Greg Bovino surfaces at Europe ‘remigration’ summit

Greg Bovino’s – Greg Bovino, the former U.S. Border Patrol commander who led a Trump-era paramilitary assault in Minneapolis last winter, returned to the spotlight as the star of a “Remigration Summit” held at a Portuguese resort. The event drew attention from European far-ri

When Greg Bovino arrived for a so-called “Remigration Summit” at a Portuguese resort last weekend. it wasn’t just another eccentric gathering on the European far-right calendar. It was a spotlight moment for a former U.S. Border Patrol commander whose name is tied. in the account presented here. to the Trump administration’s paramilitary assault on Minneapolis last winter—and whose political mythology has traveled farther than his official role ever did.

The summit positioned Bovino as its star attraction. even as the central idea of “remigration” is. to critics. a new coat of paint on ethnic cleansing. Organizers framed the project as a “technocratic” plan to remove so-called “unassimilated” people—described as mostly nonwhite—from majority-white nations in “Europe and the West. ” regardless of citizenship or birthplace.

Bovino isn’t a figure without warning signs. The account surrounding him traces a pattern through his own public signals: he cites Nazi general Erwin Rommel as an inspiration. wears an olive overcoat described by German media as recalling the attire of an “elegant SS officer. ” and has suggested there may be 100 million “deportable individuals” in the United States—an estimate presented here as roughly 30 percent of the entire population. The piece argues that you can’t deport that many people without destroying civil society and the U.S. economy, and it adds that even removing a third would collide with the basic principles of citizenship.

The summit’s lineup underscored how deeply the “remigration” conversation overlaps with extremist styling and ideological ancestry. even when mainstream European far-right parties tried to distance themselves from the event. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France reportedly avoids the term entirely. Germany’s AfD faced a public-relations backlash after an earlier remigration event in 2023.

At the Portuguese resort gathering, the focus instead landed on figures described as coming from more marginal parties. They included Austrian “remigration guru” Martin Sellner. described as possessing another Nazi-themed haircut; Afonso Gonçalves from Portugal’s Reconquista. a name said to recall the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula in the 15th century; and Andrea Ballarati. who left Italy’s main far-right party to found an identitarian group called Azione Cultura Tradizione.

The account also looks for continuity across time and rhetoric. It says Sellner is a protégé of German “nationalist intellectual” Götz Kubitschek. who has cited Carl Schmitt. described here as a leading political theorist of the Nazi era. as a key influence. It adds that the contemporary Falangist movement in Spain borrows its name and iconography from Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. and it follows Britain’s anti-immigrant movement backward through the British National Party and the National Front skinheads of the ‘70s to Oswald Mosley’s overtly pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s.

Even the language from earlier nationalist gatherings is treated as a bridge. The piece points to the Montreux Fascist Conference of 1934. where participants focused on an enemy said to have “installed themselves as if on foreign territory… exercising an influence harmful to the material and moral interests of the nation which shelters them”—described as aimed at Jews—while it says today’s right-wing crusaders use nearly identical language directed at Muslim immigrants. It calls the idea that the remigration agenda isn’t shaped by antisemitic conspiracy theory a moral blindness.

Inside the U.S. political orbit, the spotlight reached beyond Bovino. The summit also included veteran white supremacist crank Jared Taylor. author of “White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century. ” and a “young man named Stefano Forte. ” described as president of the New York Young Republicans. The account says Forte previously appeared in Salon in coverage tied to reporting by Russell Payne on a “campaign” to get Zohran Mamdani deported. and it adds that this effort does not appear to have succeeded.

For American readers, the story’s emotional weight comes from the disconnect between official power and public spectacle. Bovino no longer holds any official position. and the account dismisses the rest of the people at the summit as “irrelevant losers.” But it argues that is not a satisfactory explanation for why mainstream U.S. media treated the entire event as too distasteful to acknowledge.

To support that claim, the account says only Wired, Politico, NPR and Democracy Now! covered the summit at all, and that most of that coverage was based on reporting by independent journalist Charles Davis, formerly of Salon and now in Europe.

The reporting described here emphasizes that nothing about the summit appears designed to hide: it says organizers promoted it through Facebook posts directed to a public website. and that the summit involved no closed-door meetings at undisclosed locations. It ties the public nature of the event to another example from October, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to a DHS propaganda video starring Bovino. quoting Newsom’s view that “They aren’t even trying to hide who they are.”.

That October DHS video starring Bovino is used in this account to frame a broader question: how does a media culture draw the line between someone who “quacks like a duck” and someone who is. in substance. dangerous. The piece suggests Bovino never tried to hide who he was. and it points to the fact that he lasted as long as he did as the public face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

It also spells out what it calls the brutal turning points that eventually made Bovino too hot for the White House. The account says his “poorly trained thugs” killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis. and that public opinion began to shift against his reckless campaign of state terror.

But if the political system moved him out of official visibility. the account says that he remains a resonant figure to committed elements of the MAGA base—specifically those who fear Donald Trump cannot go fast enough or far enough. It portrays Bovino as selling out to “the weak-willed Panicans and traitorous Marxist liberals. ” reflecting. in the account. a factional fight inside the broader movement. In this telling. Bovino is less an anomaly than an embodiment: the “MAGA soul. ” described here as “deeply and enthusiastically fascist. ” eager to revive Nazism’s legacy.

The story ends with a counterweight that is meant to be as unsettling as it is deflating. It argues that Bovino was not just dangerous but also. in Portugal. came off as “physically small” and as “a pathetic little dweeb. ” after losing his BDSM-sexy-cop Halloween-style appearance. The account says Bovino told reporters on the scene that MAGA true believers had voted for mass deportation and that. since he and Kristi Noem were banished. they’re getting only a “pale imitation” and are very sad.

For the author of this account. the contradiction is the point: it is described as “hilarious and tragic and ultimately unforgivable. all at the same time” that a person presented as both shallow and inconsequential was given secret-police powers of life and death by the president of the United States.

Where the situation stands now. in the scope of this report. is simple: Bovino is out of office. the event has already happened. and the public record of what was said and who showed up has been offered to readers. The remaining argument—whether people in the U.S. political mainstream will treat those facts with the seriousness they demand—hangs over the entire account.

Greg Bovino Remigration Summit Trump administration U.S. Border Patrol Minneapolis ethnic cleansing deportation far-right Europe Martin Sellner Afonso Gonçalves Andrea Ballarati Jared Taylor Stefano Forte AfD National Rally Gavin Newsom