Does a recently-created secret State Department office operate without oversight, promoting neo-Nazism? Well, the media says so.
Buried under a couple of layers in the bureaucracy of the longstanding Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration is the Office of Remigration. It has been there for about a year, and though it does not appear on the State organization chart online, it also does not appear to be much of a secret. In fact, if you call Foggy Bottom they’ll connect you to it. To be fair, the State Department has not publicly identified the senior official for the Office of Remigration, but that hardly justifies depicting the entire unit a secret.
Nevertheless, the mass media spots a chance to uncover, or to be seen as uncovering, a nefarious government plot. “Trump’s Secret Team Focused on ‘Remigration’ Exposed,” blared one headline in The New Republic. The most comprehensive article to date came from Wired. “Apparently named after a racist, far-right scheme to expel minorities and immigrants, the office is responsible for processing payments possibly worth tens of millions of dollars to facilitate the deportation of immigrants to countries they may not even originally be from,” wrote the author David Gilbert, whose sources provided quotes about the office’s alleged lack of accountability and monitoring.
Maybe I can help expose some “secrets” of the Office of Remigration.
The office must by law operate according to the same standards of accountability as the rest of the State Department, indeed, of every other office in government that does not live off a classified budget (and even they have accountability standards, albeit themselves classified). The Office of Remigration reports to the deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, who reports to the under secretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom, who reports to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. So any journalist claiming that there is not enough oversight needs some training in the subtle art of bureaucratic forensics, or at least some common sense.
What any of these offices do with the money Congress gives them is open to inquiry by Congress, by the various inspectors general roaming the U.S. government, and, in the extreme, by the Department of Justice. A State Department office cannot just make up its own rules. I know from experience: During Iraq’s postwar reconstruction, when I was giving out literal boxes of USG cash on behalf of State to Iraq’s “NGO” warlords with probable ties to terrorist groups, I had to create a long paper chain audited by my bosses.
So what does this not-so-secret Remigration Office actually do? It conducts the diplomacy necessary to ensure third-party countries will accept mostly non-resident deportees from America whose home country cannot or will not accept them. The Department of Homeland Security used to handle these chores, but the increase in third-country deportees apparently required a new office.
Expelling migrants to countries that are not their place of origin is becoming a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s deportation strategy. On the list of places third-country deportees have been sent to are Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Rwanda, South Sudan, Eswatini, Kosovo, Equatorial Guinea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Uganda, Paraguay, Honduras, Ecuador, Moldova, Poland, Uzbekistan, and Palau. Because of its proximity to the border, the vast majority of such deportees are sent to Mexico.
You may not like this White House action, but it’s not exactly a secret. Many of the agreements which govern these transfers are online. A February 2026 congressional investigation reported that the U.S. had paid more than $32 million to five foreign governments to facilitate the deportations.
Why are any deportees sent to a country not their home, and why so many? It’s worth emphasizing that much of this is nothing new: U.S. immigration law has long allowed deportation to a third country under certain circumstances, for example, when the home country refuses to issue travel documents. Sometimes, third-country deportations are for the deportees’ own good, as when the home country cannot provide “sufficient reliable assurances” that deportees will not be persecuted or tortured or sent to another country where they would be.
Other times, deporting someone to his or her home country is simply impractical. Cuba, China, and Russia accept very few of their own citizens as deportees, and those countries and others drag their bureaucratic feet on processing the few cases they do accept. Previous administrations were loath to send these people to a third country and instead allowed them to stay indefinitely in the U.S. The Trump administration reinterpreted existing law to more easily send deportees from America to an interim country, from which they can pursue eventual travel to their home country. Some 80 percent of these deportees do go home, significantly weakening claims that the system is unfair. Neither is it unique: Australia and Italy use third-country deportee systems. What is relatively new is Trump’s effort to build a standing network of countries willing to receive non-national deportees as a regular part of domestic immigration enforcement.
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The controversy surrounding the Office of Remigration relates more to its name than its actions or supposed secrecy. Critics often view the term “remigration” through its European political associations. The term was indeed popularized by the right-wing activist Martin Sellner and has been adopted by some European nationalist parties, including the national-populist Alternative for Germany. That the actual office in the State Department, however awkwardly named, just facilitates deportations of foreigners illegally in the United States seems not to matter to those who believe a racist conspiracy to rid the U.S. of nonwhite residents.
But if the goal were to make America white again, third-party deportations would be a slow way to do it. Estimates are that this program has deported 15,000 people, some 13,000 of which were pushed back over the southern border. (The Mexican government, of course, has for decades allowed millions of migrants, any one of whom could have sought asylum in Mexico, to pass freely through its territory to America). Considering the Obama administration recorded roughly three million removals and returns, the Remigration Office does not seem very good at reversing longstanding demographic trends—because that’s not its actual goal.
For journalists at liberal news outlets, such facts get in the way of a good “investigative” story based mostly on the office’s name. Thus, another fake-news Trump administration scandal is born.
