Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has already been warned by a court about his use of tear gas, so he’s apparently switched to smoke bombs—with mixed results.
Bovino, 55, Donald Trump’s most notorious anti-immigration commander, was filmed struggling to deploy a smoke canister in a park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as federal agents clashed with protesters and legal observers.
Having finally worked out how to pull the pin, Bovino appeared to misjudge the wind and received a faceful of green smoke.
The chaos began a short distance away at West 28th Street and Blaisdell Avenue, where federal agents boxed in a vehicle and pulled out a Latino teenage boy and a girl, witnesses told the Minneota Star Tribune.
As dozens of protesters gathered and yelled at the officers, agents forced a man to the ground, and a colleague leaned in to spray a bright orange chemical irritant directly into his face, the paper reported. People hit by the spray were soon getting rinsed on the sidewalks as others poured water into their eyes.
Not long after, the paper reported, Bovino was seen lobbing a smoke canister at a crowd of protesters and observers in south Minneapolis.
At Mueller Park in the Whittier neighborhood at around 2:30 p.m., video captured a caravan of federal vehicles pulling up before Bovino began barking warnings.
“I’m gonna gas. Get back. Gas is coming. Gas is coming, second warning. Second warning,” he could be heard saying. “Third warning. Gas, gas, gas,” Bovino added dramatically, before tossing the device and shoving people away from the street.
Plumes of green smoke then rolled over the crowd as protesters and observers tried to run away.
Witnesses told the paper that at least a couple of protesters were tackled and arrested, and that several people were left coughing or vomiting from the smoke. Green stains speckled the snow where the cloud settled.
In the chaos, a loaded rifle magazine that an agent dropped in the snow was left behind. It was later recovered by Minneapolis police, according to a department spokesperson quoted by The Star Tribune.
The paper also reported that one of the spent canisters was labeled “pocket tactical green smoke,” made by Defense Technology. Its printed warning says it should only be used by trained law enforcement, corrections, or military personnel, and that users “should be trained in deployment, decontamination and first aid procedures.”
Those encounters unfolded shortly after a federal appeals court lifted an injunction that had barred immigration agents from detaining and pepper-spraying peaceful protesters and observers in the state.
Bovino is regarded as Trump’s “commander-at-large,” a role in which he answers directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and roams from city to city leading aggressive anti-immigration sweeps.
His Minneapolis performance comes barely two months after a federal judge in Chicago tore into his tear-gas tactics. In a ruling extending limits on riot-control weapons in that city, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis said she had seen “ample evidence that agents… intended to cause protesters harm,” and found the Trump administration’s justifications “simply not credible.”
Ellis focused on a now-infamous October clash in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where Bovino was filmed lobbing a canister of tear gas over a crowd in alleged violation of her earlier temporary restraining order requiring warnings and tight limits on force.
Plaintiffs in that case accused Bovino and the Department of Homeland Security of fabricating a story that he only used gas after being hit in the head by a rock—a claim they said collapsed once lawyers scoured every frame of government video.
After reviewing the video and hearing days of testimony, Ellis ruled that Bovino had admitted he lied about key details of what happened.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
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