historically been devoted to resettling people fleeing horrors abroad in the United States.
But now, civil servants who previously carried out that mission are leaking to the Post their dismay at being ordered to do the opposite. They’re now working to get other countries to agree to accept deportees who have no ties whatsoever to their new destinations, even as we pay these countries foreign assistance money to do so. As Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, tells me: “It’s a perversion of the whole purpose of refugee assistance.”
All of which gives Democrats a big opening, should they win congressional power next year. According to sources on the House Appropriations Committee, Democrats are exploring ways to shed light on these activities and even constrain them entirely.
A Democratic House, for instance, could vote to simply bar all funding for the current Office of Remigration. While this might face serious legal obstacles—and Trump would veto such a measure if it somehow got through the Senate—it’s worth trying, to force Trump and Miller to publicly defend these vile activities.
“Removing individuals to countries where they have no ties is unconscionable,” Representative Lois Frankel, a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, told me. “Congress must use its power of the purse to end the practice of using foreign assistance to incentivize countries to take third-country nationals … under the banner of ‘remigration.’”
Another possibility might be to pass a bill that prohibits the use of government funds for deportations to third countries without the express consent of the deportee. This could be modeled on a recent amendment from Frankel that codified this constraint. Again, this might run into legal obstacles, but it’s worth a shot, if only to alert the public to what’s going on and who stands where.
Still another possibility: Require the State Department to fully disclose to Congress all information about these third-country deals, including precise details about the sums paid and the conditions surrounding the deportations being done in return. Right now this is mostly shrouded in darkness.
Finally, sources say, Democrats are discussing the need to haul in the officials running this program and question them vigorously about these arrangements. “Congress should demand answers from those responsible for diverting taxpayer funding intended to protect people from persecution to some of the world’s worst authoritarians, for purposes which clearly violate human rights,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council tells me.
It’s crucial to grasp that for ethnonationalists like Miller, the Office of Remigration isn’t just carrying out immigration policy. It’s doing something much more grandiose. As international relations scholar Leonard Schuette tells The New York Times’ John Guida, many on the New Right are acting out what they see as a “civilizational grand strategy,” which requires defending the “ethnoreligious” foundations of the West by fortifying the “Western hemisphere” against “alien cultures.”
So “remigrations” are understood as part of a civilizational rescue mission of sorts: Masses of human civilizational contaminants are rounded up, expelled from the West, and dumped outside our charmed hemisphere, into that geographic mass that Trump calls “shithole countries,” which is of course where they belong. If this is terrifying, so much the better. It’s all rooted in a series of delusions, not least delusions of world-historical grandeur.
The use of the term “remigration” to name a U.S. government agency broadcasts that this naked, undisguised ethnonationalism is now the foundation for U.S. government policy. Indeed, this is very likely its deliberate purpose. Tellingly, the Post also reports that some senior State Department officials strongly objected to naming the agency this, due to the term’s white supremacist roots, with one official pointing out, correctly, that it denotes “ethnic cleansing.” They kept objecting, but the answer kept coming back from on high: The name will not change.
The conscious signaling here is the point:
Want more confirmation of this? Note that virtually the only refugees that we doadmit right now are white South Africans, on the made-up rationale that they’re suffering white genocide. Do you suppose Trump and Miller care deeply about those people’s plight? Of course not. The real purpose of this is to advertise that it’s now U.S. doctrine that the only humanitarian victims who merit our concern are the imagined victims of anti-white persecution.
The Office of Remigration announces all this to the world, right in its name, brashly and explicitly. It’s a travesty, and if they win power, Democrats should do all they can to expose and expunge it.
This article first appeared in New Republic. It is republished here with permission.
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
The cruelty is the point, as David French says. I bet a significant portion of the Orange One's followers actually like the ghoulish nature of this program.
I agree with you that we should shine a bright light on its despicable activities, but I fear that up to a third of the population will like what they see.