Elected officials, activists, and at least one former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official have all noticed the same thing: when the Trump administration wants to turn up the heat, they send in Gregory Bovino.
Over the past year, Bovino, now a Customs and Border Patrol commander-at-large, has rocketed from an obscure posting in the California desert to the center of the Trump administration’s most aggressive and highest-profile enforcement actions. He has overseen many of the recent, large-scale federal deportation operations in big, blue-leaning cities — crackdowns that quickly (and, many suspect, by design) suck U.S. citizens, elected officials, and others into their vortex. You’ve heard about many of these showy operations: the ostentatious federal law enforcement march through Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, a CBP operation outside of a Gavin Newsom press conference, clashes between the feds and peaceful protestors near an ICE detention facility in suburban Chicago.
Bovino himself has a flair for performance. He calls his sector of the U.S.-Mexico border the “premier sector” in flashy, internet-friendly videos. In one, he threatens undocumented border-crossers with an “all-expenses paid trip to Guantanamo Bay.” On X (even his handle is written to tout his rank: @CMDROpAtLargeCA) he cultivates support among right-wing influencers while lashing out at Democratic politicians and sparring with random users who criticize him as an authoritarian; those interlocutors have ranged from actor Henry Winkler to an account with five followers.
All of this is what makes Bovino uniquely suited to the administration’s demands. The Trump White House appears to be trying to push civil tensions into overdrive, staging military-style raids to conduct civil immigration arrests. Doing so requires these operations not only to take place in an aggressive manner, but for them to be broadcast to as many people as possible. Senior political appointees have used the operations to claim that the federal government is facing a kind of rebellion and that it is struggling to uphold the rule of law, potentially providing a pretext for sending in the National Guard under Title 10 — the statute the administration has already cited to deploy the military in three states — or to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Bovino combines Bull Connor’s aggression with Don King’s showmanship: a man willing to oversee violent, aggressive operations like Chicago’s “Midway Blitz” but, just as critically, to promote the fight to as many people as possible.
These flashy operations that run roughshod over the wishes of local officials were once “unheard of,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a CBP commissioner during President Obama’s second term. He told TPM that Bovino’s actions, some of which appear to place federal law enforcement in the position of conducting local policing, seem to be part of a larger strategy to escalate tensions in these cities.
“You wouldn’t be doing the kinds of things they do, which is pulling people out of cars, handcuffing them, and displaying them in front of the crowd,” Kerlikowske, who submitted a declaration in a lawsuit filed by Illinois against the Trump administration, said. “It really inflames the crowd to see people being perp walked and displayed at the scene of an arrest.”
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin described Bovino in a statement to TPM as “instrumental in making America safe again.”
“Sanctuary politicians should get used to him being around as long as they continue to abdicate their responsibilities,” she said.
‘State instruments of hard power’
What’s made Bovino’s tactics so shocking to local officials and observers across the country is not just the way they merge military-style operations with immigration enforcement, but the way in which the spectacle itself is intensely calibrated. It often involves sending CBP and ICE employees to perform work for which they are not trained: the CBP does not prepare its employees for urban policing or crowd control, Kerlikowske said. It’s a different mission from what many officers joined to do, he added.
According to Chicago alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, ICE and CBP began inviting friendly right-wing media outlets along on their outings only after Bovino appeared. Officers started to patrol in heavily trafficked areas like downtown Chicago, while certain guardrails — like declining to raid churches and schools — appeared to be dropped.
What happened in Chicago and Los Angeles followed the same pattern, Sigcho-Lopez and California officials told TPM: officers staged increasingly aggressive and brazen raids, often putting peaceful protestors in the path of law enforcement. Any response — and, sometimes, no response at all — was met with arrests and bigger shows of force against members of the public. In some cases, these displays spiraled, metastasizing into confrontations between law enforcement and protestors.
“The level of violence has changed since he was put in charge,” Sigcho-Lopez told TPM.
