Steve Bannon Calls Muslim Refugee Drop 'a Great Start,' Demands Remigration

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who hosts Bannon's War Room, called a drop in refugee admissions from Muslim countries "a great start." He then told his audience that it falls well short of the mass deportations, denaturalizations and "systematic re-migration program" he wants.

Bannon did not say President Donald Trump or the White House was failing. But with the midterm elections about a month away, he pressed for a far more aggressive agenda than the one the administration was celebrating.

Steve Bannon Says the Chart 'Doesn't Get to the Heart of the Problem'

The chart came up when Bannon asked investigative reporter Natalie Winters for her take on Trump's latest press appearance and campaign schedule. She opened with, "I'd like to hear that we are deporting all illegals, not just the criminals." She praised Trump's performance but said, "I think they're kind of indexing on the wrong stuff."

Winters then pointed to what she called "the graph from the Cato Institute report today going viral." According to Winters, the chart showed refugee admissions from Muslim countries falling 96 percent under the Trump administration. She said she would "love to hear more about the immigration stuff" from the White House.

Bannon responded by agreeing with her and then pushing further. "I saw that chart last night, and I think that chart is fantastic. It's a great start. But it also doesn't get to the heart of the problem," he said. "That's how many you're letting in. Where are we sending them home? Where's the denaturalization? Where's the mass deportations?"

He came back to the point a few minutes later.

"That's great that you're stopping people coming in from Muslim countries, okay, fine. But more importantly is, what about all the problems we have here? Why is there not re-migration? Why is there not a systematic re-migration program?" — Steve Bannon

Bannon Turns to H-1B Visas and Denaturalization

Bannon also asked, "Why are we not shutting down the H-1B programs?" Winters followed with a report on Rochester General Hospital in New York, where she said 80 of 82 new medical residents were foreigners on H-1B or J-1 visas. Later in the show, Bannon returned to the subject. "The tech companies live on these H-1B visas," he said.

The kind of denaturalization Bannon wants is legal but narrow. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, citizenship can be revoked only if naturalization was "illegally procured or procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation." The Justice Department said on August 3 that it had filed 123 civil denaturalization complaints since January 20, 2025, which it called the most in recorded history. A month earlier, when the department's own count stood at 64 cases, Bloomberg Law reported that it faced legal and resource hurdles in expanding the effort.

Bannon Ties a Polling Dip in Texas to Deportations

Bannon's polling remark came while he was discussing a leaked recording of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee. Bannon described the recording as Paxton "telling people, hey, the convention didn't help me." He said it was leaked by someone who is anti-Paxton, which he blamed on "the Bush faction, 'cause they hate the populist nationalist wing of the Republican Party."

He then offered a reason for the slide. "One of the reasons that I think that the polling went down or took is that there wasn't a ton of kind of mass deportations," he said. He did not name a specific poll. Democrat James Talarico leads Paxton 46.2 percent to 43.5 percent in PolitiKool's polling average.

National polling on immigration does not suggest voters want a harder line. A Fox News poll of 1,211 registered voters, conducted September 11–14, found that 43 percent approve of Trump's handling of immigration, down from a high of 48 percent. In the same poll, 53 percent said the administration's enforcement has gone too far.

Trump's overall approval stands at 37.6 percent in PolitiKool's polling average.

What Comes Next for the GOP's Immigration Message

Bannon told viewers that Trump is heading to Texas and then Oklahoma as he campaigns in the final weeks before Election Day. He urged Republicans to make the hard line central to their closing argument. "These are the important issues people wanna hear about, and they wanna hear about 'em in the next 30 days," he said.

"If you're gonna save your country, you gotta get tough and we gotta get tough now. That's what people wanna hear," Bannon said.

With about a month to go, it is unclear whether candidates will take his advice or listen to the voters telling pollsters that enforcement has already gone too far.