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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In Portugal, hundreds of far-right activists gathered Saturday for the annual “Remigration Summit” advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants. Former U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and white nationalist leader Jared Taylor were VIP guests alongside elected officials from Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant AfD party and Spain’s Vox. Other attendees included Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club.
In an interview ahead of the event, Greg Bovino cited Nazi Germany’s lead general, Erwin Rommel, as an inspirational figure. At the summit, Bovino said, quote, “If there is inspiration gained from the U.S. Border Patrol model and method, then fantastic.”
AMY GOODMAN: Gregory Bovino led the Trump administration’s militarized immigration crackdowns in Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Earlier this year, he appeared in Minneapolis wearing a long olive wool overcoat that some online observers likened to, quote, “a Nazi cosplay coat.” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s social media press account called it “Nazi-coded.”
Bovino was eventually removed from his position in January after immigration agents under his command killed 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Pretti was shot dead two weeks after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.
During an interview outside the so-called Remigration Summit in Portugal, Bovino criticized the Trump administration.
GREGORY BOVINO: The base is not very happy now over what’s happening immigration-wise. They voted for mass deportations. Mass deportations are not occurring. There are no mass deportations occurring in the United States right now. So, those MAGA voters, those 80 million that came out to vote for him in the polls, are not happy campers right now.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Vienna, Austria, to speak with the reporter Charles Davis, who writes for The Guardian and also runs The Redoubt, where his new piece is headlined “Why did the press ignore a gathering of the world’s leading fascists?”
Charles, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you talk about what remigration is and the significance of Bovino being there?
CHARLES R. DAVIS: Yeah, so, remigration is basically the policy response to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. And the great replacement conspiracy theory, as I think, unfortunately, a lot of your viewers will already know about, is the idea that there’s like a global elite plot, typically by Jews, to replace white Europeans and white North Americans with immigrants via mass migration. So, “remigration” was a term that was popularized a few years ago by an Austrian activist named Martin Sellner. He’s also the guy who helped popularize the great replacement conspiracy theory.
And it basically is — it’s an argument for mass deportations not just of illegal criminals, as is the typical rhetoric you would hear from the Trump administration and far-right parties here in Europe, but it’s the idea that we need to actually, like, reverse the 20th century, that the issue is not just the immigrants who came in the last few years seeking asylum or refugee status, but those who were allowed in over the last hundred years who were not really, as they see it, European or American.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Charles, could you explain why — you mentioned earlier — why is this remigration idea attributed to Jews, this global plot?
CHARLES R. DAVIS: Well, actually, yeah, my original piece that I wrote last week, I spoke to a professor at the University of Vienna named Daniel Sharp, who explained that this is basically rooted in Nazi ideology. Like, the idea — specifically, let’s talk about Germany and Austria. The idea that certain people were not German and Austrian, despite the fact that they had lived in this area for hundreds of years, despite the fact that they had citizenship, that was very much the Nazi idea. And in fact, remigration back then, before it became the Holocaust, was the idea that we would expel Jews to places like Madagascar.
So, when it’s — when it’s popularized now, like, I mean, this is why it caused such a controversy a few years ago when Martin Sellner was meeting with members of Alternative für Deutschland. In 2023, the German outlet Correctiv reported that there was a secret meeting in Potsdam between Sellner and leaders of the AfD. And that caused national protests, because Germans know their history, right? They know what happens when you start saying certain Germans are more Germans than others.
And I think what is so alarming about this summit is that these people, including the AfD lawmakers that attended this, AfD lawmaker Lena Kotré and the AfD press that showed up to give her a platform, they’re now doing it out in the open. And I think that is maybe one of the lessons they’ve learned from Donald Trump. They’ve been both emboldened and empowered by him, and they’ve also learned that the way you get away with this kind of stuff and get away with this kind of crazy, conspiratorial and, you know, policy of ethnic cleansing, which I think you can call remigration — the way you get away with it is not by having secret meetings that the press can then expose. You just do it out in public, and you say, “There’s no — there’s nothing scandalous here. We’re doing this out in public. We’re organizing on Facebook.” In fact, that’s where I first learned about this summit, paid Facebook ads by the group Reconquista, which is a far-right Portuguese group, which is named after the idea of mass expulsions of Muslims historically from the Iberian Peninsula. And so, now it’s all out in the open.
