Gregory Bovino has only a few regrets.
“I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens,” he said in a recent interview. “I mean, we went as hard as we could, but there’s always a creative and innovative solution to catching even more.”
Until January, Mr. Bovino was the pugnacious face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. As federal agents moved to suppress protests in city after city, Mr. Bovino was often at the center of the scrum, personally lobbing tear gas into crowds and authorizing his team to operate with remorseless aggression.
He had risen from relative obscurity, but Mr. Bovino was built for the moment. He had long harbored hard-line, even radical views on immigration, and said he had a plan to deport 100 million people. And he had a longstanding reputation within the Border Patrol for his eagerness to test the law in service of those views, according to interviews with current and former colleagues and previously unreported documents.
The administration handed the mid-level Border Patrol leader a highly irregular position that allowed him to leapfrog the usual chain of command and report directly to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.
He was straight out of central casting, often wearing a double-breasted olive green coat that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said looked as if he “literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb.” (Mr. Bovino said the coat is an old Border Patrol uniform that he bought as a young agent.)
Mr. Bovino eventually started referring to himself in the third person as “Chief Bovino,” one administration official said, and assumed the title of “Commander at Large.”
But Mr. Bovino’s fall was abrupt. The legally contested and chaotic crackdowns he led resulted in the killing of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis. Protests against the government’s immigration enforcement campaign intensified, and polls showed a broad public backlash. The administration pulled the plug on him.
Even Mr. Trump distanced himself, calling for a “softer touch” and saying Mr. Bovino was “a pretty out-there kind of guy.”
This week, Mr. Bovino is officially retiring.
To some of the colleagues he clashed with over his career, Mr. Bovino’s trajectory was predictable. While popular with direct subordinates for his bold and unapologetic leadership, six current and former homeland security officials described him as a chronic institutional headache whose theatricality, combativeness and disregard for rules and protocol sometimes alienated even those who generally shared his politics. Some of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the department had not authorized them to speak to the news media.
The White House and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for comment.
In several recent interviews with the Times, Mr. Bovino lashed out at many of his superiors, calling them “status quo” bureaucrats who prioritized intelligence-led arrests over the “turn and burn” tactics he championed. He mocked Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, referencing accusations that Mr. Homan once accepted a $50,000 cash bribe in a paper bag: “You’re not going to see me talking to anyone for a bag of money,” he said. (Mr. Homan was investigated but was never charged with a crime).
Mr. Bovino’s actions left a trail of litigation, condemnations from local politicians and accusations of discrimination and unconstitutional conduct.
And, yes, the Commander has a few regrets. But he does not think he went too far. He thinks he did not go far enough.
“We wanted total border domination,” Mr. Bovino said one recent morning, leaning over a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon at Burgers and Beer, a sports bar and restaurant popular with El Centro’s federal agents. “When you use terms like that, perhaps it scares some of the weaker-minded people. Domination. I want you to dominate that border. I’m not going to ‘control’ it. We’re going to dominate the hell out of that damn place.”
A High-Voltage Presence
On Jan. 30, one week after federal agents in Minneapolis fatally shot a protester named Alex Pretti, Mr. Bovino drove back to El Centro, a dusty city in the Imperial Valley.
It was a contentious homecoming. First, he was mocked on social media after making a brief stop in Las Vegas, where management at the Bottled Blonde, a nightclub on the Strip, said that they had asked him to leave and escorted him out at around 12:30 a.m. Mr. Bovino insisted the bar had lied and that no one had kicked him out. The night was a “really positive experience,” fueled by his appreciation for ’80s cover bands, he said. “The bartenders loved us.”
Later that day, Mr. Bovino drove by the patrol’s El Centro headquarters, where he faced off against a small group of protesters. His return polarized the desert community, where the agency is a top employer. One protester, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement employee named Maribel Padilla, stood outside with a sign as he drove by: “Deport Bovino.”
At Burgers and Beer weeks later, Mr. Bovino wore a form-fitting black T-shirt and a beaded “good luck” bracelet that he said was given to him by a friend for protection. He was a high-voltage presence, prone to intense eye contact. He drank so many cups of coffee that it was hard to keep track, although he possessed the same energy regardless of the caffeine.
He relished politically incorrect language. Barack Obama was “Hussein”; migrants attempting to cross the border during the pandemic were “walking zombies.” This rhetoric is part of what made Bovino such a singular character, the embodiment of Trump-era immigration enforcement. Over the past year, Mr. Bovino was caught on camera denigrating protesters and encouraging force. At one point, he declared Los Angeles “our fucking city” and told agents to “arrest as many people that touch you as you want.”
By the end of his national tour, one official said, Mr. Bovino was deliberately seeking out confrontations at convenience stores or on the street to get content for social media.
Mr. Bovino’s persona was so theatrical that he drew frequent comparisons to Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, the fictional villain in the Oscar-winning film “One Battle After Another.” Mr. Bovino said that he had not seen the film, but did not think he resembled the actor who played Lockjaw, Sean Penn, whom he dismissed as “fringe, left, liberal.”
