A White House spokesperson’s attempt to cite the dictionary to “prove” that Donald Trump’s immigration policy isn’t racist has spectacularly backfired on her.
The U.S. State Department last year created a secretive “Office of Remigration” that was apparently inspired by Europe’s extremist movements seeking to expel people for simply being foreign.
The president has also repeatedly called for “remigration” or “reverse migration,” a previously fringe concept that has gained widespread attention in Europe thanks to a former neo-Nazi political activist from Austria.
But the Trump administration has been desperate to argue with its critics over the word’s meaning, saying that it does not mean forcibly expelling people from the country.
A new report in The Washington Post details how senior State Department officials originally objected to adopting the term “remigration” because of its roots in white supremacism.
They showed the acting remigration head a Wikipedia article that detailed the word’s racist origins, but during an all-hands call on June 9, 2025, the new Office of Remigration was announced.
Career officials continued to push back on the office, which seemed to promote “ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation or promoted voluntary return of non-white immigrants,” according to one staffer.
Trump officials, however, insisted it was the exact terminology they wanted.
Asked by the Post about the white supremacist associations, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement: “Not everything you dislike is racist. Remigrate literally means to migrate back. By returning illegal aliens to their origin country, we are simply enforcing our nation’s laws.”
Bis also included a link to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of “remigration,” though the entry didn’t have the intended effect.
As the Post pointed out, one of the definitions listed is “the forcible return of immigrants and often their descendants to the immigrants’ countries of origin.”
The White House has repeatedly denied remigration’s European extremist roots, while at the same time using white nationalist rhetoric and imagery to discuss Western values and Western civilization, NPR reported in December.
During his 2024 presidential campaign against former Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump vowed in a Truth Social post to “end the migrant invasion of America,” and to “revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).”
When a former Afghan special forces soldier opened fire on two National Guard members last November, the president used the deadly shooting as an excuse to attack immigrants and announce his plans to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” to “allow the U.S. system to fully recover” from a supposed influx of “illegal and disruptive populations.”
“Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the days following the shooting. “Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
The White House previously defended the policy in a statement to the Daily Beast, saying: “President Trump was elected as the president of the United States based on the many promises he made to the American people, including his promise to deport criminal illegal aliens. He is keeping his promise to the American people.”
But the Office of Remigration’s activities go far beyond deporting migrants to their countries of origin, according to the Post.
Trump’s remigration chief, Christian Ehrhardt, has negotiated at least $410 million worth of agreements with 31 African and Latin American countries to accept deportees who have no connection to the host country.
The 41-year-old career State Department official, who previously worked in embassy protection, is technically a deputy assistant secretary of state, but he negotiates the so-called third-country deportation deals as a “White House envoy” sent by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the Post reported.
The resulting contracts are meant to bypass statutory requirements—including human rights protections—that govern most foreign assistance spending, with some agreements involving countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, sources told the paper.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the State Department for comment.
