Employees inside the State Department office overseeing President Donald Trump's mass expulsion of migrants to third countries have grown so disturbed by the program that they are privately sharing news accounts of its human toll — attaching trigger warnings so colleagues can brace themselves before reading.
The office at the center of the program, formally named the Office of Remigration, was created last year inside the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration to negotiate deals sending deportees — many with no citizenship or prior ties to the receiving nation — to countries across Africa and Latin America, reported the Washington Post.
The administration has authorized or pledged more than $410 million to at least 31 countries to accept the arrangement, but the office's name has been a source of internal alarm since before it launched.
"Remigration" was popularized in recent years by Martin Sellner, an Austrian white nationalist and former neo-Nazi who has called for the mass expulsion of non-white immigrants from Europe.
According to the Post's reporting, a career State Department official confronted Spencer Chretien, the bureau's senior official at the time, with a printout of the term's Wikipedia definition during an internal meeting, and staffers later pressed the issue further on an all-hands call.
One employee wrote in a pointed question during that call that the term appeared to describe "ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation or promoted voluntary return of non-white immigrants," calling the choice "beyond alarming," but leadership did not budge.
"The answer we got back every single time is that it's not changing," one staffer who later resigned told the Post.
That unresolved friction has fed widespread demoralization inside the office, according to people who worked there.
Staffers have described watching colleagues process reports of migrants beaten by guards, denied food and cut off from lawyers and family in countries such as Equatorial Guinea, where dozens of third-country deportees have been held at a converted hotel owned by that country's vice president.
A group of human rights lawyers has since accused the country of forcibly returning migrants to the dangerous home countries they originally fled — a violation of international law known as refoulement.
One former staffer told the Post that departing colleagues have kept in touch over encrypted messaging apps, sharing links to news coverage of the deportees' treatment along with warnings that the material would "make you feel awful."
"Everybody feels pretty conflicted," the former employee said. "Morale is bad and it's busy, and people do not want to be doing what they're doing. It was a very painful thing."
The State Department did not answer detailed questions about the office's operations for the investigation, though it said in a statement that officials would use "all legal means to remove those with no right to remain in our country."
A federal appeals court ruled last week that the underlying third-country deportation policy is unlawful, but the administration is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.
