Overview
Bo French sparked controversy with his xenophobic social media posts about UT Austin.
Days earlier, he made similar remarks on a panel sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition.
Leading conservative think tanks support the Mass Deportation Coalition.
On September 13, Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, sparked controversy. French posted an image of mostly nonwhite, male students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) celebrating their football team’s stunning fourth-quarter comeback victory over Ohio State. French wrote that he had “heard UT graduation year looked like this … the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” He later posted the same image with a different caption, claiming “social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” French reiterated: ”It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”
French’s xenophobic posts were widely criticized, including by other Texas Republicans. Sen. John Cornyn called on his fellow Republicans “to condemn the intolerance and racism” in French’s posts.
While French’s posts on X (formerly Twitter) garnered widespread attention, his controversial remarks just days earlier went largely unnoticed.
Bo French’s Controversial Remarks at a Panel Sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition
On September 9, French spoke on a panel sponsored by the Mass Deportation Coalition (MDC), a group that is supported by dozens of conservative and Republican organizations around the nation. The MDC pressures President Donald Trump and his administration from the right, with its X account’s (@Phase2Deport) bio stating that the president “CAN keep his promise to ‘carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,’” starting “with 1M deportations in 2026.”
During the September 9 event, French boasted that he was “maybe the first person in Texas to talk about the fact that we needed to probably deport 100 million people.” (The total number of noncitizens living in the United States was just 22 million people in 2023, and approximately 14 million of them were unauthorized immigrants. Using these figures as an estimate, French’s call to deport 100 million people would necessarily include millions of legal residents and American citizens.)
French complained about immigrants “who bring this sort of third world mentality with them where they feel entitled to scam our systems.” He claimed that the “left” is “clearly trying to import more people that they can call voters” (language that invokes the racist great replacement theory) and separately said that “in order to preserve our culture we obviously have to ramp these things up,” referring to mass deportations. French said assimilation “is the exception, not the rule,” and that “leftism” is engaged in a “war against order” by bringing “tens of millions of people … who view those things that we hold dear as evil.” In his closing remarks, French claimed that “we are in a spiritual battle” against the “demonic” left’s “version of right and wrong.”
French’s comments from the panel discussion remain online in a post on the X account @ApplytoForum, which notes that the event was “sponsored” by the MDC.
Several Leading Conservative Think Tanks Support the MDC
The MDC’s webpage lists several leading conservative think tanks as its “coalition partners,” including: The Heritage Foundation, The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, identifies himself as the “Captain” of the MDC in his X bio. The MDC also lists several prominent individual supporters, including Blackwater founder Erik Prince, conservative activist Jennica Pounds (who posts as @DataRepublican on X), former Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark (who supported efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election) and former U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin.
The MDC has not distanced itself or criticized French’s posts or remarks on its official X account or webpage. Instead, some figures affiliated with the MDC have endorsed and amplified his claims.
Ryan Neuhaus, one of the public-facing leaders of the MDC, reposted French’s post alleging that Americans had been “displaced” and defended him in a subsequent post. Neuhaus, the former chief of staff to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, identifies himself as a “Builder” of the MDC (@Phase2Deport) in his bio on X.
Former Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) Commander Gregory Bovino, who was the featured speaker at an Indiana “Mass Deportation Rally” promoted by the MDC, thanked French for “highlighting” the topic, saying “mass deportations will solve it in very short order.” Similar to French’s comment during the September 9 MDC-sponsored event, Bovino has claimed that there are “107 million illegal aliens in the U.S.,” which is false, and would amount to nearly one-third of the U.S. population.
Bo French has a History of Controversial and Racist Remarks
French has a long history of using controversial and outright racist rhetoric. In October 2025, he used an apparent racial slur to refer to Black people in a post celebrating delayed SNAP benefits. According to The New York Times, he once asked his X followers whether Muslims or Jews are a “bigger threat” to the United States, saying he believed Islam “is the bigger threat.”
In December 2025, French replied to a fan account for Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, agreeing that “mass migration” and “feminism” were “killing our country.” French used an antisemitic trope when disagreeing with the fan account’s post about the supposed threat posed by the “Jewish oligarchy,” writing: “My Jewish friends are good at business. Muslims are openly conquering America via jihad. Big difference.”
French has demonized Muslims. In a July 2026 post, he argued that mass deportations should “prioritize” Muslims, saying “they are actually the most dangerous to our nation … they all must go.” He has claimed Muslims want to “conquer our country and replace our culture with Islam” or make the United States “into a Sharia Superpower.” In reality, Muslims make up only slightly more than 1 percent of the population of the United States. According to the Cato Institute, the vast majority of Muslims also adopt American social values.
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.