One year ago, Gregory Bovino was a low-profile Border Patrol chief overseeing a relatively small stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in California. Just months into President Donald Trump’s second term, however, Bovino emerged as the face of one of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns in U.S. history, leading federal agents as they flooded one predominantly Democratic city after another, making thousands of arrests.
Now that approach has turned into a political liability for Trump. And Bovino, 55, has been dispatched back to California, days after he declared — despite video evidence to the contrary — that the intensive care nurse fatally shot in Minneapolis on Saturday by federal immigration personnel wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”
Bovino’s rapid rise and fall reflects the arc of the Trump administration’s combative immigration enforcement tactics and the mounting public backlash it has generated.
The administration’s enforcement operations in multiple metropolitan areas formed the capstone of Bovino’s three-decade career in U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the nation’s biggest federal law enforcement agency. His visibility also demonstrated the more prominent role that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has given to the Border Patrol in urban areas, mostly far from its traditional purview over the U.S.-Mexico border.
Dressed in his signature olive-green uniform and sporting a buzz cut, Bovino led masked agents into American cities like a military commander directing troops into battle. Bovino relished trading insults with critics on social media, posting action videos of his agents’ maneuvers and appearing on the front lines of tear-gas-laced clashes with protesters.
His leadership drew criticism over time, including an admonishment from a federal judge in Illinois, who said the use of force by federal agents “shocks the conscience.” That criticism mounted this month amid Bovino’s forceful defense of the fatal shootings by federal immigration personnel of two American citizens in Minneapolis, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
Even Trump, who has touted the blue-city operations, seemed to acknowledge that in Minneapolis, Bovino had pushed past the boundaries of traditional law enforcement tactics.
“You know, Bovino is very good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy,” Trump said in a Fox News interview Tuesday. “And in some cases, that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”
Some former officials of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, said they welcomed Bovino’s departure from Minneapolis out of concern for the agency’s credibility.
“I hope it’s a sign that perhaps there is a recalibration going on about how to approach the enforcement of immigration laws,” said Tim Quinn, a longtime CBP official who resigned last year. “I don’t think agents were well represented by his actions, and I fear that the country’s view of the border patrol is going to be negatively affected, but hopefully not irreparably damaged.”
Bovino’s elevated status within the agency was unusual because he didn’t appear to operate within the chain of command, which would require him to answer to senior CBP officials. Instead, he was in direct contact with Noem, said Robert Danley, who retired as CBP head of professional responsibility in December.
“He has a more direct line to the secretary, and he’s able to do what she wants and what he wants,” Danley said.
DHS and Bovino did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week. Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said Monday evening on X that Bovino “has NOT been relieved of his duties” and called him a “key part of the President’s team and a great American.”
Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer whose arrest at an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest in Portland won admiration from Trump, has championed Bovino’s leadership and said he hopes the administration keeps him at the center of its crackdown on illegal immigration.
“His presence on the front lines was a huge morale booster for the Border Patrol, which is obviously under heavy scrutiny,” Sortor said. “Him being there and risking his life beside them every day was sort of like fuel for them … He was becoming a figurehead for the mass deportation effort, somebody who was hell-bent on fulfilling what he believed was a mandate from the 2024 election.”
Days before Trump took office, Bovino oversaw a Border Patrol raid in Kern County, at the southern end of California’s Central Valley, some 250 miles from the border. Although the agency described the operation as targeted, Border Patrol agents had no knowledge of the criminal or immigration history for 77 of the 78 people arrested, according to CalMatters,a nonprofit news organization.
The American Civil Liberties Union alleged in a lawsuit that agents were conducting arrests indiscriminately of people of color “who appeared to be farm workers or day laborers, regardless of their actual immigration status.” A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction last spring barring Border Patrol agents from stopping people in that region without reasonable suspicion that they were violating U.S. immigration law.
