refoulement
The involuntary sending of refugees or asylum seekers to their country of origin or another one, where they are likely to face persecution and harm.
uncountable
He also expressed concern that at the same time there could be cases of refoulement with asylum seekers being returned to their countries of origin, where they are at risk of persecution and in an apparent breach of international law.
An instance thereof.
countable
The forced relocation of a group of people.
archaic, uncountable
An instance of that relocation.
archaic, countable
Where it comes from
Borrowed from French refoulement (“act of pushing something back (as gunpowder into a gun barrel, or water by a dam); act of water overflowing; forced relocation of a group of people; forced repatriation of asylum-seekers or refugees”), from refouler (“to cause to flow or turn back; to repress, suppress; to repulse; to trample on again”) (from re- (prefix meaning ‘again’) + fouler (“to impress, stamp; to trample, walk on; to mistreat, oppress”) (ultimately from Medieval Latin fullare (“to make cloth denser and firmer by soaking, beating and pressing, to full”), from Latin fullō (“one who fulls cloth, fuller”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₃- (“to blow; to inflate, swell”)) + -ment (suffix forming nouns from verbs, usually denoting resulting actions or states).
Adapted from the Wiktionary entry refoulement (CC BY-SA 4.0).