By Ponderer November 28, 2025 3:09 pm Category: History
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Rules of the Post & Tips.
DHS issued a call to ‘remigrate.’ Here’s the history of the term often associated with far-right groups
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.
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.”
[I am of course open to any discussion about the notion that Stephen Miller does not belong to such a far right philosophy.]
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 respon
"You keep using that word...
I do not think that it means
what you think it means..."
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