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The latest city official to contend with Border Patrol agents is Janet Cowell, mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina. When they landed in Raleigh this week, she didn’t know much about their plans; the best guidance she could offer residents was that if they felt unsafe, they should “call the police.”
Since arriving in Los Angeles this June, agents from Customs and Border Protection have been making their way to other locations, first to Chicago, then New Orleans, and now North Carolina. They may head to New York City, according to reports, to greet incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Along the way, they’ve collected civil-rights suits and irate federal judges, and the list of people they’ve arrested has been light on hardened criminals. They’ve also produced plenty of video footage. “Nobody tells us where to go, when to go, how to go in our fucking country,” Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino said in one of his many John Wick–style promotional videos, this one showing him giving a pep talk to agents in Chicago.
When the Trump administration promised a mass-deportation campaign, it initially relied on Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out the effort, and Abolish ICE signs are still a common sight at protests. But many of the more aggressive, and even violent, interactions experienced by undocumented immigrants and protesters have been with Border Patrol agents. The administration quickly discovered that ICE, which was accustomed to operating in crowded communities, was too slow and bureaucratic to accomplish its goals, says the Atlantic immigration reporter Nick Miroff, our guest this week. So the administration turned to Border Patrol agents, who are trained to operate with a defensive mindset. The administration has especially relied on Bovino, who has brought the culture of border enforcement inland.
What happens when CBP begins patrolling in a crowded American city? We talk to Miroff about the administration’s shift in strategy, Bovino’s approach, the recent Supreme Court order that seems to sanction racial profiling, and where the agency might go next. We also talk to Brian Kolp, a Chicagoan whose quiet residential neighborhood was turned into what the local news called a “war zone” the day Border Patrol showed up.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Brian Kolp: I’ve always been a sucker for the foursquare with the front porch. You can just kind of sit out, have your morning coffee, have your drinks in the evening.
Hanna Rosin: This is Brian Kolp.
Kolp: I’m born and raised in Chicago—my dad was actually a Chicago firefighter—so I grew up in the far South Side in a neighborhood called Beverly. It’s supersafe. It’s super close knit. And I kind of always wanted my kids to have the same thing. But I wanted them to have at least a little bit more exposure to kind of the rest of the city and the rest of the world, and I think you get a little bit more of that up on the North Side than you do on the South Side.
Rosin: One day this fall, he and his kids did get a little more exposure to the world, although not in a way he had planned for.
Kolp: Yeah, so it was Saturday, October 25. At 10:30 that morning, there was supposed to be a neighborhood Halloween parade, where basically the families were just kind of walking a line around the neighborhood, an opportunity for the kids to kind of strut their stuff in their costumes, and then end at a local park, where there would be some activities and stuff for them.
It was what was supposed to be a very normal day became probably, honestly, one of the craziest days of my life.
[Music]
Kolp: I was sitting on my couch, like I am often one to do on Saturday mornings, drinking my coffee, watching the news. Something caught my attention—it was, like, something quick-moving—through the window, and I looked out my window and saw two [Customs and Border Protection] agents in full military fatigues tackling a guy to the ground.
Rosin: At that point, “Operation Midway Blitz,” the Trump administration’s name for its immigration crackdown in Chicago, had been going on for about six weeks. There had already been scores of social-media videos circulating of agents tackling people, so Kolp guessed what this was about.
Kolp: Before I could even put my shoes on, before I could even grab my phone, I ran out in my pajama pants, and the rest kind of unfolded from there.
[Sounds of whistles and people yelling]
Kolp (from CBS): I never thought this would happen in my neighborhood.
Marissa Sulek: This man walking barefoot in the Chicago Blackhawks pajama pants is Brian Kolp. He lives on Kildare, a picture-perfect area of Old Irving Park, which turned into what looked like a war zone Saturday morning.
Rosin: Online, Kolp became known as the “Blackhawks pajamas guy”—that’s Chicago’s hockey team, and he’s a fan. He’s also a lawyer, formerly a prosecutor, and he began his career as a city attorney defending Chicago cops in civil-rights cases, so he’s familiar with things like wrongful arrest and excessive force.
And here’s how he described what happened that day: Some agents went after a guy on a construction crew. The guy climbed down the ladder—
Kolp: And then as soon as they started to go after him, he fled on foot, and then that chase ended on my front lawn.
