Updated June 9, 2026 at 2:29 PM CDT
Former Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino was the face of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. In late May, he appeared alongside neo-Nazis and white nationalists at the Remigration Summit in Porto, Portugal. At the conference, he endorsed the organizers' immigration agenda, which some researchers have compared to ethnic cleansing.
One of the organizers of the Remigration Summit was Martin Sellner, an Austrian white nationalist and former neo-Nazi widely credited with popularizing the term "remigration." Sellner calls for expelling most people of color from Europe, including permanent residents and citizens.
In his speech, Bovino thanked Sellner for inviting him and addressed him directly. "Your ideas, we talked a lot on that. And again, those ideas mirror each other. It's almost — it's very suspicious how we've never talked before — face to face, that is — until yesterday, and we were on the same sheet of music almost immediately," Bovino said.
The recording of his speech was shared with NPR by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that researches transnational far-right extremist movements.
"It's a major coup for the remigration folks to have a former Trump administration official, a person who was in charge of mass deportations, to come and speak with them [and] say he's on the same page, and that Trump's policies are essentially remigration," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
Sellner agreed. "It was obviously a huge endorsement and honor for us because I think he's the single most famous Border Patrol officer in the world right now," he told NPR in an interview after the conference.
Bovino did not respond to NPR's request for comment. Since the conference, he has mentioned the term "remigration" multiple times on social media.
European white nationalists get an American boost
Bovino oversaw raids in Los Angeles and Chicago before being promoted to commander-at-large of the Border Patrol. He left the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Although the Department of Homeland Security's new head, Markwayne Mullin, recently said Bovino is "irrelevant," his endorsement of remigration still carries weight, Beirich said. She told NPR that the influence of remigration-related policy proposals is growing in Europe, in part thanks to the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign in the U.S.
Bovino wasn't the only notable American boost the conference received: an anonymous "Catholic-American" with ties to a speaker donated to help cover conference costs, Sellner said, though he would not identify the person. The donor also attended the summit, he said. "He's not connected to any institution or any state official, [he's] just a private donor who's coming from the traditional Catholic community."
Sellner said such transatlantic connections are important to his movement, even as he remains focused on Europe. He claimed he talks privately with some Americans who "are definitely also part of the [administration]," but would not provide further details.
Changing culture via online influencers
Both Sellner and Bovino have talked about recruiting social media influencers to their causes, because they believe content creators play an important role in shifting public discourse.
"One of the things we did there in our city-hopping campaign was ... having our media apparatus outwork [our opponents'] media apparatus," Bovino said in his conference speech, referring to the immigration raids he led across various American cities.
Sellner is setting up a new organization called the Institute of Remigration, which will be part think tank, part political advocacy group. He said media outreach is one of the organization's focuses. "To push the same agenda," Sellner said, he plans to establish a fellowship for politicians, activists and influencers to coordinate messaging.
Sellner is savvy about media and messaging, said Beirich, the extremism expert. "He's achieved something no other white nationalist has, which is to get the White House to repeat his phrase, 'remigration.'" She said Sellner "thinks a lot about [what] he calls 'metapolitics,' this idea that you have to influence the culture to get to the policy."
Sellner told NPR he wants to replicate his success in pushing the term "remigration" with other "terms, concepts and narratives."
"This was done by repeating ['remigration'] over and over again in demonstrations, writing books, in reels," he said. "It's a multi-domain effort of memes, subculture ... political activism, to bring this into the public consciousness and then slowly into the mainstream." For the term "remigration," the repetition was partially organic, partially planned, he said.
Trump administration actions in sync with Sellner's goals
The Trump administration has adopted the term "remigration": President Trump and DHS have posted the phrase multiple times on social media. The State Department has created an Office of Remigration, although the office's operations have remained opaque. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Just last month, the White House X account posted an image of the president, above the words "replacement migration" which are crossed out and replaced with "remigration" in larger font.
It mirrors how proponents of remigration see it as a solution for the so-called "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that there is a deliberate effort to encourage immigration from non-white countries to dilute the identity and culture of Western countries. That conspiracy theory has inspired multiple terror attacks in the U.S. and around the world.
In his book Remigration, Sellner calls for expelling most people of color from Europe in three stages: first undocumented immigrants, then visa and green card holders, and finally, citizens deemed "unassimilable."
It's an agenda that shares similarities with the Trump administration's approach to immigrants in the country legally, which has included trying to push out visa holders, permanent residents and some naturalized U.S. citizens.
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