Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief leading the Southern California immigration crackdown that has stirred outrage and won the admiration of President Trump, said he had been told by federal officials to be on standby.
He may be tapped to recreate his aggressive Los Angeles raids in other American cities.
“I’ve definitely received direction to be ready in the event that they want me to go,” Mr. Bovino said.
Mr. Bovino, 55, is the face of the Trump administration’s campaign to round up, detain and deport thousands of undocumented immigrants in the nation’s second-largest city. In just 11 weeks, he has gone from being the little-known head of one of the least busy sectors on America’s Southern border to the tactical commander of a contentious multiagency federal operation.
He has been testing the limits of politicized law enforcement, clashing on social media with California Democrats and producing Hollywood-style promotional videos of his masked, heavily armed officers marching to Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” He questioned an Army general’s loyalty to the country when the general expressed reservations about the National Guard’s involvement in one show of force at a Los Angeles park, according to court testimony. And he’s a named defendant in two lawsuits accusing his agents of crossing legal lines, including arresting Latino residents based on their skin color and regardless of their immigration status.
Mr. Bovino’s supporters say he’s helping to pull undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records off the streets. One of the biggest fans of his work is Mr. Trump. “The president called into the entire team that was assembled just to say, ‘Thank you, and you’re doing a good job in Los Angeles,’” Mr. Bovino said of a recent call with Mr. Trump.
His critics have a sharply different view, describing him as a showboat with a badge and a gun whose agents are using racial profiling to scoop up Hispanic men, women and teenagers. Outside of the federal takeover of the police force in the nation’s capital, no other region in America has seen such an aggressive display of federal force.
Two immigrants have died while trying to flee Mr. Bovino’s agents — a Mexican farmworker fell from a greenhouse, and a Guatemalan day laborer was struck by a vehicle on a freeway following a raid at a Home Depot.
Mr. Bovino’s agents opened fire on a vehicle that they tried to stop and that they claimed tried to hit them. They detained a disabled 15-year-old high school student, drawing their guns on him and handcuffing him in a case of mistaken identity, and leaving unfired bullets on the ground, school officials said. They have been captured on social-media videos smashing the windows of drivers who refuse to cooperate, questioning and detaining not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens and, in one case, urinating on storage containers on a high school campus.
And led by Mr. Bovino, they were involved this summer in two high-profile episodes that drew swift backlash from local officials.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Bovino and other agents showed up outside a museum in Los Angeles where Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a rally. The event had nothing to do with immigration enforcement, but was focused instead on redistricting.
“We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that,” Mr. Bovino said as he stood next to his agents, some of whom carried rifles. “We do that ourselves.”
And last month, Mr. Bovino and dozens of federal agents marched through MacArthur Park, backed up by National Guard troops, helicopters and riot-ready horses. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles suddenly showed up demanding answers, but the two officials did not meet face-to-face and talked by phone instead.
“I was on scene there,” Mr. Bovino later told the Fox affiliate in Los Angeles. “I was about 60 yards away from Mayor Bass. She didn’t want to come over and talk to me. She wanted to talk on the phone there.”
A spokeswoman for Ms. Bass said the mayor and Mr. Bovino spoke over the phone because he was not “immediately present” during the “military stunt.”
No arrests were made in the operation.
“It’s pretty unheard-of in any professional law enforcement organization to pull that stunt at MacArthur Park,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who served in the Obama administration as the commissioner of the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. “If I was a commissioner at this point, I would have relieved him of duty after MacArthur Park.”
In two interviews with The New York Times, Mr. Bovino defended his operations in Los Angeles, calling them “legal, ethical and moral.” Mr. Bovino has said that agents have been targeting immigrants with criminal histories, but that any undocumented immigrant they come across could face arrest.
“And you may say, ‘Well, hey, don’t you feel bad?’ Well, no, I don’t,” Mr. Bovino said. “I’m not trying to be callous here, but it’s because we are giving them an out.” That out, he added, is the Trump administration’s announcement in May that it was offering $1,000 and a flight home to any undocumented immigrant who self-deports. He pointed out that one of his relatives used to live next door to an undocumented immigrant who was a drug trafficker.
“We got him deported, like, immediately,” Mr. Bovino said.
He said he had showed up outside the museum, not knowing that Mr. Newsom was holding a rally there. The museum is about a block away from a federal detention facility where many of those detained in raids have been held.
“He came to our neighborhood, a place that we work in and out of every single day, and we arrest illegal aliens every single day and bring them right into that facility,” Mr. Bovino said. “I didn’t know he was inside the building until a police officer said, ‘Hey, the governor’s supposed to be here.’”
Mr. Newsom called the presence of federal agents outside “pretty sick and pathetic,” and he and other Democratic leaders disputed that it was a mere coincidence. Mr. Newsom’s office filed a formal request seeking all documents about the decision to show up outside the rally.
Though Mr. Bovino said he harbored no ill will toward the governor, he criticized Mr. Newsom for failing to respond to a request to meet with agency officials in Mr. Bovino’s border region, the El Centro sector, back in 2023. “So he ignored me,” Mr. Bovino said. “Didn’t want to talk. I guess I was beneath him. That’s sure what it felt like.”
Izzy Gardon, a spokesman for the governor, did not directly respond to a question about Mr. Bovino’s meeting request. But he said that Mr. Newsom had visited the border frequently and “doesn’t need a hall pass” from Mr. Bovino to do so.