Rosin: And then, he says, the agents tackled the guy. Neighbors were out of their houses watching. The agents then put the suspect into the car, and that should have been the end of it.
Instead, that’s when the mayhem started.
[Sounds of horns and people yelling]
Rosin: One of the agents’ cars got blocked in by another car. Kolp walked over to the other end of the block, where things were quickly getting out of control.
Kolp: It was a pretty chaotic scene by the time I got out there. Another agent was getting ready to deploy a chemical agent at the end of the block that I was at.
Michael George (from CBS): The Department of Homeland Security is again the target of anger in Chicago after they deployed tear gas against civilians. A DHS spokesperson says it was done for crowd control.
Kolp: And I yelled out to him when I saw it, and I said, Are you seriously about to throw that in the middle of a neighborhood?
Rosin: The crowd got rowdier, the police more aggressive.
Kolp: They took two people to the ground, broke their ribs. They threw chemical agents—the tear-gas canister, the pepper-spray canister, whatever it was—to the ground. In my entire time defending Chicago police officers, never once did I have to justify that level of force, ever.
These agents, these Border Patrol agents, are acting in ways that are bringing disrepute to law enforcement generally, and that is leaving minority communities and undocumented communities and some of the most vulnerable communities feeling as though they have nowhere to turn.
Rosin: How did you know it was Border Patrol?
Kolp: Again, I’m a former prosecutor; I pay attention to the distinctions between the various federal agencies. Most folks are not making that distinction, right? At this point, they just say “ICE,” even if it is CBP.
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today, Border Patrol: the new face of the Trump immigration crackdown. What happens when an agency trained to operate at the desolate and sometimes dangerous border shows up in crowded American cities?
One of Trump’s main campaign promises was that he would deport millions of “criminal aliens,” as he called them, once he was in office.
Nick Miroff: Almost from the beginning, there was this kind of disappointment with ICE’s ability to deliver the kinds of numbers that would get to a million deportations a year.
Rosin: That’s Nick Miroff, who covers immigration for The Atlantic.
Miroff: ICE has never deported even half that many people in a year. It just requires an enormous amount of resources and effort, and the agencies involved, but especially ICE, were not set up for that kind of scale.
Rosin: So in order to speed up the process, the administration turned to a different agency.
Miroff: What we’ve really seen in the last few months is the growing role of the Border Patrol—first in Los Angeles, then Chicago, and now in North Carolina. The most confrontational imagery, the most violent imagery that’s on social media, and is often blamed on ICE, is the actions of Border Patrol.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security are using them kind of as like shock troops or like a strike force that is going from city to city, escalating the pressure and trying to make as many arrests as possible, and it’s just a completely different way of operating than the way that ICE officers are trained to conduct themselves.
Rosin: What is the difference between ICE and Border Patrol?
Miroff: That’s a great question. So the simplest answer is that ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—is responsible for enforcing immigration law within the interior of the United States, away from border areas, and often, that requires enforcing compliance with immigration court orders from immigration judges.
There are more than 6 million people who are on what’s considered the nondetained docket—that means they have some kind of immigration claim or case pending in immigration courts. And ICE’s job is to ensure that they fulfill their obligations to appear at the court, and if they’re ordered deported from the country and don’t leave voluntarily, then it’s up to ICE to go and arrest them and deport them from the United States. There’s a much smaller population of people who are in ICE detention, but that population has been growing rapidly under the current administration.
In contrast, the Border Patrol is really focused on defending the borders of the United States and protecting the country from illegal migration and illegal narcotics—and really anything that is coming into the United States outside of the legal border crossings. And so Border Patrol agents are out there, often in remote desert and mountain areas, watching the border, patrolling, looking for smugglers, traffickers, that type of thing. And they have a very kind of defensive mindset. Their No. 1 job is to make sure that nothing sneaks past them that could harm the United States, and obviously, since the September 11 terrorist attacks, that role took on an even greater importance, with the level of concern that somebody who could really do a lot of damage would try to sneak into the United States. It’s just the Border Patrol’s responsibility to stop them and make sure that doesn’t happen.
Rosin: So when you mentioned ICE, you talked about courts. When you mentioned Border Patrol, you talked about defense and 9/11. So how are those two agencies different in tactics, and how are they different in culture?
