State Department set to launch ‘Office of Remigration’

Marisa Kabas – The Handbasket: “Secretary Marco Rubio’s State Department published a reorganization chart Thursday morning showing massive cuts to diplomatic offices and functions, plus a few new additions. Rubio’s department also reportedly sent the plan to Congress concurrently. What hasn’t been previously reported is the extensive 136-page document Congress received that includes the more granular details of what the reimagined department would look like— including an “Office of Remigration,” a far-right, anti-immigrant buzzword made popular in Europe for ridding the country of migrants. “To address these structural problems of bureaucratic overgrowth and overlapping office mandates, the Department will eliminate non-statutory offices whose roles do not align with core U.S. national security or foreign policy objectives, or whose functions overlap with or duplicate those of other offices,” the introduction of the document states. It was sent to Congress with a cover letter from Paul Guaglianone, an apparent Senior Bureau Official at the Bureau of Legislative Affairs. According to LegiStorm, Guaglianone began working on the hill in 2013 as an intern for former Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy prior to his graduation that year from George Washington University. Most recently he worked as Legislative Director for Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. Arguably the most alarming piece of the report comes in the section for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). The report states that PRM will be “substantially reorganized” and that a number of new offices will be created as part of the absorption of USAID. There will be three new offices under the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Migration Matters, “to shift focus towards supporting the Administration’s efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status.”