The US Far Right Is Mounting an Invasion of Europe

During Donald Trump's second term, senior figures in his administration have regularly used the language of invasion as they talk about migration to Europe. Speaking in France on the eighty-second anniversary of D-Day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that Europe was being "invaded" by migrants.

As he stood close to the Normandy beaches, Hegseth claimed that "sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies." He was referring to the landing of boats carrying refugees along the coasts of Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria: "When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not."

The previous day, Vice President J. D. Vance had blamed the murder of eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak by Vickrum Singh Digwa in the English city of Southampton on "the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West."

Trump himself has long used this language, declaring during a golf trip to Scotland in 2025 that immigration was an "invasion" that was "killing Europe." He has also repeatedly insinuated that European cities like Paris and London were flooded with criminal migrants who have introduced sharia law and created "no-go zones," areas "where police don't even want to go anywhere near."

European authorities have repeatedly rejected these claims, and rightly so. Europe is not being invaded by migrants. But it is facing an invasion of a different kind. The invaders are not the people crossing the Mediterranean or the English Channel. They are the US far right, storming Europe's shores with money, platforms, and personnel.

The American right's "invasion" narrative serves many purposes. At home, it helps justify xenophobia. Abroad it helps build solidarity with ideological allies who are fighting the same battles in Europe.

Increasingly, this is not just a rhetorical project conducted from afar. US far-right figures and organizations are crossing the Atlantic, appearing at conferences, funding networks, and lending their weight to a European radical right eager to move further into the mainstream.

The European editions of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) have provided one such platform where the American far right has shown up for its kin in Europe. At CPAC 2022 in Budapest, where the theme was "God, Homeland, Family," Hungary's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán welcomed US far-right political commentator Candace Owens.

The conference also featured video messages from Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Trump's former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Other attendees included the likes of pro-Orbán Hungarian talk show host Zsolt Bayer, who has referred to Jews as "stinking excrement" and Roma as "animals."

Later editions of CPAC in Hungary and Poland have featured the likes of Kari Lake, a former news anchor and Republican nominee for the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race, alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and current Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin.

Earlier this year, Portugal hosted a "Remigration Summit." The official website of the event presented "remigration" as "the answer to decades of replacement migration and multiculturalism that have disintegrated [European] nations to the point of dysfunction." It adds: "With remigration, Europe will become more European day by day. Without remigration, it will become less European every day and will eventually cease to exist."

At the summit, politicians like Lena Kotré and Kay Gottschalk from Alternative for Germany and Rocío de Meer and Carlos Quero from Spain's Vox hobnobbed with US white nationalist Jared Taylor and former US Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino.

The Paris-based NGO BLOOM has also uncovered and mapped what it describes as a "network of far-right, conservative and obscurantist organisations collaborating on both sides of the Atlantic to undermine the very heart of the European democratic project." Formally this network of American and European "think tanks, foundations, political parties, government bodies and transatlantic platforms" engages in issues such as "competitiveness," "free speech," "free trade," and "wokeism." However, BLOOM insists that the members of the network are ultimately working to reshape the continent's "political, regulatory and intellectual landscape" in favor of a more "illiberal, conservative, deregulated, splintered Europe."

The US wing of this network includes the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the America First Policy Institute. The Heritage Foundation published the Project 2025 report, which provided the blueprint for MAGA politics coming into Trump's second term. The Heartland Institute has a long history of climate denial: according to Greenpeace, it organized the America First Energy Conference to "influence Trump administration policies to incentivise fossil fuel leases, extraction, and its staunch opposition to climate science."

The Alliance Defending Freedom legally contests "abortion rights and gender equality policies" in the United States. According to the BLOOM investigation, the organization is registered as an "active lobby" in Brussels that advocates for these issues in the European Parliament. The America First Policy Institute was established in 2021 and, alongside the Heritage Foundation, played a central role in formulating the architecture of Trump's second term. As part of its efforts to establish global coalitions, the organization advocates for more restrictive migration policies in Europe as a way of countering what it characterizes as the "negative consequences of illegal immigration . . . including the violent crime and strife caused by an unassimilated population."

The European wing includes the likes of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, the Ordo Iuris Institute in Warsaw, and New Direction: the Foundation for European Conservatism, which is based in Brussels. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium is a key node in the far-right infrastructure of knowledge production and transatlantic coalition-building that Orbán had propped up through public funding. After ousting Orbán in the 2026 parliamentary elections, Hungary's new leader, Péter Magyar, pledged to cut public funding to the group and end ties with CPAC. According to Magyar, "The state should never have financed them in the first place, it was a crime."

A 2021 investigation by Balkan Insight revealed that the Ordo Iuris Institute has close ties with far-right parties in Poland and has played a central role in the implementation of antiabortion and anti-LGBTQ legislation. Alongside a range of like-minded European organizations, like the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, it also lists the US right-wing advocacy group the Center for Family and Human Rights as one of its partners. The Ordo Iuris Institute was founded in 2012 at a conference titled "Intellectual Foundations and Legal Means for the Protection of Human Life in the Pre-natal Phase: Comparative Perspective" at the University of Warsaw, which was cosponsored by the Alliance Defending Freedom.

The BLOOM investigation describes New Direction and its political patrons, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), as arguably the most important driving force behind the "conservative and far-right transatlantic alliance." Formally the group repeats the usual far-right talking points and describes itself as "giving a voice to national movements that promote the rule of law, traditional values, free markets, and respect for the principle of protecting national sovereignty." Its events include the Transatlantic Summit VII held in Brussels earlier this year, which was cosponsored by the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Featured speakers at the conference included Chile's far-right President-Elect José Antonio Kast Rist; Nikolas Ferreira, an MP from the party of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro; and Sharon Slater, the president of anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ group Family Watch International, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

Finally, US far-right figures have also not hesitated to meddle in European electoral politics. We have seen Elon Musk expressing support for Reform UK leader Nigel Farage before transferring his allegiance to more radical right-wing figures such as Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe, the former Reform MP who set up his own party, Restore Britain. Musk also endorsed the Alternative for Germany and its leader Alice Weidel in the run-up to the 2025 German federal elections.

Most recently, Musk has been promoting Citizen Vigilante, a film in which an American businessman in Europe kills immigrants (who are depicted as criminals) and those he deems complicit in their crimes. Germany's film classification board refused Citizen Vigilante a rating over concerns that its anti-migrant violence could inspire real-life attacks.

On the eve of Hungary's election in April this year, J. D. Vance traveled to Budapest to show his support for Viktor Orbán at a campaign rally, where he delivered the following ironic message:

We want you to make a decision about your future with no outside forces pressuring you or telling you what to do. I'm not telling you exactly who to vote for, but what I am telling you is that the bureaucrats in Brussels, those people should not be listened to.

He then urged Hungarians to "go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you." Vance's support for Orbán wasn't enough to keep him in power, but it underlined the desire of his political movement to prop up the European far right.

Seeing all of this, it makes sense to go back to Pete Hegseth's words. Europe is indeed under invasion, not by migrants but by Hegseth's own ideological allies. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.