Miroff: Well, ICE has to work in U.S. cities and communities, many of which are run by Democrats, and so ICE officers have to do their jobs with a relative degree of caution and restraint. They practice what is called “targeted enforcement.” And so, over the years, as they have been accused of carrying out sweeps and roundups, they have insisted they do not engage in those tactics and that what they do is called “targeted enforcement”: They know who they’re looking for, they do research in advance, and they plan the best way to take that person into custody. And that’s one of the reasons you have seen ICE over the years really emphasize that it’s going after criminals, particularly those who have committed violent crimes, that it’s not just randomly going out and grabbing people or racially profiling people on the streets.
The difference here is that the Border Patrol, which has this kind of defensive mindset, and the mentality of its agents is that Someone who comes into my area, I need to make sure that they’re not a threat.
And I think that that has carried over into the contrasting ways that the two agencies are trying to conduct the president’s mass-deportation campaign. That is why there’s a frustration with ICE’s inability to generate huge numbers—again, because its agents are trained to know who they’re looking for and to go for specific individuals, but that does not get you millions of deportations a year. Unlike the Border Patrol, which is trained to police general areas and treat anyone that they encounter in that area as a potential suspect, and I think generally feel much more entitled to stop that person and wanna check their status.
Rosin: We’ve seen a lot of videos come out of cities like Chicago and now Charlotte that seem to show more aggressive tactics, and it’s actually hard to understand: Is this ICE—ICE is a shorthand that we tend to use—or is this Border Patrol? Can you interpret some of what we are seeing for us?
Miroff: Sure. You’re absolutely right. There are a lot of videos circulating on social media that show federal agents using force, whether it’s against protesters or people they’re seeking to detain on immigration violations, that everyone is just referring to as “ICE,” when often it’s Border Patrol agents who are in the video.
That said, both agencies have been directed to be much more aggressive in their enforcement tactics under this administration. We saw very early on the Trump administration lift the restrictions on ICE, for example, operating in “sensitive locations,” so schools, hospitals, around churches, that type of thing.
That’s a big reason why we’re seeing so many videos from the hallways of courthouses, where ICE officers have been assigned to, basically, take people into custody as they come out of court. Some of the most appalling imagery that we have seen has come from ICE officers in those situations, where there are distraught families, and they’re trying to arrest one of the parents, and children are crying.
[Sounds of ICE officer speaking and family crying]
Miroff: On the streets, many of the videos we’ve seen that have been attributed to ICE are actually Border Patrol agents who are conducting the kind of broad, less-discriminating enforcement tactics that I was describing earlier.
Those are often agents in camouflage. They have ballistic helmets, vests, masks, obviously, and often much heavier weaponry than you would expect for this kind of enforcement operation.
Ali Rogin (from PBS): Hundreds of federal agents rappel from Black Hawk helicopters, use drones and flash-bang grenades to storm an apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood.
Miroff: And where Border Patrol agents arrive—especially in public places like Home Depot parking lots and car washes, the specific locations that Stephen Miller told them that he wanted to target—and really kind of flooding a zone or a neighborhood to conduct more kind of sweeping tactics, to make a large number of arrests rather quickly, to aggressively question people that they encounter, we often see crowds gathering as people, some activists, some just bystanders, start to film what the agents are doing, often yelling at them.
[CBP officers and protesters clash, and a vehicle horn blares]
Miroff: This is how we’ve gotten so many of these clips of confrontations out on the streets, and some of them show agents behaving quite violently and using a lot of force. And that is also what has led to some of the litigation that has found the Border Patrol at fault—Border Patrol using tear gas excessively or pepper balls, which are these munitions that they shoot at people.
Rosin: So what I hear you saying—it’s both that ICE is behaving more aggressively than they typically do, and that Border Patrol has newly arrived into cities and introduced their tactics that they usually use at the border.
Miroff: That’s right, with the caveat that I would say ICE officers, because they have more experience operating in cities and communities, are trained to think about their actions in advance, to use more caution. And there’s, I think, a greater awareness that they’re being filmed and that they’re gonna be accountable for their actions.
Rosin: Nick, what about this 100-mile rule? I’ve heard that the Border Patrol shouldn’t actually operate so far from the border. Is that not actually a limit on their actions?
