Remigration Summit 2026: Europe’s far right looks to ICE for inspiration

by HOPE not hate Europe Team

At a hotel complex around an hour and a half drive south of Porto, several hundred people gathered for the second Remigration Summit. Promotional material for the event portrayed it as something aspirational: a movement in celebration and defence of European culture. 

The first summit, last year in Milan, was meant to kick-start the movement and introduce the remigration idea to a wider audience. At the 2026 event, the emphasis had shifted to the next stage: how advocates’ mass deportation dreams could be made a policy reality.

At the event were prominent activists of the European identitarian and anti-immigrant movements. Martin Sellner, probably the most well-known extreme right activist in Europe, was there, as well as Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek. A small number of Brits included Steve Laws, the founder of the activist group Remigration Now, and other social media influencers associated with Restore Britain, a new far-right party praised by Sellner. 

Also present were many people associated with European far-right parties. These include Kay Gottschalk, a German MP and co-founder of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, as well as AfD state-level representatives and party members Juliane Waehler, Sven Tritschler and Lena Kotré and many other militants for the party and its youth wing Generation Deutschland. Björn Höcke, another prominent AfD figure, sent a video message.

Slovak MEP and remigration advocate Milan Mazurek attended, as was Thierry Baudet, leader of the Dutch far-right Forum voor Democratie. And there was a wide cross-section of other European militants, far-right media organisations, independent content creators, as well as cryptocurrency and AI advocates.

Here come the Americans

But the most revealing presence was a large cadre of Americans. These include headline speaker Gregory Bovino, until recently President Trump’s ‘deporter in chief’. Speaking alongside Bovino was Stefano Forte, leader of the New York Young Republicans Club.

Veteran white supremacist figurehead Jared Taylor made his second summit appearance, spending a large part of the event outside with the journalists barred from entering. Members of the US white supremacist Patriot Front were spotted, as were Zach and Barbara Halkias, two MAGA activists from Pennsylvania, among many other Americans.

People inside the event remarked on the Americans’ presence, and their influence came through in the summit’s programme. Bovino’s speech won a standing ovation, after which he was asked by a conference organiser if he might ‘stick around’ in Europe to impart some more of his mass deportation experience. The enthusiasm was not just coming from the stage. At one point a group of Americans in the audience began chanting “USA! USA! USA!”, a notable turn in a movement that has long looked at the US with suspicion.

“This is the most exciting movement that I’ve seen in probably my entire life,” said Bovino in an interview on the margins of the summit. “Immigration, remigration and mass deportations are the number one issue for the preservation of our culture, the preservation of our society. […] The movement spans across the ocean into the United States, and the interesting thing is the problems are the same problems with the same solutions. I think that’s why we are all very interested in what’s happening in Europe, whereas Europe conversely was interested in what was happening in the United States with our mass deportation campaign.”

Bovino knows what he is talking about. As President Trump’s former “commander at large” of US Border Patrol, he is to many the face of the indiscriminate mass violence waged by the US government in the name of immigration control. He was apparently demoted and removed from Minneapolis after two people were shot to death amid anti-ICE protests, though the actual details of what happened remain unclear. Since then, Bovino has criticised the Trump administration for being soft on deportations.

European remigration advocates are aware of Bovino’s record. The adulation he received at ‘ReSum26’ shows what the remigration project is really all about. Remigration looks like what ICE is doing in the US, but at a larger scale. European advocates are clearly eager to benefit from the experience of those who have already begun this kind of mass violence. 

Stefano Forte of the New York Young Republicans seemed to also endorse the vision for mass deportations, far beyond what is already happening in the US. After his speech, he told Swedish far-right vlogger Christian Peterson that in the US there lacked the “political will” for the kind of mass deportation project dreamed of at ReSum26. In Forte’s view, the protections and due process inherent in a democratic system are to blame: “That is the fundamental problem with democracy. The moment you do something, you’re up for scrutiny. Long-term planning is not rewarded, only short-term planning is rewarded. […] people want democracy and they demand a dictator.”

Trying to go mainstream

In her speech, Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek – who has made a name for herself by linking immigration to women’s safety – remarked that “since last year’s summit, we have managed to do something incredible. We have managed to make the term remigration mainstream”. 

Vlaardingerbroek went on to introduce a petition called the Save Europe Act which, if it reaches one million signatures, would be presented to the European Union as part of the ‘European Citizens’ Initiative’. This petition is the closest the summit came to a concrete policy proposal. Nonetheless, in speeches and conversation with press outside, the organisers pushed the policy angle, describing successive stages designed to make each seem reasonable and obscuring the real intent of remigration. 

Other attempts to lend legitimacy to the idea were a presentation from the US right-wing think tank the White Papers Policy Institute, which appears to focus only on advocating anti-immigration policies, as well as the presence of Jean-Yves Gallou, a veteran former politician and extreme-right intellectual in France. While the former attempted to give a scientific veneer to the remigration concept, the latter was there for intellectual decorum.

What is remigration

“Remigration” is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. It attempts to obscure its real intent through bureaucratic and procedural language – talking about ‘voluntary’ departures and staged deportation – rather than acknowledging that such a mass deportation project would be impossible without ICE-style violence. This allows activists to talk about mass deportation as a measured policy programme while presenting themselves as clear-headed analysts and policymakers responding to a specific problem.

The ultimate goal is to introduce mass deportations into European policy, something advocates present as relatively simple if consensus on the issue was reached. 

“[Remigration] would be very easy,” said Martin Sellner on an episode of the European Conservative podcast in early 2026. “If millions can come in illegally, it would be logistically possible to bring them home legally. The problem is political willpower, and it is lacking because the right is lacking real morality, a real legitimacy”.

Advocates such as Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek want to emulate the way that, in the US, decades of lobbying against pro-immigration policies and in favour of unrestrained police powers created the conditions for the mass border violence seen under President Trump’s ICE regime. 

In order to turn this idea into policy, and following the US model of suit-and-tie lobbying, Europe’s remigration advocates first need to make the idea seem respectable, presenting it as a cool-headed policy response to increasing insecurity, cultural decay and violence against women. At the same time, advocates need to downplay controversy, by distancing remigration from its white supremacist origins.

The organisers appeared to feel they had put on a more professional show, compared to the much more chaotic 2025 summit in Milan. Referencing that summit, this year Eva Vlaardingerbroek remarked “that entire town was in lockdown, there were police vans escorting us to the venue. So I’m really happy that none of that was necessary [in Portugal]. Look at us!” 

In his own speech, after evoking a desire to build on last year’s summit, Sellner clearly evoked his desire for mainstream legitimacy, leaning hard on the petition as a first step towards policy.

“Trust me, this [the Save Europe Act] is going to be big. It’s not just a new online petition, it’s a powerful tool that was hidden until Eva discovered it. If we reach one million, it will legitimise the idea of remigration and it will force the European Commission to talk to Eva and me. How cool is that? They will have to sit down and talk to us!”