# Office of Remigration The **Office of Remigration** is a unit of the [[Department of State]]'s [[Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]] (PRM). It was created in [[Marco Rubio]]'s 2025 reorganization of the department. Its main work is arranging and paying for **[[Third-Country Removal]]**: deals in which foreign governments agree to take deportees the United States cannot, or will not, send to their home countries. The name is the story. "[[Remigration]]" is the European far right's word for the mass expulsion of immigrants and their descendants. It came out of the French identitarian movement in the 2010s and was popularized by Austrian activist [[Martin Sellner]]. In January 2024 German linguists named it the *Unwort des Jahres* for 2023. Sixteen months later it was the name of an office in the U.S. government. The office sits inside the bureau built to resettle refugees, which now houses the office that removes migrants. ## Creation - **May 29, 2025.** Rubio's press statement "Next Steps on Building an America First State Department" sets out the reorganization. Axios reported the next day that the plan sent to Congress included an "Office of Remigration." - **The stated mission.** The department's 136-page notification to Congress, as reported by *Wired*, said the office would "actively facilitate the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin or legal status." - **Placement.** The reorganization folded PRM's work into three functional offices under a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Migration Matters. The Office of Remigration is one of the three. - **Staffing.** About **15 people**. A May 2025 congressional notification, as reported by *Wired*, said they were reassigned from the Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs. *The Bulwark* also describes a "fifteen-person unit." - **Structure.** Wikipedia's account of an August 2025 organization chart says the office was split into "Voluntary Returns and Maritime Migration" and "Overseas Solutions," the second meaning third-country deportations. That detail is uncited there and not independently confirmed here. Career officials objected to the name and were overruled. A staffer who later resigned told reporters: "The message we got was that was the exact terminology they wanted." ## What it does: buying third-country removals > [!warning] Sourcing — the program's financials rest on one investigation > The figures below come from a single *Washington Post* investigation by David Nakamura and Adam Taylor, published September 21, 2026, which cites internal documents. Since then they have been repeated by aggregators and commentators (Newser, *The Bulwark*) rather than confirmed by independent reporting. The office's **existence, placement and creation date** are confirmed against the State Department's own May 2025 announcement and contemporaneous reporting. The **dollar amounts and counts are attributed, not asserted.** According to that reporting: - **At least $410 million** was authorized or pledged to support deportation deals with **31 countries**, largely in Africa and Latin America. That includes roughly **$81 million in direct payments to 13 foreign governments**; the rest was routed through intermediary agencies. - **More than 25,000 people** have been sent to at least **28 countries**. - [[Stephen Miller]] ordered the deals. A former department official who resigned over the policy said the design wanted "fast money, with no strings attached," to get around congressional notification requirements for money going to governments known to be corrupt. - The old diplomatic safeguards against sending people to persecution were replaced with **"assurances"** from the receiving government. The deals work as a loophole. The receiving country either detains the deportee or sends them on to the home country that U.S. law or a court order bars the United States from sending them to. The stated goal is deterrence: people already in the country self-deport, and others do not come. **Who negotiates.** Accounts of the *Post* investigation disagree on names. Newser and *The Bulwark* name [[Andrew Veprek]], the assistant secretary who heads PRM, as the senior official involved and a Miller ally. Heather Cox Richardson's September 23, 2026 letter named a "Christian Ehrhardt." Wikipedia also cites the *Post* for the involvement of Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau. This page names Veprek because of his formal role as bureau head. It does not say which official personally secured the deals. ## Legal status The office's main product has been in court since 2025, in the *D.V.D. v. DHS* class action (full history at [[Third-Country Removal]]): - **September 18, 2026.** The First Circuit held that rapid removals to unrelated countries are unlawful without a "meaningful" chance to raise safety claims. - **September 23, 2026.** The First Circuit dissolved its stay. The government then made its third emergency trip to the Supreme Court. - **September 29, 2026.** The Supreme Court **granted the government a stay** of the classwide judgment without explanation, over the dissents of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson. It also granted certiorari (No. 26-426), with argument set for December 9, 2026. Removals can continue in the meantime. ## Why it matters for the KB The Office of Remigration is the clearest case in the vault of a far-right coinage **becoming an institution**. Earlier steps were rhetoric: Trump's September 2024 post, his June 2025 "It's called Remigration," DHS's "Remigration now." Those can be walked back or explained away. An office is different. It has a budget line, a staff, an organization chart and a negotiating mandate. Sellner treated the American adoption of the word as a "meta political victory," and the office's creation was praised by European far-right figures including Sellner himself. When the department was challenged, it pointed to the word's dictionary meaning. The office's actual work fits the movement's meaning: moving people to countries they have never lived in, which is not "returning" anywhere. The office also fits two of the vault's recurring patterns: - **Hollowed, not abolished.** PRM was not shut down. It was repurposed. The refugee bureau's machinery for relationships with foreign governments and funding them through intermediaries now runs removals. - **The bypass that works.** The money moves through foreign-assistance channels built for humanitarian aid, which is what lets it avoid the scrutiny a DHS deportation budget would get. ## Related [[Remigration]] · [[Third-Country Removal]] · [[Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]] · [[Department of State]] · [[Marco Rubio]] · [[Stephen Miller]] · [[Andrew Veprek]] · [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]] · [[Department of Homeland Security]] · [[ICE]] · [[Martin Sellner]] · [[Remigration Summit]] · [[Second Trump Administration]]