Miroff: It isn’t a limit. It’s more like, within 100 miles, they have additional authorities to stop vehicles, to question people. There’s a lower bar to the standard that they need to meet, which is that they have to have a “reasonable suspicion” that someone is in the country, is present, illegally. And so within that 100-mile zone, they have more powers, but they do have a broad authority to enforce U.S. immigration law across the country.
And so what’s different is that ICE officers, by and large, get more training in meeting that reasonable suspicion standard. ICE officers are really trained to avoid U.S. citizens, to avoid hassling U.S. citizens, and when an ICE officer takes a U.S. citizen into custody and detains them for a period of time, that’s really considered, like, a screwup within the agency.
Whereas the Border Patrol, because it has this mentality that anybody who gets past them is a potential threat, the default for Border Patrol agents is to stop someone and detain them and question them until they’re satisfied. Acting first and working out the details later isn’t considered bad operating policy for Border Patrol agents.
Rosin: Right, and it sounds like, from what you’re saying, it’s actually considered the right way to operate because anybody is a potential threat, and letting a potential threat in brings about the specter of terrorism or drug trafficking or sort of much more dangerous things—in their culture.
Miroff: That’s exactly right. In Border Patrol, you’re faulted for failing to act, whereas, I think, in ICE, you can get in bigger trouble for making a mistake.
And I think there’s just generally—like, for an ICE officer working in a U.S. city, if you are trying to go for somebody and they duck into a day care, or if they go into a church or something, and you didn’t get ’em, well, you come back a couple hours later, or you come back the next day. It’s not like the Border Patrol, where it’s if somebody sneaks past you, you’re not gonna get ’em again, and who knows who they are.
Rosin: After the break, Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who is leading this effort—and who just loves a good propaganda video.
[Break]
Rosin: A face of the Border Patrol presence has been Greg Bovino. Who is he?
Miroff: Greg Bovino was the chief of the El Centro Border Patrol Sector in California’s Imperial Valley; it’s sort of a lower-tier border sector, not one of the higher-profile jobs at the agency.
And he’s a nearly 30-year Border Patrol veteran who, in this administration, has taken on this kind of extraordinary role that is almost outside of his own agency. He is now, as he’s said under oath, reporting directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and to her kind of de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, the longtime kind of Trump world figure.
And so Bovino is leading this kind of road show of Border Patrol enforcement that started in Los Angeles, went to Chicago, and is now arriving in North Carolina.
Within the Border Patrol, Bovino has been viewed as kind of an extreme figure, an attention seeker. He is the only Border Patrol chief who, in his social-media profile photo, was carrying a weapon, right? He’s holding a big military-grade rifle.
For years now, he’s been at the forefront of making social-media videos, kind of Border Patrol propaganda videos, initially with an eye, I think, on trying to boost recruitment and depicting the job as something akin to kind of a military service, with a lot of action and a lot of guns and vehicles and things like that.
[Sounds of helicopter, agents yelling, music]
Miroff: Increasingly, as he travels around the country with his own film crew, they’re making videos that are almost akin to kind of a trolling operation, where they’re using certain songs—like, they would take a Kendrick Lamar song and use it in Los Angeles as they were rolling through the streets,
[Music]
Miroff: You know, making themselves out to be like action figures.
And so the president’s most ardent supporters love these kinds of videos and love to see these guys deployed on the streets almost like kind of MAGA action heroes. But a lot of people are upset by them, and a lot of people within the Department of Homeland Security, including the Border Patrol, think that it’s gone too far and that he’s inviting a big backlash against the agency.
A good example of this, and probably the one action that most typifies Bovino’s approach, was this raid on a South Side Chicago apartment building at the end of September, in which Bovino and hundreds of agents—primarily from the Border Patrol, including the Border Patrol’s elite kind of SWAT teams—they raided this apartment building, looking for alleged Venezuelan gang members.
And they flew a Black Hawk helicopter and used fast-rope techniques to repel down onto the roof of this building. They set off flash-bang grenades. They kicked down doors. They went apartment to apartment, pulling people out of this building, including minors and children, in the middle of the night.
And they made 37 arrests and touted the operation as a huge success. But they ended up, for a period of time, detaining and zip-tying a number of U.S. citizens. And weeks later, they haven’t released the names of the people that they arrested; they haven’t produced evidence of narcotics or weapons.
