DHS issued a call to ‘remigrate.’ Here’s the history of the term often associated with far-right groups

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — A nine-letter social media post was all it took for the Department of Homeland Security to spark a torrent of backlash online this week, drawing the ire of politicians and prompting comparisons to Europe’s far right.

On Tuesday afternoon, DHS posted a declaration on X for immigrants to “remigrate,” threading a link to the agency’s self-deportation app.

At first glance, the post could be seen as a straightforward reference to the Trump administration’s long-standing immigration policies, which have called for immigrants to “voluntarily self-deport” back to their home countries.

But experts who study and monitor extremism and the far right told CNN they’d urge caution when invoking the word, which has historic roots, including Nazi ideology and, more recently, a violent conspiracy theory that’s inspired terrorist attacks in the US and abroad.

Here’s what we know:

A brief, dark history of a loaded word

Extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss was researching Nazi iconography for her 2019 book when she said she came across an image that made her pause.

The picture – emblazoned on a T-shirt – showed Jewish people being loaded onto a ship bound for Madagascar. It was captioned, “Have a nice trip,” she said.

And it was a reference to the Nazis’ “Madagascar Plan.”

In the late 1930s, “before the concentration camps and gas chambers … there was a solution to remigrate Jews to Madagascar,” Miller-Idriss explained.

Indeed, Adolf Hitler weighed multiple remigration policies and other antisemitic proposals before arriving at his final, devastating solution to the “Jewish Question” – the Holocaust.

And although the world vowed “never again,” Miller-Idriss said decades later, neo-Nazis were proudly wearing references to the antisemitic remigration proposal on T-shirts.

Remigration is “this idea that you should send people ‘who don’t belong in this country’ to another place,” Miller-Idriss said.

While remigration isn’t often used in daily conversation, Miller-Idriss told CNN in recent years the concept has found a champion in a new far-right conspiracy: The Great Replacement Theory.

The far right believes “any particular state that has a White majority population that wants to retain it – or restore it – you would have to get rid of people of color,” Miller-Idriss said.

“And you either do that violently … or by remigrating them.”

A dubious solution to a racist conspiracy

Although many have likely never heard of the replacement theory, we’ve all lived through its violent consequences.

In July 2011, a Norwegian neo-Nazi went on a rampage, detonating a bomb in Oslo, Norway, before opening fire at a Labour Party youth camp on nearby Utoya Island.

He killed 77 people. In the aftermath, experts began wading through the 1,500-page manifesto the terrorist reportedly posted online just before the attack.

They found it was riddled with references to the replacement theory, a once-fringe conspiracy that falsely argues a shadowy cabal is conspiring to eradicate the White European population by replacing them with non-European immigrants.

Although the attack was widely condemned, experts told CNN the conspiracy ultimately found a new foothold amid the rise of far-right movements in Europe and the United States.

And as it spread, terrorist attacks followed: at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. At a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. And, most recently, at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

Each attack, Miller-Idriss said, was inspired in some way by the replacement conspiracy.

In Europe, as the ethnonationalist Identitarian movement gained traction in the mid-2010s, far-right politicians began touting what had historically been a more palatable solution to the so-called replacement theory: the large-scale deportation of non-Europeans.

“The more political, nonviolent response (to the conspiracy theory) is to advocate for remigration policies – very, very large scale deportation of non-Europeans from the countries that they live in,” said Jakob Guhl, director of policy, research and counterterrorism for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“The concept of remigration has been so successful because it’s not 100% clear what people mean by it.”

On one end of the spectrum, Guhl said, there are politicians who are advocating for returning those who no longer have a legal right to remain in a country. But on the other, more extreme end, he said the conversation quickly turns to maintaining a country’s White so-called ethnic purity.

The ambiguity “really allows the far right to push this term and have people kind of interpret it in the way they prefer,” Guhl said.

Across Europe, nationalist and far-right groups have successfully pushed “remigration” to the forefront through panels, podcasts, political campaigns and posts on social media, Guhl said.

