Former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino recently spoke at an international far-right gathering alongside white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
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Greg Bovino was the face of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He oversaw raids in Los Angeles and Chicago before being promoted to commander-at-large of the Border Patrol. He left the government earlier this year after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. But then recently, he appeared at a conference alongside neo-Nazis and white nationalists. NPR’s Huo Jingnan has more.
HUO JINGNAN, BYLINE: The conference held in Portugal is called the Remigration Summit. One of the organizers is Martin Sellner, an Austrian white nationalist widely credited with popularizing the term remigration. Sellner, a former neo-Nazi, calls for expelling most people of color from Europe, including legal residents and citizens. He bills remigration as a solution for the so-called great replacement, 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.
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GREG BOVINO: Well, thank you. Thank you very much.
HUO: Bovino was a headliner at the summit. 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. In his speech, Bovino thanked Sellner for inviting him and addressed him directly.
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BOVINO: 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.
HUO: Bovino has echoed some of Sellner’s talking points on social media, such as emphasizing how culturally unfit some immigrants are. Bovino did not respond to an interview request, and Sellner was not available before this story’s deadline. Bovino has left the Department of Homeland Security, and the department’s new head, Markwayne Mullen, recently said he is irrelevant. However, Bovino’s endorsement of remigration still carries weight, says Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
HEIDI BEIRICH: Well, 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, say, you know, he’s on the same page, and that Trump’s policies are essentially remigration.
HUO: Beirich says the influence of this extremist ideology is growing in Europe, in part thanks to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Whats more, the administration has itself adopted the term remigration.
BEIRICH: We know that Trump has tweeted the term, the Department of State is creating an Office of Remigration. DHS has put that term out there.
HUO: Just last month, the White House X account posted an image of the president crossing out the words replacement migration and replacing them with remigration in big letters. Huo Jingnan, NPR News.
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