That operation was viewed within the Border Patrol as very risky and with the potential that something could have gone badly wrong if one of the agents had slipped or if worse violence had erupted as part of that raid.
Rosin: So what is the story, then, they’re telling with these videos?
Miroff: Well, if you listen to Bovino’s—the kind of speeches that he makes to agents that appear in some of the videos, the message is very much that No one is gonna stop us, that they’re empowered to do this mission, that this is their country. Nobody can tell them where to go, where not to go. They view this very much as taking out criminals and kind of taking back the streets, so there’s a kind of vigilante undercurrent to it.
And I think that’s the most, probably, exciting part to a lot of the president’s supporters. I think they view themselves almost kind of like an untouchables, where they are taking back some territory that has been occupied or taken over by criminals.
And obviously, that’s not what a huge part of the American public sees when they see these images of heavily armed, masked agents arresting women or grabbing families, smashing people’s windows, grabbing gardeners on quiet streets. They see something that is just absolutely foreign and beyond the pale of any domestic law-enforcement operation they’re familiar with.
Rosin: The story the administration tells in these videos and in other ways was that they are focusing on “the worst of the worst,” the criminals. But the percent of people they pick up who have criminal records does not seem to match that. There are varied numbers coming out of Chicago, but it’s definitely not anywhere close to the majority. How big is that gap, and what does it mean?
Miroff: The gap is big, and it’s growing.
When ICE was responsible for domestic interior enforcement, the statistic that ICE officials were always emphasizing was the percentage of people they arrest who either have criminal convictions or have pending criminal charges. Now, oftentimes, ICE had all the incentive to overstate that, and a lot of the pending criminal charges were for things like traffic violations or immigration violations. But it was a big part of the way ICE has justified its role in carrying out immigration enforcement.
And what we’re seeing with the Border Patrol, to the extent that Border Patrol is playing a bigger role in the deportation campaign, [is] that a growing share of the people who are arrested do not have criminal records. The percentage that have criminal records, who have criminal convictions or even criminal charges, is dropping.
Probably the best example is these court filings out of Chicago in the case involving excessive use of force by the Border Patrol that show that, of a more than 600 suspects whose names were provided to the court, only 16 had criminal records that led them to be considered public-safety risks by ICE.
Rosin: Right, so that is a small percentage.
Miroff: A small percentage. Again, that it’s a sign of a less-discriminating approach. And they continue to insist that they are doing targeted enforcement, but numbers like that tell a different story.
From the beginning, they’ve been trying to have it both ways: They say that they’re going after “the worst of the worst,” but that anybody who is present in the country illegally is fair game.
I think it’s helpful to try to think about this in terms of the message they’re seeking to send. And you have to look at what the Biden administration’s policy was, and the Biden administration, what they were trying to do with ICE, after a period in which a lot of people within the Democratic Party were calling for ICE’s abolition, was to direct ICE officers to really focus on public-safety threats, people who had come into the country recently, and national-security threats—really to be even more discerning—but not to go after immigrants who were living in the country long term and were basically keeping their heads down and staying out of trouble.
And so, as the Trump administration came in, they continued to say that criminals were going to be their priority and that they were going after “the worst of the worst,” because that was the imagery that the president had really leaned into on the campaign trail, depicting cities as being overrun by immigrant gangs.
And so, in reality, they were going after “the worst of the worst,” but then they would say, Anybody who is in the country illegally is fair game, and that they were going to conduct more what they call “collateral arrests,” in which they are specifically targeting an individual, but then, once they arrive at a location, they will check the immigration status of other people they encounter and potentially arrest them.
And over the course of the last few months, I think we’ve seen them get further and further away from that type of tactic and toward what we discussed earlier, in which agents arrive at a general geographic area and then just start questioning anybody they encounter. And that’s a big reason why the percentage of people who have criminal records who are being arrested has been going down.
What immigration and enforcement veterans would say is that these agencies have limited resources, and so it’s a matter of, “Who do you prioritize for enforcement?” Is it more important to arrest fewer people, but get higher-quality arrests—that being people with violent histories or violent criminal records, who, I think, there’s broad bipartisan consensus that those types of people should be deported from the United States—or are you going for just raw numbers?
And what we’ve seen with this administration is that the priority is getting to high numbers and to meeting the president’s really kind of arbitrary desire to get millions of arrests, which appears to sound better, but leads to a more kind of indiscriminate immigration-enforcement approach. And that’s what we’re seeing increasingly play out with the Border Patrol.