And if we can be grateful to Greg Bovino for anything, it’s to drawing some attention to this, and also spelling out what they mean by remigration. It is not just deporting so-called illegals. Greg Bovino, when he was criticizing the Trump administration, you know, I’m less interested in his sour grapes, and more in the fact that he spelled out that he thinks there are 100 million “illegal aliens” in the United States. Now, most credible experts would tell you there are 12 million tops. But if you were paying attention during the 2024 campaign, you might have seen Donald Trump and JD Vance making that number go a little bit higher every time they spoke. It hit 20 million, it hit 30 million, and now it hit 100 million. And I think that speaks to the fact that they’re not just trying to get people out based on pure legal status. You have to view it in the context of trying to eliminate birthright citizenship and rolling back the 20th century. It’s getting rid of people that came over the last hundred years who they define as not American or not European enough, in the European context.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, if you could say a little bit more about the way in which Trump and his administration generally have been advancing and elevating this idea, and in particular the fact that the State Department has pledged to create an office for remigration? What is the status of that? Has it been established? And what is its purpose?
CHARLES R. DAVIS: Well, you know, the Trump administration, there’s always a little bit of dance that the far right does. There are those that are like the public figures that say, “You know, remigration, don’t get too scared about it. We actually just mean deporting criminals.” That is what the AfD did after their secret meeting with Martin Sellner was exposed a few years ago. If you go to their website, they say, “We just mean getting rid of, like, the people that have committed violent crimes, etc.” And same with the Trump administration.
I do not know if they actually succeeded in establishing this, but the whole department of remigration that they were going to establish from under the State Department was ostensibly about voluntary self-deportation. Of course, when you get them to speak honestly at summits like just happened over the weekend, you see that it’s not just about getting out a certain amount of “illegal aliens,” as they call them, or getting people to self-deport. I mean, they would get people to self-deport by creating such a hostile environment and, I think, through state force to get them expelled.
And in terms of remigration in Europe, the United States State Department has actually endorsed this great replacement conspiracy theory. In the U.S. National Security Strategy document that was released last December, the Trump administration warned that majority non-Europeans were taking over Europe and that Europeans faced a stark prospect of civilizational erasure, and that, should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. Now, living here in Vienna, I can tell you that that is not really taking place. You know, there are definitely more immigrants here than there were 20 years ago, but the idea that they’re facing civilizational erasure for white Austrians, that is — it’s conspiratorial.
And I think what upsets me so much about the coverage of this and just the far-right extremism, in general, is that if you — you sound kind of crazy when you talk about it. When you say that the face of Donald Trump’s deportation policy and a young Republican leader, Stefano Forte, are going to Europe to meet with self-described fans of Adolf Hitler, people that you can fairly describe as neo-Nazi activists, to talk about a plan for ethnic cleansing, it sounds crazy, because, you know, we should acknowledge that there has been some reporting on this — it’s not just people like myself — but you have not seen any coverage from CBS News, you’ve not seen any coverage from The Washington Post, and you’ve not seen any coverage from The New York Times. And I think that is a huge problem, because The New York Times, especially, is an institution that could make this something more than just a one-day story, that could press the Trump administration to answer: When did they realize that Greg Bovino was a Nazi sympathizer? — and to press Republicans in New York and elsewhere: Do you agree with Stefano Forte in his efforts to forge a kind of neofascist transatlantic alliance?
AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to ask you more about Bovino and why people should care, since he has been ousted. You have him tweeting from Newark — many people wondered if he had gone to Delaney — but on his way to Portugal, “Sen. Mullin” — he was talking about the new DHS secretary — “and the rest of them have been trying to handle these riots and… well, let’s just say it’s not going great. For those of you in the comments section, give a vote. Should I just handle this myself? Those agents’ lives are at stake due to this inaction.” And then you have — let me go to Greg Bovino speaking to Newsmax about the hunger strike at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark.
GREGORY BOVINO: As far as the facilities, those facilities are actually — I think they’re too good, fantastic facilities. Those detainees get everything they need. But what they really need is deporting. And we need to expand this facility so we can get even more detainees in there. Carl, hey, I’ve heard about a hunger strike, which, you know, I think that’s fake news anyway. But if they did, well, I’m OK with that, because if they lose weight, we can get even more people on planes for deportation.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Bovino talking to Newsmax. And, of course, you had Tom Homan, the so-called border czar, denying there’s a hunger strike, but then saying he would force-feed prisoners there. And then you have Bovino saying, “You have the world watching and supporting your efforts to hold the line,” he’s saying to ICE agents at Delaney. “Every one of us wants to be shoulder to shoulder with you. In speaking with the Mean Green Team, they send you support and are wishing you the best.” He also talked about ”ICE Agents at Delaney, hang in there.” This is extremely interesting, given he is both supporting them and criticizing the Trump administration. Your final comment on this, the role he plays?
CHARLES R. DAVIS: Well, yeah, I think he does speak for the MAGA base. And I think it’s interesting that when he criticizes the Trump administration, he is criticizing the czars around him. It’s always the bad advisers. He’s not criticizing Stephen Miller or Donald Trump. And I think he’s right not to, because I think Stephen Miller and Donald Trump share the remigration agenda that he has.