“Looking back on last year, the operation looks like an audition for Greg Bovino, and he got the part,” said Bree Bernwanger, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “That raid was a precursor to the policies and practices that DHS would adopt writ large across the country … We’ve seen them ignoring proof of immigration status and an utter disregard for the laws on the books that restrict immigration arrests without a warrant.”
But Bovino remained little known nationally until June, when Border Patrol agents began making arrests in Los Angeles. After agents descended on a park in an immigrant-rich neighborhood on horseback and in military vehicles, Bovino told Fox News, “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon.”
Several weeks later, in Chicago, Bovino’s aggressive tactics became more visible, as federal agents deployed tear gas and protesters clashed with law enforcement outside an ICE processing facility west of downtown. The nonprofit Chicago Headline Club filed a lawsuitagainst administration officials, alleging that the use of rubber bullets and tear gas against reporters and protesters violated their First Amendment rights.
Bovino, who was among multiple defendants in the lawsuit, claimed in a deposition that the agents’ conduct was “more than exemplary.” But U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis concluded that Bovino’s testimony was “not credible” and wrote in a court opinion that Bovino admitted “he lied multiple times” about the events that led up to his throwing a tear-gas canister toward a crowd. Bovino and DHS said that a rock hit him in the head before he threw the canister, and he said that he was “mistaken” in his deposition.
“I see little reason for the use of force that the federal agents are currently using,” Ellis said when she issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting immigration officers from using tear gas and pepper spray on those who do not pose a threat. “I would find the use of force shocks the conscience.”
From Chicago, Bovino continued on to shorter-term operations in New Orleans and Charlotte. Then came his posting to Minneapolis, which has turned out to be an inflection point for his career and, perhaps, for the administration’s immigration crackdown in urban areas.
On the morning of Jan. 7, an ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed 37-year-old Good while she drove her SUV near her home in Minneapolis. A Washington Post analysis of video footage found Good’s car did move toward Ross but that he was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him.
Bovino, however, did not hesitate to condemn Good’s actions and praise the shooter, saying, “Hats off to that ICE agent” in a Fox News interview.
Seventeen days later, Bovino would once again defend the use of fatal force as the news broke that Pretti had been shot and killed in an encounter with federal officers.
At a news conference just hours after Pretti’s death, Bovino claimed that agents tried to disarm Pretti, but he “violently resisted.” An agent fired “defensive shots,” he said.
“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” Bovino added.
Analysis of videos of the scene by several media organizations do not support Bovino’s claims. Federal immigration personnel had already secured Pretti’s handgun by the time they fatally shot him, according to a Post analysis of videos that captured the incident from several angles. As many as eight officers and agents were attempting to detain the 37-year-old ICU nurse, videos show. Federal officials now say that a Border Patrol agent and a CBP officer both shot Pretti, and they no longer claim that he had menaced agents with his gun.
By Sunday, some Republican members of Congress had begun raising concerns about the shooting and pressing for an independent investigation. And by the following day, both Trump and White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt signaled a change, saying that Trump’s border czar Tom Homan would be taking over the operation in Minneapolis.
“Mr. Bovino is a wonderful man, and he is a great professional,” Leavitt said. “He is going to very much continue to lead [Customs and Border Protection] throughout and across the country. Mr. Homan will be the main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis.”
The news drew praise from Bovino’s critics.
“This move by the administration is a political recognition that the violence we’re seeing across our communities, from Minneapolis to cities nationwide, is deeply unpopular, unacceptable, and politically toxic,” said Todd Schulte, president of the immigration advocacy group FWD.us.
Bovino allies like Sortor registered their disappointment. “Bovino put his life on the line EVERY SINGLE DAY pushing for mass deportations across the country, going head to head with leftists and reminding THEM who’s boss,” he said on X: “DO NOT COWER TO THE DEMOCRATS, PRESIDENT TRUMP! BACK BOVINO!”
Bovino’s typically busy social media feed has been quiet since then. His most recent post on X came Monday morning before news of his departure spread. “Finding and arresting criminal illegal aliens,” he wrote, “this is why we are deployed across the country.”
Robert Klemko contributed to this report.
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