Rosin: So one thing we haven’t covered—there was a recent Supreme Court opinion that opened up new options for Border Patrol. Can you explain what it is and how it works?
Miroff: Yeah, well, when the Border Patrol first deployed to Los Angeles, quickly, there were a number of complaints about agents racially profiling people on the streets and disproportionately going for people who appeared Hispanic or Latino, or who spoke Spanish.
And so activist groups in the city brought this lawsuit against the government and initially won some victories at the district-court level. And by the time it made it to the shadow docket of the Supreme Court, it came back with a ruling in favor of the administration, and an opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh that agents could continue to use racial and ethnic appearance as a factor in determining a reasonable suspicion to stop and question someone. And it couldn’t be the only factor, but that they could continue to use that as a factor.
And the administration, and particularly the Border Patrol, I think, interpreted that really as a green light to lean even more heavily into the kinds of tactics that we’ve seen from Bovino in Chicago and now in North Carolina, in which they use speaking Spanish or ethnic appearance as some of the primary factors in determining who to stop and question.
Rosin: Yeah, the words Kavanaugh used were “do not speak much English,” “apparent ethnicity,” and then he said it was “common sense” that these factors “can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.” Is that now the settled law of the land—that that is permissible?
Miroff: No, this was a shadow-docket decision written by a single justice, an emergency docket decision. The case is still working its way through the courts and is scheduled to be revisited on the merits and to be heard on the merits. But it’s certainly an indication of the way the court seems to be leaning.
Rosin: Nick, we talked about Bovino turning his sights from Chicago to now North Carolina. Do we know why he left Chicago? Do we understand why they leave one city and choose another city?
Miroff: So DHS and Bovino himself haven’t given a great answer to this question, but I think it’s a series of factors. The biggest ones are that this district court found that he had repeatedly, and his agents had repeatedly, used excessive force and put limits on their ability to deploy tear gas and things like that.
And then I think that they were also getting diminishing returns. Once they operate in a city this way for a long period of time, you start to see activist groups and neighborhood groups really mobilize in defense of their neighborhoods and communities and really kind of resist, with tactics that include blowing whistles whenever they see ICE officers or Border Patrol agents, filming them, following them around, sending out notices of where they’re located. And I think it just gets harder and harder for these federal agencies to operate when the community gets so stirred up.
And the administration also—it’s important to keep in mind—really wanted, I think, a bigger National Guard deployment and a more robust National Guard role. We’ve heard the president talk about wanting to use active-duty troops in these cities, and the courts have really pushed back at that. And, as we know, the Posse Comitatus Act really limits the ability of armed troops to operate in a domestic law-enforcement capacity, and the courts, I think, have really tried to uphold that.
And so they didn’t get the kind of military force that they were wanting in Chicago. And so Bovino, after getting this kind of adverse ruling from the court and wanting to go to a new city where they could make kind of a new splash, ended up going to North Carolina—which, coincidentally, is Bovino’s home state.
Rosin: And does going to North Carolina reset things? The federal judge issued pretty specific warnings—like, You have to issue warnings before you use tear-gas canisters at protests—but does it all just reset once he goes to Charlotte?
Miroff: That’s my understanding. Plaintiffs could bring a lawsuit, a similar lawsuit on similar grounds, in North Carolina, and I think we should probably expect that’ll happen soon.
But I think that they view it as a reset, and given the way that they are treating this both as an immigration-enforcement campaign but also as a social-media campaign, I think that they view this campaign almost episodically. You hear about Trump saying, We’re gonna do this city next, or We’re gonna go into that city.
And so the point isn’t to stay forever in a particular city. I think they’re looking to go to new cities to get kind of a new narrative, get new images. They like to give these operations cute names; that’s why their North Carolina deployment is called “Charlotte’s Web.” And they’ve talked about going into New Orleans after North Carolina. I would say, at this point, there’s widespread expectation within the Department of Homeland Security that Bovino and the Border Patrol are going to target New York City next, once Mayor-elect [Zohran] Mamdani takes office on January 1.
No one has officially confirmed that, but I’ve spoken to several officials within the Department of Homeland Security who say that that is the expectation at this point. And we know that the White House is setting up Mamdani to be a kind of political foil for the president. The White House has long wanted to do a big enforcement operation of this kind in New York City.