Take a recent raid on an apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago. Per a lawsuit filed by the state of Illinois, Bovino led the operation. According to the South Side Weekly and other local reports, the episode involved a Black Hawk helicopter and flashbang grenades. Officers evacuated the building, separating people out by race. NewsNation, a right-leaning TV network, was brought along for the ride.
“We generally don’t determine alienage while we’re in the building, clearing the building,” Bovino told the network. “It’s too dangerous, so we’ll bring them out. It’s safer for the U.S. citizens. It’s safer for the illegal aliens, and most of all it’s safer for our officers.”
DHS also released a video of the operation, including footage apparently shot by drone. CBP officers surround the building with guns drawn, eventually marching people out of the complex.
In one Oct. 3 episode, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stood with Bovino at an ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. Benny Johnson, a right-wing media personality with a checkered career, filmed a “sniper nest” overlooking a crowd of protestors calmly milling around outside. Johnson described them as “violent leftist protestors” who had staged “attacks.”
Johnson’s next post was another video that showed Noem and Bovino addressing a crowd of armed law enforcement. “State instruments of hard power — you’re going to be put into full effect,” Bovino said. “That crowd there is an unsafe crowd … we’re gonna roll all the way out of here. When they resist, what happens? They get arrested.”
Johnson captioned the video: “Left-wing extremists surrounded this ICE facility in Chicago. Federal agents crushed the threat immediately.”
According to a lawsuit filed by the state of Illinois seeking to stop the National Guard — including from other states — from being deployed to the city, Noem’s motorcade then left via an exit that was “congested with protestors,” avoiding another exit that was unblocked by demonstrators. She then purportedly left her car, prompting federal law enforcement to push protestors back to maintain a perimeter set by the Secret Service.
The episode was “designed to provoke those who could see or hear the visit,” Illinois alleged in the lawsuit.
‘Oh jeez’
Bovino has spent nearly 30 years in CBP. Originally from North Carolina, until this year he was one of 20 CBP officials with the title of chief patrol agent. During the Biden administration, that meant, for Bovino, supervising a sleepy, 70-mile stretch of border that runs through desert, farmland, and mountains in inland California. Bovino calls it the “premier sector” in videos posted to Instagram.
Bovino got to the premier sector after a career that saw him move steadily upwards, reaching the level of patrol agent in charge in 2012. He held prestigious foreign postings in Central America and Africa; under the Obama Administration, he worked in D.C. as an associate director for DHS counterintelligence and, later, as an associate chief for Border Patrol strategic planning.
In 2018, Bovino was working as sector chief in New Orleans. The office advertised a job for which two Black CBP employees applied, according to complaints that the applicants later filed. The two had become finalists for the position before Bovino closed the job opening and allegedly hired a white official who was a friend of his.
The lawsuit may not have gone anywhere but for a few email exchanges that attorneys found. In one, the co-worker that Bovino hired sent him a picture of a Confederate general titled “Chief Bovino” and another of soldiers assembled around a Confederate flag with the caption “NLL All Hands Meeting,” a seeming reference to the New Orleans, Louisiana CBP sector. The email’s subject line was “Lateral Reassignment Request (Draft).”
Bovino replied: “Oh jeez. DELETE!!!!”
Bovino was not named as a defendant in the suit. DHS attorneys wrote in a response to the complaint that the New Orleans sector had been underperforming and that senior officials brought Bovino in out of a belief that he would improve productivity and morale. The job announcement was already public when Bovino arrived, DHS attorneys said. Bovino closed the vacancy, and requested that a staffer with whom, DHS attorneys wrote, he had worked for 20 years be reassigned to the position.
In an order denying a motion to dismiss from DHS, the judge wrote that the email “raises concerns of racial animus in Mr. Bovino’s hiring decision.” The judge found that Bovino cancelled the hiring process upon arrival in New Orleans and had already decided to hire his white colleague before starting the job.
