"Remigration" as State Policy – How Trump’s Deportation Office Speaks the Language of Purging -Trump wants to establish an Office of Remigration !

It is just a word. And yet it acts like an explosive device in political language: remigration. Donald Trump uses it as if it were bureaucratic jargon. As if it referred to return assistance, applications, orderly procedures. In reality, however, behind it lies an agenda that critics call for what it is: ethnic cleansing in bureaucratic form.

Eight months after Trump first publicly demanded a remigration policy, his State Department has now officially announced plans to establish its own Office of Remigration. The agency previously responsible for refugee aid – including support for Afghan allies of the United States – is to be restructured, its funds redirected, its staff reassigned. The goal: not to integrate people, but to remove them. According to the plan, the new office is to function as a “hub for repatriation tracking.”

The AfD will jump for joy. So will its voters – at least until the moment when abstract harshness turns into concrete cruelty in their own neighborhoods. When the discussion is no longer about “strangers,” but neighbors disappear, friends fall silent, entire families are torn from everyday life. That is when remigration becomes reality. And approval turns into fear.

Trump first publicly used the term in September 2024 – as a threat against Kamala Harris’s supposedly illegal migrants. Even then, it was no coincidence that he simultaneously labeled Haitian citizens in Ohio and Venezuelan refugees as “invaders.” And that he was drawing on a term long embraced by the radical right in Europe.

Martin Sellner, Austrian activist and intellectual figurehead of the new right, has been promoting the idea of remigration for years. His three-phase plan, recently published on his website, reads like a copy-paste of Trump’s current policy: stop the invasion, block family reunification, issue ultimatums, offer cash payments for voluntary departure, cut humanitarian aid.

And that is exactly what is happening. The Trump administration is offering migrants who use the CBP Home app to “self-deport” a payment of $1,000. At the same time, it attempted to eliminate legal aid for unaccompanied children. Only court intervention was able to halt the measure.

Julia Ebner of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue calls the term “remigration” a “sanitized packaging for systematic expulsion.” In Germany and Austria, she says, the proximity to the language of the Holocaust is unmistakable – even if today it comes wrapped in technocratic phrasing. What is presented as a security measure today bears disturbing resemblance to the methods of the Third Reich: state-sanctioned removal of people from public life – not because they posed any actual threat, but because they were deemed undesirable. The parallels to the racially motivated expulsion policies of the 1930s are glaring – even if they now sound more administrative in tone.

The reality is anything but abstract. According to the Washington Post, 3,000 migrants per day are to be arrested going forward. The numbers come directly from Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller. And they are not just targets – they are orders. Federal agents are being compelled to take part in raids. Even in previously protected spaces: courthouses, churches, hospitals.

Nayna Gupta of the American Immigration Council puts it bluntly: “They are arresting people who are doing exactly what the law requires – they are showing up for their hearings.” Because that’s easy, efficient. Because this is about quotas, not justice.

Greg Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association openly describes it as an attack on the legal system itself. “Judges are no longer expected to weigh decisions, but to deliver results.”

Trump, Vance, Rubio, Bondi – they all sit atop this new administrative structure that in truth constitutes a system of cold dehumanization. And while public support is declining – according to Gallup, only one-third of Americans support Trump’s call to deport all undocumented individuals – the apparatus continues to expand.

The AfD will celebrate. So will the FPÖ. And in Italy, the first international Remigration Summit was held in early May – with 400 participants from the US, France, Germany, Ireland. Among them: Jacky Eubanks, a Trump endorsee, who claimed that “Europeans are the founding stock of the United States” – blatantly ignoring the existence of Indigenous peoples across the continent. There is nothing left to imagine. Everything is out in the open. The terms are known. The measures visible. The ideology declared.

Germany and Europe are being called to account. Because with a country that establishes an Office of Remigration – an institutional framework for deportation, intimidation, and systematic exclusion – one would prefer not to maintain a strategic partnership. One would prefer not to sign summit declarations, not to celebrate trade deals, not to invoke shared values. Because what is being created there is not a technical administrative reform. It is a political breach of the dam. And those who remain silent now are not just complicit – they are rendering themselves irrelevant in the defense of what we still call an open society.

What remains is the question: How much longer will we be allowed to call it “remigration” – without saying what it truly is?

Another name for expulsion. And for that which a democracy can only survive by standing firmly against.