Mr. Bovino said he had a master plan that was in motion before his exile back to El Centro. It would have neutralized protesters, he said, and made it possible to deport 100 million people.
That is a goal that the Department of Homeland Security has widely promoted. If it sounds extreme, that’s because it’s nearly 10 times the estimated number of undocumented people in the country. It is also more than a quarter of the entire U.S. population.
Proof of Concept
Mr. Bovino said he had been combative since his childhood growing up in North Carolina.
He calls himself a “hillbilly” and strongly identifies with his Appalachian roots. As a child, he said, he was inspired by local Revolutionary War fighters who “wiped them British off” before returning to the mountains to make liquor.
He graduated from Western Carolina University in 1993, a degree he said he paid for in part by harvesting ginseng in the mountains. In later years, he claimed, “illegal aliens” scoured the hillsides and depleted his “prized ginseng patches.” (Scientists attribute the decline of wild American ginseng to other factors.)
After joining the Border Patrol in 1996, Mr. Bovino’s first assignment was in El Centro, where he said he immediately dedicated himself to one goal: “Catch as many illegal aliens as you possibly can.” Over the next 15 years he popped up all over the American West, in Washington, D.C., and as far away as Africa and Australia.
He spent the 2010s building a reputation inside the agency for a willingness to push back against the political and bureaucratic leaders above him.
While leading a Border Patrol station in Blythe, Calif., Mr. Bovino attempted to publish his own research paper claiming that foreigners, both documented and not, were engaged in a “large-scale” attack on America’s environment. He advocated for amending immigration law so that the government could deport even green-card holders for low-level offenses such as illegal fishing. He said that a “weak-kneed” superior, Rodney Scott, currently the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, would not publish his work.
In 2010, Mr. Bovino launched his first major interior operation, a sweep of the Las Vegas airport and bus stations. Though intended to last for three days, the mission was shut down within an hour following an intervention by Senator Harry Reid. Mr. Bovino still felt triumphant. “From what I remember, we caught more illegal aliens than there were minutes in the operation,” he said. “We were going to town on them.”
He concluded that interior immigration enforcement was inextricably linked to “total immigration domination” and that his methods were sound — if only there were a White House that would let him run.
He said he began training teams to execute “consensual encounters,” a controversial tactic of casually approaching individuals at gas stations and transit hubs, then asking about their immigration status. By basing these stops on “articulable facts,” Bovino exploited a legal gray area that allowed agents to question people without the reasonable suspicion required for a formal detention.
‘Scum,’ ‘Trash’ and ‘Filth’
After he was assigned to lead the New Orleans sector in 2018, Mr. Bovino solidified what he viewed as his all-encompassing approach to enforcement, which would one day draw the admiration of the Trump administration.
His unapologetic and abrasive persona was on full display, too. Teresa Pedregon, a veteran Border Patrol employee who is now retired, said that in their first meeting in New Orleans, Bovino referred to undocumented immigrants as “filth” and “trash.” Under his leadership, she said, the sector shifted from intelligence-driven operations to those consensual encounters.
“It was all about numbers for Bovino,” she said.
Ms. Pedregon was one of four agency employees who sued D.H.S., alleging discriminatory hiring practices in New Orleans. The lawsuits claimed that Mr. Bovino gave preferential treatment to less qualified white and male agents.
During the litigation, Mr. Bovino had to address political and racially charged emails that were sent to him by a man he promoted, including a meme that depicted Mr. Bovino as a Confederate general.
Previously unreported legal documents show that Mr. Bovino also admitted he had referred to undocumented people as “scum,” “trash,” and “filth” while giving a speech to his agents. He said that at the time, he had been referring to criminals such as child rapists, but he also refused to back down. “All illegal aliens are criminals,” he said.
In the case documents, Mr. Bovino made a surprising claim to minority status: He identified his race as “Native American” and his tribe as Cherokee. He testified that he had identified this way since he was 8 years old, but said he was not registered on any official tribal rolls. To reward top performance, he said, he gave out tomahawks.
The cases were ultimately settled, and the legal dispute did not hurt his career. Instead, Mr. Bovino got a promotion, and returned to El Centro as sector chief in 2020.
‘Frankly, Obnoxious’
Mr. Bovino said he had anticipated that Mr. Trump would win re-election in 2020 and give him an empowering mandate. Instead, he got President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a global pandemic. He and his department made the best of it, Mr. Bovino said, defying orders from headquarters to prioritize the rapid processing and release of migrants.
A report published by the Project On Government Oversight, which analyzed federal data from 2022 to 2025, found that Mr. Bovino’s sector used force more frequently relative to its apprehensions than others in the agency.
Mr. Bovino felt his team, which he called “the premier sector,” was ignored by colleagues to avoid validating his methods. Why did no one ask him for his “secret sauce,” he wondered? He began to speak out.
Mr. Bovino said he had discovered the power of social media in New Orleans, after clashing with the city’s mayor and realizing he could speak directly to the public, even if it caused internal reprimand. “I got yelled at a whole lot and got in trouble a whole lot, and didn’t care,” he said.