DHS settled the case at a conference one week after the order; there was no admission of wrongdoing.
Bovino was moved from New Orleans to El Centro, California, in 2020. During the Biden administration, he cameoed in a fight between the White House and House Republicans. Biden officials had tried to stop Bovino from testifying in a committee investigation about management of the border; after he sat for an interview, DHS briefly reassigned him to a job in D.C. House Republicans celebrated his return to El Centro as a victory over retaliation.
‘Left-wing agitators’
Since President Trump took office, Bovino has become more openly partisan. During a recent Fox News appearance, Bovino said protestors were mirroring “rhetoric coming from these crazy politicians,” and accused elected officials of having gotten people hurt. On X, he’s made a point of bickering with high-profile Democrats like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and others.
He’s also been open about something that most law enforcement officials would strenuously deny: he applies racial appearance in law enforcement decisions. He told WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, that people are detained based on “how they look.”
That’s a more recent shift. His media savvy was once more empathetic, and directed towards public safety. In 2021, he donned a life vest and jumped into a canal that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border to demonstrate the risk of drowning faced by migrants. “I can’t imagine doing this at night, especially not knowing the distance across the canal and especially if you’re not a good swimmer,” he remarked.
His high profile comes with risks, Trump officials say. Federal prosecutors charged a man this week with putting a $10,000 price on Bovino’s head; court documents purport that the man was a member of the Latin Kings gang.
Bovino’s newfound aggressive approach has received some praise from the extreme right. White nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes wrote on Telegram this week that the administration’s operations “almost seem designed to invite a response from Left-Wing agitators.” Fuentes went on to worry that the government “lacks the will and follow through to do what is necessary to win a true confrontation with the Left.”
The provocations dovetail with the administration’s efforts to assert that their forays into these cities are legal. Judges have been skeptical that Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago are experiencing a rebellion or that the president “is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States” — a requirement of the law, Title 10, that the administration cited when deploying the Guard to each city.
President Trump himself mused this week about invoking another law, the Insurrection Act, to respond to the crisis that his administration manufactured. In this case, too, he’d need to make a formal finding that the country faces an invasion or, in what may fit more with Bovino’s complaints about supposedly obstructive protestors, that federal officials are unable to execute the laws in a given area.
Those who have experienced Bovino’s operations up close say that that may be the long game.
“They’re hoping that things could escalate so they can have the pretext to be even more aggressive,” Hugo Soto-Martinez, a Los Angeles city councilmember told TPM. He added that Bovino’s arrival in June came with raids on churches and schools, which had not happened previously. “We felt he was trying to invoke the Insurrection Act,” Soto-Martinez said.
Bovino’s tactics also mean steamrolling internal opposition. One example emerged from litigation over Trump’s federalizing the California National Guard in Los Angeles in June. During a trial over whether the move was legal, an army major general testified that Bovino had initially requested 51 military vehicles for a sweep through Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park. When the officer questioned that plan, Bovino purportedly replied by asking whether he had sufficient “loyalty” to his country. In another telling episode, President Trump reportedly fired the top federal prosecutor in Sacramento after she warned Bovino to comply with a court order barring CBP from indiscriminately arresting people in the district. Bovino told the New York Times that the prosecutor’s suggestion that CBP “does not ALWAYS abide by the Constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement.”
For Soto-Martinez, the escalation that seems to come along with Bovino’s arrival is in part a result of Bovino bringing in CBP officers who are not accustomed to operating in urban areas. It also means that protestors find themselves with an increased burden: don’t give federal authorities any excuse to escalate.
“The most important thing is not to fall into the trap,” he said.
Kerlikowske, the former CBP commissioner, made a similar point: many of those now deployed to Chicago and other cities with CBP and ICE lack experience and education in dealing with peaceful protests and in policing urban areas. It’s not their mission, and it’s not what they signed up to do, he said.
“They’re being given these directions, and if they don’t follow these directions, their career is going to be short-circuited,” he said.