But given how combustible that could potentially be and the challenges that agents will face, operationally, in a dense urban environment like that, where they can’t easily maneuver their vehicles in and out—again, these are Border Patrol agents, who are used to working down along the desert, in these wide-open spaces where they can drive wherever the hell they want, and so if they are in a tightly packed urban neighborhood, where vehicles get blocked and whatnot, it’s not hard to imagine things really spiraling outta control.
And so that would, I think, weigh against whatever decision they make. But, I can say at this point, there’s an anticipation that that’s going to happen next year.
Rosin: How scalable is this operation? How big can this operation get?
Miroff: Well, I’ve covered the Border Patrol for more than a decade, and I’d say there aren’t a lot of other Bovinos within the leadership of the Border Patrol. He’s something of an outlier even within his agency.
The Border Patrol says that it has about 2,000 agents right now assisting with this deportation campaign in 25 U.S. cities. But I think that, in most of those locations, it’s not the kind of high-profile deployment that Bovino is engaged in. It’s more of an auxiliary-support role for ICE, which continues to take the lead.
That said, the White House continues to be disappointed and frustrated with ICE’s ability to deliver the numbers that the president wants, and they have started replacing ICE regional-office directors with Border Patrol commanders. And so the Border Patrol is going to expand its role in this campaign. There will be more agents out on U.S. streets.
It’s creating tension between ICE and the Border Patrol, and a lot of senior ICE officials are frustrated and demoralized. But, given that border crossings are so low and the White House sees a need for more manpower in these cities, I think we can expect that more agents are going to deploy over the coming months.
Rosin: You’re talking about this in terms of ICE v. Border Patrol, but where does it ultimately go for immigration enforcement? I can see a scenario where DHS and ICE start to slowly take on the style of Bovino.
Miroff: I think that, by promoting Bovino in this way, the White House is definitely signaling that this is what the president wants. These are the kinds of tactics that he wants to see. When 60 Minutes asked the president what he thought of the operation in Chicago led by Bovino and whether it was too violent, he said he didn’t think that they had “gone far enough.”
[Music]
Miroff: It’s also crucial to keep in mind that the president’s “big, beautiful bill” provided $170 billion for Customs and Border Protection and for ICE, just this extraordinary amount of money. And so that funding is going to allow ICE to more than double the size of its workforce and to expand its detention capacity to more than 100,000 beds—that means that it can basically hold more than 100,000 people in custody at any given time awaiting deportation.
And so they certainly have the resources to work toward the president’s stated goal of at least 1 million deportations a year, and I think that they’re trying to signal to the ICE and Border Patrol workforce that what they want is more Bovinos.
The question, I think, is gonna be, “Does the pushback to that become so great that there’s a bit of a reset or a pause?,” if it becomes so politically,untenable for the White House to continue in this way, given what we’ve seen in the polling about diminishing public support for the president’s immigration-enforcement campaign.
Rosin: It seems like this is an immigration crackdown, but it also seems like this is part of Trump asserting himself in just a more militarized way on U.S. soil, particularly in Democratic-led cities. Is that a fair assessment?
Miroff: Yeah, I think that’s spot-on. Stephen Miller has talked for years about imposing the power of the federal government on sanctuary cities that have adopted these policies to limit cooperation with ICE, and that Democratic officials in these jurisdictions are akin to insurrectionists. He has long mused about using the Insurrection Act to call in troops and to unlock extraordinary emergency authorities that would allow for the deployment of even more troops and federal forces in places where the government is getting pushback.
And so I think this kind of militarization is targeted both at protesters, at Democratic officials that have resisted this campaign in California and Chicago, and then as part of a desire to just mobilize the entire federal government on behalf of this effort to deport as many people as possible.
[Music]
Rosin: Thank you to Nick Miroff for joining us on the show, and thank you also to Brian Kolp for sharing his story from Chicago.
By the way, his neighborhood did end up holding their Halloween costume parade.
Rosin: What were your kids gonna be, by the way?
Kolp: They were—ironically, they were both police officers.
Rosin: Really? (Laughs.) You’re kidding. Wow.
Kolp: Yeah, no, no joke. No, I’m not even kidding.
Rosin: Yeah.
Kolp: Not even kidding.
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Susan Banta fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
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