On Saturday morning, as hundreds of far-right activists and lawmakers from across Europe gathered outside a conference center in the central Portuguese town of Figueira da Foz, a group of half a dozen men dressed in identical uniforms of khaki chinos, dark blue shirts, and sunglasses marched into the parking lot.
On the lapels of their jackets, some wore the red and blue circular emblem of Patriot Front, the US white-supremacist group formed in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and known for marching in large numbers while wearing masks and targeting left-wing events. When WIRED asked one of the men if they were members of the group, he said yes.
This group was just one aspect of the flood of American far-right figures who traveled thousands of miles to attend the Remigration Summit, a conference held south of Porto featuring European political leaders and hundreds of others to discuss remigration, a racist, far-right European plan to expel minorities and immigrants from Western nations.
Prominent white supremacist Jared Taylor, president of the New York Young Republican Club Stefano Forte, and Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol leader who terrorized immigrant communities in Minneapolis and Chicago, were all present.
Bovino said he was there to forge closer links to European right-wing groups and claimed that remigration was already underway in the US, though it was not happening fast enough.
“Over the past year, remigration did actually occur [in the US] … but [they] got a long way to go,” Bovino told WIRED on Saturday. He then criticized the leaders now running the administration’s deportation efforts, including secretary of homeland security Markwayne Mullin. President Donald Trump “needs a little bit better advice, and Mullin’s a great guy, a great plumber, no doubt about that,” Bovino said. “He could probably fix a leaky faucet, but a hundred million illegal aliens is not a leaky faucet.” (Mullin previously ran a plumbing business.)
Remigration is a policy that has gained prominence in Europe over the past five years, thanks mainly to the efforts of conference organizer Martin Sellner, a former member of a neo-Nazi group who founded the far-right Identitarian Movement of Austria and was referred to as “the godfather of remigration” during the event.
Remigration, according to the plan Sellner published on his website, would ultimately see the removal of not only illegal immigrants in a country but also citizens who have not assimilated to the country’s cultures and traditions. The concept has been adopted by far-right political parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Vox in Spain, as Sellner has successfully forged close links to far-right parties across Europe. Some elected lawmakers espousing remigration spoke at the event.
In recent years, the concept has made its way across the Atlantic, where Trump and his administration have seemingly embraced the idea, setting up an Office of Remigration within the State Department and promoting the concept on social media.
Collaboration appeared to be the name of the game at Sellner’s conference, where Americans went to Europe to learn from their right-wing counterparts, exchange information, and make connections with far-right activists, extremist groups, and political parties.
Just before the conference began, media, including WIRED, were informed they would not be allowed to attend and were instead relegated to a tent in the car park that featured a small table, a handful of chairs, and a single iPad where the speeches from inside were streamed. The organizers said the decision was taken to protect the identities of some attendees who may lose their jobs if they were reported to be attending the event. (These attendees, who WIRED watched walk into the event, largely appeared to be young white men, most wearing virtually identical attire of tight-fitting chinos, bare ankles, and crisp white shirts.)
