Trump admin slammed for using ethnic cleansing euphemism: ‘Wannabe Nazis’

The Department of Homeland Security relayed a message on social media Tuesday from its official X account: a single word that critics say is a blatant call for ethnic cleansing.

“Remigrate,” the post reads, a term that first saw prominence in Europe in the mid-20th century as a call to reverse migration through mass deportation of migrants.

“Yet further evidence that the DHS [X] account in particular is run by wannabe Nazis,” wrote British journalist and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan in a social media post Tuesday.

The term “remigration” has seen renewed usage in recent years amid the resurgence of far-right political parties across Europe, notably by Austrian political activist Martin Sellner, who’s identified himself as a neo-Nazi. Scholars, like University of South Florida professor Jose Angel Maldonado, have described the term as a “soft type of ethnic cleansing under the guise of deportation and segregation.”

“This official government account would appear to be run by far-right trolls deliberately trying to provoke a response by using a term openly associated with ethnic cleansing,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in a social media post on X. “They will likely attack anyone who points this out and express faux-outrage at the suggestion.”

Critics were also quick to note that the DHS social media post was made the same day as the bombshell report that revealed leadership of the Young Republicans were engaged in a private group chat that included praise for Adolf Hitler, with at least one person in the chat working in the Trump administration.