Sector chiefs oversee day-to-day operations in their regions, and they are typically focused on their A.O.R., agency parlance for area of responsibility. Silvestre Reyes used his experience as a sector chief in El Paso to win a seat in Congress in the 1990s. Most sector chiefs, however, do not venture into the world of politics and avoid antagonizing their region’s elected officials, with whom they usually build partnerships.
Although he has described himself as “apolitical,” Mr. Bovino has taken a different approach and has adopted a distinctly partisan edge. His remarks in interviews, his social-media posts and the videos that his team creates often criticize or ridicule Mr. Newsom, Ms. Bass and Democratic-run California as a whole.
“I see a lot of outrage from the governor when he talks about these ICE raids,” Mr. Bovino said of Mr. Newsom on Fox News. “Where is the outrage when there are Tren de Aragua members walking with impunity on the streets of Los Angeles?”
One “Star Wars”-themed video posted by Mr. Bovino depicted his sector as Darth Vader’s lightsaber. The rebel troops Darth Vader slaughters are portrayed as Sanctuary Cities, Fake News and Human Smugglers, among others.
Another video opens with comments Ms. Bass made following a raid known as Operation Trojan Horse. As the mayor says the border operation failed, the video quickly cuts to show Mr. Bovino cracking a smile, and then supplies the Border Patrol’s response to Ms. Bass. Rap music blares as his agents jump out of a Penske rental truck and chase down immigrants outside a Home Depot. The video ends with Mr. Bovino, wearing a tactical helmet, walking across the parking lot in slow motion, like a triumphant scene out of an action movie.
“It’s just far too political,” said Mr. Kerlikowske, the former Customs and Border Protection commissioner. “I mean, I don’t think you can find any of the Border Patrol chiefs, any of the ICE chiefs in the past, making these kinds of statements or taking these kinds of actions.”
Mr. Bovino said he saw his approach not as political, but as defending his agents from being attacked by lawmakers.
“When you have politicians that are encouraging MS-13 gang members to take action against law enforcement, then you’re damn right I’m going to say something,” he said.
He was referring to a local elected official who posted a video urging the leaders of street gangs to “get your members in order” in response to the raids and wondering why, “now that your ‘hood is being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there ain’t a peep out of you.” That official, Cynthia Gonzalez, the vice mayor of Cudahy, a small city in Los Angeles County, later said in public remarks that the video was satirical and had nothing to do with violence.
Mr. Bovino sent an early signal that he was ready to lead the administration’s immigration crackdown before Mr. Trump was even president.
On Jan. 6, in the last days of the Biden administration, Mr. Bovino led Operation Return to Sender, a raid in agricultural Kern County. At least 78 people, including farmworkers, were arrested. During that operation, agents fanned out across the area, at gas stations and along farm roads.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal government over the raid on behalf of the United Farm Workers union, arguing that people were stopped based on unlawful factors such as the color of their skin. In April, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring Border Patrol agents from stopping people in the Kern County area without reasonable suspicion that they are in the country illegally.
That pre-Trump raid in January was a kind of test run of the Los Angeles raids that started later in the year — high-profile sweeps in multiple locations at once to capture undocumented immigrants as they went about their daily routines. The L.A. raids started on June 6, and Mr. Bovino was named the operation’s tactical commander about a week later. Since the raids began, federal agents have made 5,000 arrests in the Los Angeles area, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
“Chief Bovino is an asset to the Trump Administration and playing an important role in Making America Safe Again,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
In his spare time, Mr. Bovino has been flipping through a classic novel from the 1800s, “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the epic of wrongful imprisonment and revenge. He considers bear hunting one of life’s pleasures, and got his start in law enforcement working as a reserve police officer in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, his home state. Federal officials declined to supply some biographical details about him, including his marital status or how many children he has, citing security threats.
Mr. Bovino attended Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., for graduate school, and joined the Border Patrol when he was in his 20s, inspired by authors who wrote about their work as agents. He joined the agency in 1996 as a member of Border Patrol Academy Class 325.
“People underestimate his intelligence because of his demeanor sometimes, but he’s exceptionally smart,” said Jason Owens, a former Border Patrol chief who is a friend of Mr. Bovino and was also part of Academy Class 325. “He just has the country-boy demeanor, where he talks about Ma and Pa America, and his accent, and so a lot of people can dismiss him. They do that at their own peril.”
The Los Angeles raids have continued in recent days, despite legal developments that have made local officials and activists question whether agents were violating court orders. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal agents from making indiscriminate stops in the Los Angeles area. An appeals court later upheld that ruling.
“They are not trying to follow the law,” said Mayra Joachín, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. involved in both the Kern County and Los Angeles lawsuits. “They are not trying to avoid using race to stop someone.”
Mr. Bovino has pushed back on such accusations, noting that undocumented immigrants of various nationalities have been arrested and that a large percentage of Border Patrol agents are Hispanic.
“That’s agenda-driven talk by those trying to sow fear in people,” he said of racial-profiling claims.
It remains unclear how long Mr. Bovino will run operations in Los Angeles. But he said he had been told to be ready “to take on criminals at a moment’s notice in other locations.” The Department of Homeland Security did not comment on whether Mr. Bovino would be going to other cities.
Later this fall, he said, he would like to get back to North Carolina for bear-hunting season. “But I have a feeling that I may be continuing to make America a safer place,” he said, “and that always takes precedence over anything personal.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Jesus Jiménez is a Times reporter covering Southern California.
The post The Border Patrol Chief Leading the California Immigration Crackdown appeared first on New York Times.
