State Department set to launch ‘Office of Remigration’

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Secretary Marco Rubio’s State Department published a reorganization chart Thursday morning showing massive cuts to diplomatic offices and functions, plus a few new additions. Rubio’s department also reportedly sent the plan to Congress concurrently. What hasn’t been previously reported is the extensive 136-page document Congress received that includes the more granular details of what the reimagined department would look like— including an “Office of Remigration,” a far-right, anti-immigrant buzzword made popular in Europe for ridding the country of migrants.

“To address these structural problems of bureaucratic overgrowth and overlapping office mandates, the Department will eliminate non-statutory offices whose roles do not align with core U.S. national security or foreign policy objectives, or whose functions overlap with or duplicate those of other offices,” the introduction of the document states. It was sent to Congress with a cover letter from Paul Guaglianone, an apparent Senior Bureau Official at the Bureau of Legislative Affairs. According to LegiStorm, Guaglianone began working on the hill in 2013 as an intern for former Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy prior to his graduation that year from George Washington University. Most recently he worked as Legislative Director for Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska.  

Arguably the most alarming piece of the report comes in the section for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). The report states that PRM will be “substantially reorganized” and that a number of new offices will be created as part of the absorption of USAID. There will be three new offices under the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Migration Matters, “to shift focus towards supporting the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status.” 

One such office will be the Office of Remigration (REM), which will “provide a policy platform for interagency coordination with DHS and other agencies on removals/repatriations, and for intra-agency policy work to advance the President’s immigration agenda.” There will also be offices of International Migration/Repatriation and Refugee Processing.

Coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) surprised one State Department employee I spoke to who said the people they’ve known to work in PRM are “pretty much the opposite” of those who work for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

While these plans align with Trump’s open objective of expelling as many migrants from the United States as possible, the use of the word “remigration” is particularly striking as it’s widely used by far-right extremists in Europe. 

Just last week, approximately 400 far-right activists—including a former Trump-endorsed GOP state legislative candidate from Michigan—gathered in Italy to specifically discuss remigration. Per one news report, “Flemish nationalist Dries Van Langenhove -- who has been sentenced to a year in prison for denying the Holocaust -- quoted Hungarian Premier Viktor Orban and asked participants to chant the slogan ‘Save our nation, remigration’.” 

According to a post about the summit on the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s website, “Remigration is rooted in the thoroughly de-bunked white supremacist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which purports a planned ‘replacement’ of white people by politicians and other ‘elites.’ Jews are often targeted as driving this ‘plan.’”

They continued: “Remigration is a series of policy proposals, drafted by Austrian Identitarian and former neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, to end the so-called ‘replacement’ by purging the continent of non-white people and eliminating all forms of multiculturalism. The goal is to make countries ‘European again.’” 

As I wrote about back in September, an exclusive conference was held in Potsdam, Germany at the time specifically to discuss the “masterplan” for instituting the country’s remigration policy.

A reporter for the European news outlet CORRECTIV went undercover at the hotel where the meeting was held and was able to piece together much of what was discussed via correspondence from beforehand, meeting notes, research, and long-range photos.

“The scenarios sketched out in this hotel room in Potsdam all essentially boil down to one thing: people in Germany should be forcibly extradited if they have the wrong skin colour, the wrong parents, or aren’t sufficiently ‘assimilated’ into German culture according to the standards of people like Sellner,” CORRECTIV reported. “Even if they have German citizenship.”

As we’ve witnessed over the last few months, American citizenship has not been enough to stop federal authorities from detaining people. On his first day back in office, Trump issued an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, and the Supreme Court recently heard arguments on how the order should be handled.

A post published Wednesday on the State Department’s Substack (Yes, the State Department has a Substack) by staffer Samuel Samson (Yes, that’s his real name) makes clear the department’s alignment with the far-right European vision for migration and uses overt white supremacist language to make the point.

“Our hope is that both Europe and the United States can recommit to our Western heritage, and that European nations will end the weaponization of government against those seeking to defend it,” Samson writes. “We will not always agree on scope and tactics, but tangible actions by European governments to guarantee protection for political and religious speech, secure borders, and fair elections would serve as welcome steps forward.”

This language is also reflected in Thursday’s report to Congress which references the goal of “advancing the Administration’s affirmative vision of American and Western values.”

Aside from mass round ups of migrants by ICE across the country, we also know this administration is similarly focused on sending migrants to “third countries” if their country of origin either won’t take them back or is too dangerous for them to return. The Handbasket was first to report that an Iraqi national named Omar Ameen was sent by the US to Rwanda in early April as part of a new diplomatic arrangement between the countries. The cable confirming the deportation also stated that at least 10 more people were set to undergo the same journey. 

Third country migrants have also been unlawfully sent from the US to South Sudan. The case of the men involved is tied up in litigation, with Trump’s Department of Justice filing an emergency brief at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. (Read this comprehensive report on the latest by Jacqueline Sweet for Rolling Stone.)

If there was any doubt that the Trump administration would make good on its promise to rid the country of migrants it deems undesirable, the State Department’s report to Congress on Thursday made it clear that they’re moving full steam ahead. 

“All of it is pretty awful with some pieces that definitely violate existing law and treaties,” a person who works closely with the State Department told The Handbasket. “But institutionalizing neo-Nazi theory as an office in the State Department is the most blatantly horrifying.”