Politics

Did you know that the U.S. government has an agency called the “Office of Remigration”? In case you’re unfamiliar with the term “remigration,” it’s typically used by white nationalists to describe the mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, done in the quest to ethnically cleanse “Western” countries. It’s mostly a European term, but Trump himself employed the phrase “reverse migration” last year, mainstreaming “remigration” on the American right—and true to its name, the office now helps facilitate mass removals in some very dark and sordid ways.

But a blockbuster Washington Post investigation just flushed the Office of Remigration’s activities out into the light. Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.

It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.