“I think it’s really important to understand that it’s language that has been strategically used, and that has sort of been intentionally kept a little bit vague in order for very extreme nationalist positions to enter the mainstream,” he said.

But for far-right groups like AFG in Germany and the National Rally in France, he said, “this is really about creating greater ethnic homogeneity, creating Whiter countries.”

Remigration in action

CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau has spent years covering immigration and tracing the rise of the far right in Italian politics.

The election of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in 2022, marked the ascension of such right-wing policies in Italy and her administration has since ushered in a dramatic crackdown on immigration and asylum-seekers through remigration.

“Italy is the Texas and California of the United States, in terms of irregular migration, and the Mediterranean Sea is the Rio Grande,” Latza Nadeau said.

Migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa and try to enter Europe to claim asylum along the Italian coast. But their boats are often met with tragedy, as many become stranded or capsize in the rough seas, prompting rescue from the Italian Coast Guard.

According to the Dublin Regulation, if a migrant arrives in a European Union member state, the first country where they arrive must care for them and process their cases. But in 2023, Meloni’s government struck an agreement with Albania – a non-EU country – to build controversial migrant detention centers and subvert the EU agreement.

The following year Italy began deporting asylum-seekers there to await processing. The remigration policy has been beset by legal challenges and in August, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled while the facilities in Albania could remain open, Italy needed to ensure asylum-seekers aren’t being remigrated to dangerous situations in their home countries.

But the centers aren’t the only mechanism the Italian government has to remigrate immigrants and asylum-seekers. Being born in Italy does not automatically make you a citizen which, Latza Nadeau said, makes it easier for the country to target, detain and deport migrants – and their families – back to their country of origin.

Even though her children were born in Italy to an American journalist who legally has a right to work and live in the country, Latza Nadeau said her kids could face deportation to the US, a country they’ve never really known.

“Remigration means in Italy that anyone – even if your kids are born here, even if you’re totally ‘legal’ – can send your kids away,” she said. “My kids have to have better documents than almost anyone I know to stay in Italy.”

This spring, tensions flared in Milan as far-right activists gathered in the city to hold a Remigration Summit. The event was met with protests and demonstrators clashed with police.

Latza Nadeau said for many in Europe today, remigration has been seen as just another outgrowth of the push for immigration reform, but historically the policy has been used as a tool for ethnic cleansing.

“Remigration in the context of Europe, you don’t have to go back very far to figure out that this started in a time when Mussolini remigrated the Roma people … or sending Jewish people to the concentration camps,” she said.

“These were words that were used during that period of time, and reimagined now.”

More than semantics

In April, the State Department proposed shifting the responsibilities of several offices in the agency from refugee support toward creating offices that would support “the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin.”

According to the proposal, one of the new offices would be called the “Office of Remigration.”

CNN asked DHS to further explain the policies and context behind Tuesday’s controversial social media post. In response, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin questioned the reporter’s ability to understand English.

“Is the English language too difficult for you?” McLaughlin wrote in email, before citing the Collins English Dictionary’s definition of the verb “remigrate.”

“We urge all illegal aliens to remigrate and self-deport using the CBP Home app,” McLaughlin said.

But when pressed to respond to CNN’s initial inquiry about the controversy over the post – and its far-right connotations – McLaughlin did not respond.

“The best-case scenario is that’s not what DHS intends, and in that case, they should choose a different word because (remigrate) is a signal,” Miller-Idriss said.

“It’s read as a dog whistle by the extreme right, by White supremacists who will see it that way.”

For now, both Miller-Idriss and Guhl told CNN they’re more focused on whether far-right extremists – in the US and abroad – will view the DHS post as a call to action.

“I’m more concerned with, ‘Does it signal legitimation to groups that promote violent types of ethnic cleansing, or that believe that ethnic cleansing through violence is the right path forward for this country,’” Miller-Idriss said.

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