Back in 2018, a 19-year-old neo-Nazi going by the name “ThomasRyan” wrote in a private Discord server that a “vast remigration program” in the United States was the “best outcome we can stand to look at.” There was no mistaking what ThomasRyan meant by “remigration,” a term only he and his ilk were using at the time. It meant the forced removal of non-white people from the U.S., a process ThomasRyan imagined would begin with the U.S. government escorting “willing” non-white people to their “ethnic homelands.” The “unwilling” — that is, immigrants and U.S. citizens who refused to leave the country that is their home — would be rounded up in chains so the government could “dump them” somewhere abroad.
Fast forward to the present and ThomasRyan — real name Thomas Rousseau — is the leader of Patriot Front, a growing white supremacist group known for committing hate crimes across America. The vision of “remigration” he articulated eight years ago in a neo-Nazi message board has become official U.S. policy.
As America celebrated its birthday with fireworks and fairs and speeches extolling our “freedom,” Rousseau led hundreds of masked Patriot Front members on a march through the streets of Washington, D.C. chanting “Reclaim America!” And the White House and the Republican Party have fully embraced the term “remigration,” a euphemism with the clearest, most traceable of fascist lineages, designed just over a decade ago to soften or obscure the atrocities associated with its actual meaning: ethnic cleansing. | 