And I think it’s interesting, since we’re talking about him showing up to Newark, or at least faking that he would. You know, for several days, organizers of this summit had been teasing that they would have a special guest star. And in the weeks leading up to it, I kind of wondered who that was. I thought, “Is it going to be a former Fox News anchor? Is it going to be Nick Fuentes?” And then Greg Bovino posted on X a photo of himself with — giving what can only be described as a Nazi salute. And I think at that exact moment I realized it is him. It is him. And I checked the Telegram channel for the summit, and they had just announced him.
And I think that is what is alarming, because I think he does speak, in an unfiltered way, what Stephen Miller and Donald Trump would like to say, but they are prevented to by their — the Susie Wiles, who know, again, this kind of fascist dance, that you cannot come out and say this. You can hint at it by embracing the term “remigration,” but when the broader public asks you what that means, you tell them it’s not the scary thing that it totally does mean, and which you are signaling to your far-right supporters that you yourself support.
It would be easier to dismiss this Hitlerian greeting as an awkward gesture — as some did when X's owner, Elon Musk, gave it at Trump's 2025 inauguration — were it not selected and shared by a man on his way to a racial-purity conference. The "Remigration Summit 2026," so called, was held May 30 at the Salmanha Residence hotel just south of Porto, Portugal, and its organizers were not subtle.
"Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions," argues Afonso Gonçalves, chief organizer of the event. He's the founder of the far-right group Reconquista, so named for the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. That's who Bovino was photographed standing next to after he landed in Europe.
Martin Sellner, an extremist from Austria, is best known for pushing the "great replacement" conspiracy theory — that Jewish elites are seeking to exterminate the white race via mass migration — that has motivated mass shooters from Pennsylvania to New Zealand. He was the other man standing next to Bovino.
Other speakers included a Belgian fascist convicted of Holocaust denial and the founder of a Swiss neo-Nazi group called "Junge Tat" who is quite open about his fondness for "National Socialism."
I first learned of this gathering on Facebook, where it was promoted by Reconquista with paid advertising (Meta refused to comment or to take down the ads). The only secret was its precise location.
And yet? No media outlet in the English-speaking world covered the fact that a former Trump administration official was at a gathering of the world's leading fascists to promote "remigration," a far-right euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the United States and Europe.
Major media outlets also ignored the presence of Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club. A spokesperson for the group — informed of the extremist views (and criminal convictions) of those attending — told The Redoubt that it would "never apologize for standing alongside our European brothers and sisters."
One of the only outlets that covered this event — and certainly the first — was The Redoubt. The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on the presence of Rocio de Meer Méndez, a politician with the far-right Vox party; Europe's Politico covered it too. But otherwise? As of Sunday afternoon, coverage appeared largely limited to the far-right outlets that were invited, such as the AfD-affiliated Deutschland Kurier (Alternative für Deutschland lawmaker Lena Kotré was another featured speaker).
The mainstream right is crawling into the sewer of neo-Nazi ideology but you probably wouldn't know it unless you were a right-wing extremist yourself. Even news outlets that dedicate significant resources to covering the scourge of antisemitism generally ignore it, at least in the United States, when it comes from Republican operatives and retired Trump administration officials.
There is no need to argue about whether there is a double standard; the lack of media coverage speaks for itself. The only question is why it exists.
Right-wing capture of the corporate media in the United States is one response; there's just no incentive to highlight one side of the aisle's extremists.
Bari Weiss, an opinion columnist with no record of actual reporting, was handed full control over CBS News based on her willingness to turn it into a mouthpiece for its new owners' politics. ABC paid Donald Trump millions of dollars for the crime of accurately describing his civil liability for sexual assault. Jeff Bezos has turned The Washington Post into a conservative blog, and not a particularly interesting one.
These outlets will cover extremism and antisemitism if the dots can be connected to an elected Democrat, no question, but not when it's the other way around. After all, it is in the interests of their ownership, and the reactionary cause, for right-wing politics to be seen as a necessarily brutish response to the dangers of a loony left.
But I think it's more than that. I think it's that we, broadly speaking, demand nothing from the right, even if we don't share the politics. When illiberal figures behave badly, as they are wont to do — when they give voice to their basest and oft-libidinal desires and hatreds — it is viewed as akin to a mangy dog chewing on a slipper. They are not defying expectations; they can't really be helped.
Whether from sympathy or condescension, far-right politics are interpreted as naturally occurring in a way that left-wing politics are not. Small-minded, reactionary tribalism is the default setting of the world, or so it is thought. It's only news, and only interesting, when someone who purports to be better shows that they're not.
Eventually, though, what's left of the free press will have to reckon with the fact that the far-right fringe is now the modern world's governing elite — and openly declaring an intent to repeat the 1930s. That's a story.
Screen capture of Google News taken May 31, 2026. 
