Kristi Noem went on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend to defend the White House’s latest immigration messaging, but the conversation quickly narrowed to a President Donald Trump’s use of “remigration.”
It was first used in a message from Trump, who wrote last week, “Only reverse migration can fully cure this situation.” The next day, the Department of Homeland Security echoed him with its own post: “Remigration now.” Those two notes raised eyebrows not only for their timing, but for the obvious question they left hanging, what exactly does this administration mean when it uses a term that has long been associated with Europe’s far right?
Moderator Kristen Welker asked Noem to define it asking, “This term has been used in different situations, but including by the far right in Europe to call for the mass deportation of non white immigrants,” Welker said. “How specifically does the Trump administration define remigration?”
Noem never quite got there.
Instead, she opened with a critique of the Biden years, saying that President Trump “has been working towards cleaning up the mess that Joe Biden left us ever since he came into the White House.” When Welker followed up, pressing her again to explain what the word actually means, Noem slid back to a familiar rhythm.
“First of all, we have criminal illegal aliens,” she said, launching into a description of deportation efforts. She claimed the administration has already removed “millions of people” in its first months, focusing on “murderers, rapists, and criminals” while also “encouraging people to go home” if they are in the country illegally. She warned that those who wait to be detained will be deported and “never get the chance to come back to America and visit us or become a citizen.”
Kristi Noem refuses to directly answer a question about what Trump means by “remigration” — a word that, as Kristen Welker notes, is often invoked by white nationalists in Europe pic.twitter.com/skLQAe0jiI
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 30, 2025
The longer she talked, the clearer it became that she wasn’t planning to define the word at all.
That silence matters, because outside the U.S., “remigration” is not a blank slate. Over the past decade, the term has been taken up by white nationalist and hard right parties in Europe, who use it as a kind of soft language for large-scale removal of immigrants, often including people who have lived in those countries for years.
Welker’s question reflected that context that it chooses to elevate a term that it cannot pretend is a neutral slogan. And yet, Noem’s answer implied precisely that, offering a narrow description of criminal enforcement while sidestepping any discussion of the version of “reverse migration” that Trump himself has hinted at.
Trump has already pushed well beyond the category of violent offenders, talking about revoking status for people deemed “non compatible with Western Civilization” and promising the largest set of deportations in modern history. When DHS posts “Remigration now,” it lands differently for audiences who know the word’s history.
The interview exposed that tension in real time as Welker asked a straightforward question. Noem chose a softer route, attaching the term to criminal cases without touching the more uncomfortable associations directly tied to it.
By the end, the word still had no official definition, just a cloud of implications. Noem defended the president’s agenda, offered warnings about dangerous migrants, and thanked Trump for restoring order. But the core question, what “remigration” means coming from a sitting president, went unanswered.
For a term with such a charged political meaning, the silence from Trump’s ICE queen was almost as revealing as an answer.