In 2023, he was disciplined for social media posts and for congressional testimony, which he said earned him a formal counseling session and a brief reassignment to headquarters. He said he believed he would have been fired if Republican lawmakers hadn’t intervened.
But four former D.H.S. officials pushed back on Mr. Bovino’s narrative of these years. They said it wasn’t that colleagues were jealous as much as they resented his bragging, and they said his statistical successes were the result of geography, not just strategy. While Mr. Bovino framed past disciplinary issues as political battles, they said in reality he was singled out for unprofessionalism.
“He had no trouble putting himself out there as better than the others and doing that in front of them,” said Chris Magnus, who served as commissioner of Customs and Border Protection from 2021 to 2022. “It struck me as particularly unprofessional, disturbing and frankly, obnoxious, how he interacted with both his colleagues and his subordinates.”
‘Kudos From the Trumpster’
On Jan. 7, 2025, 13 days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, dozens of Border Patrol agents from El Centro began an operation 300 miles north, in Kern County. Using unmarked vehicles, agents roved through agricultural hubs and day-laborer gathering sites, arresting 78 people in three days.
Mr. Bovino said the raids were targeted at criminals, but agents didn’t know the criminal or immigration history of most of the people they arrested, according to a judge’s ruling in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The sweep drew the attention of the White House and other federal agencies, Mr. Bovino said. When the Trump administration began its immigration crackdown in Los Angeles in June, Mr. Bovino was soon put in charge.
In Los Angeles, federal agents deployed flash-bang grenades and tear gas against protesters. In Chicago, agents in military uniforms rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter into an apartment complex as part of a campaign that resulted in the shooting of a U.S. citizen and the wrongful detention of others. In Minneapolis, an increasingly chaotic operation reached its violent end with the deaths of Renée Good and Mr. Pretti.
For months, the administration had praised Mr. Bovino for his aggressive raids. Last summer, a D.H.S. spokesperson told a reporter that he was chosen to lead the force “because he’s a badass.”
When the Minneapolis fallout shuttered Mr. Bovino’s operation, the unit was disappointed, said one member of his team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a ban on homeland security agents speaking to the media. Two members of the unit said that Mr. Bovino was a beloved leader who was as accessible as he was fierce and that morale on the team had been at an all-time high.
Mr. Bovino said he disagreed with the message the agency had sent by leaving Minnesota. He also said that he did not regret his claim that Mr. Pretti had wanted to “massacre law enforcement” despite the lack of evidence to back up that assessment.
One official said Mr. Bovino had devolved from a quirky but useful disruptive force into a liability.
The friction was palpable in the field. In Chicago, when his unit rounded up families with young children, local ICE officials balked and said they lacked the facilities to hold minors. Mr. Bovino said he was overriding them.
One D.H.S. official said some agents filed formal complaints about their time working with Mr. Bovino, alleging that they were instructed to engage in blatant racial profiling and the indiscriminate use of munitions against non-violent targets. Mr. Bovino said he was unaware of any formal complaints.
Mr. Bovino admitted there had sometimes been tension. He recalled a National Guard commander in Los Angeles warning him that his tactics in a public park could result in fatalities.
“It’s possible, yes,” Mr. Bovino remembered replying.
Back at Burgers and Beer, which by noon was already bustling with servers carrying sizzling cast-iron skillets and clapping happy birthday to guests, Mr. Bovino reflected on whether he felt ready to retire.
The administration’s public stance on immigration had shifted since his return to El Centro. Ms. Noem, whom Mr. Bovino called the “best secretary I’ve ever worked for, bar none,” had been removed from her role; Senator Markwayne Mullin, the incoming homeland security secretary, made it clear at his confirmation hearing that he would take a softer approach.
Mr. Bovino had also recently learned that he faced an internal investigation for making disparaging remarks about a Jewish prosecutor in Minnesota taking time off for Shabbat — a probe he said he was outraged to learn about not from his superiors, but from reporting in The Times. He called the accusations unfounded and said they were “made by troglodytes.”
Still, as he looked back on the past year, Mr. Bovino had some praise. He called Mr. Trump the most effective president he had ever served under: “We got a lot of kudos from the Trumpster,” he said, transmitted via Corey Lewandowski, the controversial senior adviser to Ms. Noem. He was evasive about his relationship with Stephen Miller, but acknowledged they had had “spirited” conversations.
As for retirement, Mr. Bovino said he is planning a new campaign in the North Carolina backcountry to hunt a “non-native invasive species”: the coyote.
He clarified that he meant the four-legged kind, “not the coyotes that smuggle aliens,” but the mission still felt familiar.
“Maybe I get me some dogs and we go hard on the coyotes,” he said, explaining they were killing off local timber rattlesnakes. “I’ll take it in my own hands.”
Georgia Gee contributed reporting and research. Shannon Sims contributed reporting.
Katie J.M. Baker is a national investigative correspondent for The Times.
The post Gregory Bovino’s Final Days: Harsh Words and Few Regrets appeared first on New York Times.
