How a once fringe idea became a Trump administration mantra

0:00Last month, after an Afghan national was charged in the shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.

0:12A few days later, aboard Air Force One, reporters asked what the president meant. His response? It means get people out that are in our country. Get them out of here. This is not the first time President Trump has used this term, reverse migration or re-migration, as it's sometimes referred to. On the campaign trail last year, he said on social media that he would, quote, quote, return Kamala's illegal immigrants to their home countries. And then in parentheses, quote, also known as re-migration. Today, the president's deportation agenda is well underway. The first deportation flight has landed at Guantanamo Bay.

0:47It's deportations of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador. Inside, a deportation flight from the United States to Cuba. Judge this weekend blocked the deportation of hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children. Since the National Guard shooting, the U.S. has further curtailed immigration from 19 countries. Some extremism experts say they are surprised to see the term re-migration enter U.S. policy because of its ties to white nationalism. Heidi Beyrick is with the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. When I think about this, I cannot believe that a federal government in the United States would use terms that come from white supremacists.

1:28There's always been some sort of barrier to that being mainstreamed. Consider this. One hallmark of both terms of President Trump has been an effort to stop immigration and to deport those without legal status. Coming up, a look at the far-right concept that the Trump administration has been using to describe its agenda.

1:55From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang.

2:06It's Consider This from NPR. Odette Youssef covers the extremism beat here at NPR. After an Afghan national was charged in the ambush of two National Guardsmen last month in D.C., she dug into the ideas behind the terms remigration and reverse migration. She joined me to explain the once fringe idea that's become a mantra for the Trump administration's deportation efforts. Hi, Odette. Hey, Elsa. Okay, so where exactly within this administration are you seeing these calls for reverse migration or re-migration as it's sometimes referred to, right? Right. So President Trump on Thanksgiving Day posted to social media about how immigration policies have hurt, quote, gains in living conditions for many.

2:50And he said only reverse migration can fully cure this situation. But also the State Department's proposed reorganization plan included a new office of remigration. And the Department of Homeland Security has called for remigration on social media posts. One of them, for example, Elsa, with simply the word remigrate. OK, so what does remigrate exactly mean? Well, here's how Heidi Beirich explained it to me. She's with the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Basically, what it means is ethnically cleansing or forcibly deporting from traditionally white countries everybody who's not white.

3:28That's the idea. The idea is often attributed to a French novelist who became known as the originator of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which is this baseless claim that white Christian Europeans are being systematically replaced by immigrants in an attempt to dilute European or Western cultures. And remigration was the solution he proposed. And the idea was that it would be a kind of organized removal of immigrants and even the children of immigrants. And Elsa, these were fringe ideas earlier this century, but they are now associated with a movement that cuts across Europe known as the Identitarian Movement and which has increasingly informed party politics there and here.

4:12Right now. Okay, so talk more about that. Like how have these ideas become mainstream today? So the change is largely attributed to an extreme right Austrian political activist named Martin Selner. He's a former neo-Nazi, and now he heads up an international network called Generation Identity. And he has worked to bring terms like re-migration into popular discourse. I spoke to Julia Ebner about this. She heads the Violin Extremism Lab at the University of Oxford, and she has sat in on strategy sessions for identitarian groups. She says they staged events to create uncertainty and fear because then they found that people were more open to their extreme ideas.

4:56The strategy was all about controlled provocation and strategic polarization. So they were launching media stunts in the streets of from Vienna to Berlin to Paris, where they tried to generate as much media attention as they could possibly get from, for example, simulating a terrorist attack in the heart of Vienna or putting a burka on top of an old statue. So their idea was to really to provoke strategically and step by step to move the Overton window. The Overton window, Elsa, refers to the range of policy ideas that the public considers acceptable. Remigration for a long time fell outside that window, but that's no longer true.

5:40No longer true. I mean, it is interesting that these ideas are so strongly associated with Europe. Like, how did they take root here in the U.S. then? So a personal story. Years ago, I was interviewing someone who was in charge of recruitment in the Midwest for a group called Identity Europa, which at the time was the U.S.-based identitarian group. And I remember asking him, how did he think the U.S. would become a white nation if not with violence? And he said he thought people would just re-migrate. I think that was the first time I heard the term. And it sounded ridiculous to me. Why would millions of people who had put down stakes just willingly uproot?

6:21Well, years later, remigration has been operationalized. We are seeing it with immigration operations in L.A., Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and so on. I did some reporting from Chicago about the disorder, the tear gas, the pepper guns, military-style raids and beatings that occurred in that operation in places that didn't normally see those things. And so it has been clear that the removal of people is violent. But what are you hearing, Odette, from White House officials when they are being asked why they are using terms that are adopted by white nationalists? The White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department all rejected or didn't acknowledge the European extremist roots of this policy idea when I asked them about it.

7:05But I think it's important also to add the context of other terms that this administration has been using, you know, talking about Western values, Western civilization, chiding European allies for making themselves vulnerable to civilizational suicide or civilizational erasure. Bayerich says this is language that sits firmly within the rhetoric of the identitarian and broader white nationalist movement. That is NPR's Odette Youssef. Thank you so much, Odette. Thank you. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Andrew Sussman, Justine Kennan, and Courtney Dorning.

7:40Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

7:48It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.