Think ICE Is Bad Now? Today the Border Patrol Is Taking It Over

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

A big part of this newsletter, amid the onrushing tide of news and never-ending flurry of scandal, is to mark when something major changes in our national fabric. Last night, something did — and you probably haven’t even heard about it yet.

In a sweeping purge that affected cities from Denver to Philadelphia, the ICE leadership across about half of the country was removed — making room to replace them with leaders from the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). “The mentality is CBP does what they’re told, and the administration thinks ICE isn’t getting the job done,” a DHS official told NBC News, one of the few outlets to report on the purge as it happened last evening. “So CBP will do it.”

NBC reported that the move was led by Corey Lewandowski, the mastermind behind much of DHS’s enforcement operations, and Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol executive who has been the literal face of much of the agency’s most aggressive (and illegal!) tactics.

It’s an important recognition of a nuanced point: There are really two separate armed gangs rampaging on America’s streets — while ICE has been primarily leading the way on detentions across the country, ambushing people in places like the hallways outside immigration courts in New York City, it’s really been CBP’s Border Patrol that is terrorizing the residents of places of Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. (The two are now so blob-like that The Atlantic even used a photo of CBP officers to illustrate its article on how badly ICE’s hiring surge is going.) In the race to become America’s secret police and Trump’s goon-squad-of-choice, CBP’s military-style tactics on our streets appears to be winning — laws be damned.

In fact, today in Chicago a US District Court judge is hauling Bovino into court, after video showed Bovino apparently throwing tear gas into a crowd in Chicago last week despite a judicial restraining order against such tactics. Over the weekend, Border Patrol agents fired off tear gas for the third straight day in Chicago — the seventh time in the last three weeks — this time amid a leafy wealthy neighborhood where they were besieged by suburban residents in, literally, Blackhawk pajamas — not exactly a pitched battle with ISIS. In another showdown, agents violently arrested the manager of a comedy club.

The abuses are so widespread that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is forming a commission to document the abuses for later prosecution. “Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Greg Bovino have failed their oaths of office and allowed agents under their command to act unconscionably under the color of law. They have given the impression that their actions are immune from investigation or accountability. They are not,” Pritzker said.

Bovino has not (yet?) gotten the attention he deserves — there’s been no long-form profile of him written by the New Yorker, New York Times Sunday Magazine, or the like — but from the smaller profiles we’ve seen so far, there’s little that makes Bovino stand out. A three-decade veteran of the agency, he’s a pretty average — albeit particularly aggro — agent.

That’s exactly to me what makes his takeover of the nation’s immigration enforcement so worrisome.

I spent about five years through the Obama administration through the first Trump administration covering the Border Patrol closely; during that time, I interviewed every single one of the people who had served as commissioner of Customs and Border Protection for a 2014 piece called “The Green Monster,” which still stands as the definitive story about how the Border Patrol’s post-9/11 hiring surge infected a decade of stunning and paralyzing crime, corruption, and abuse of force inside the agency. The Border Patrol at the time was the most deadly federal law enforcement agency in the country; many of its shootings were highly controversial—and often violated the agency’s use-of-force procedures — people shot in the back, unarmed, or across the border in Mexico. As one senior DHS official told me back then, “The agency has created a culture that says, ‘If you throw a rock at me, you’re going to get shot.’”

The Border Patrol has a much longer, darker, and more militaristic history than the still-new ICE, and the idea it would eventually end up as Donald Trump’s quasi-military “interior police” has been obvious. As I’ve described it, the Border Patrol is “part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry.” It’s an agency beset with crime and corruption — even an actual serial killer.

Its combative and pugilistic union was the first to endorse Donald Trump’s presidential campaign back in the 2016 campaign — most people forget that Trump first debuted his now iconic “Make America Great Again” hat during a 2015 border tour initiated by Border Patrol union leader Hector Garza — has long hosted a popular far-right podcast that Trump loves, and then spent much of the first Trump administration whining about how the gloves weren’t really taken off immigration-wise. Many of the worst abuses of Trump administration’s response to the George Floyd protests in 2020 were carried out by heavily armed Border Patrol agents. (I wrote about all this in 2019 and 2020, among other times.)

Now the gloves have been taken off — and with the ICE purge, the administration clearly hopes ICE begins to match CBP for its intensity, aggression, and assault on American civil liberties.

The one Zelig-like constant atop the worst excesses and most controversial actions of the Border Patrol since January has been sector chief Gregory Bovino, who until January was just one of a score of agents overseeing Border Patrol operations in various parts of the country. He’s long advocated unleashing the Border Patrol on the nation’s interior, which is exactly what he’s done since January. Now, he has risen to become the administration’s elite no-holds-barred field commander of choice — its George Patton or Reinhard Heydrich, depending on your view.

In a moment when most immigration officers are hiding behind masks, Bovino has been happy to become the literal face of its immigration enforcement.

Across the country in his wake, Bovino has left a legacy of misstatements, abused civil liberties, and made-for-Instagram videos. Back in January, he led a big immigration raid in California that he promised was aimed at the worst of the worst. As CalMatters reported, “In the weeks after, both the factual and legal foundation of Bovino’s bold sweep crumbled. Border Patrol documents obtained by CalMatters showed that 77 of the 78 people his agents arrested had no prior [criminal] record.” DHS promised to retrain Bovino’s agents on the Constitution.

Next, Bovino was the force behind the controversial military-backed show-of-force by the Border Patrol in LA’s MacArthur Park. Agents on horseback, supported by the US military, marched through a park where kids were playing soccer. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon,” he told Fox News.

Then he headed further north in California in July, leading another operation. When the acting US attorney reminded him that he had to follow the Constitution and appropriate court orders, she was fired. Bovino trumpeted her ouster: “The former Acting US Attorney’s email suggesting that the United States Border Patrol does not ALWAYS abide by the Constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement.”

In August, he oversaw a force of Border Patrol agents who showed up outside a press conference by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, as blatant an effort to intimidate an elected official as we’ve seen yet in this administration.

Throughout his efforts, he’s been a leading voice that immigration officers have every right to racially profile people on the streets — a power now backed by the Supreme Court in a case championed by Bovino and known as “Kavanaugh stops.”

Now he’s been front and center in the Chicago operations, often leading the agents firing pepper balls and tear gas at protesters outside the ICE facility in Broadview that has become ground zero for anti-ICE protests. It was his agents who led the first widespread “Kavanaugh Raid,” effectively invading an entire apartment building in another made-for-social-media moment that terrorized residents and abused the civil liberties of US citizens. As I wrote earlier in the month, “It was a dark and almost certainly illegal escalation of the out-of-control agency’s war on the American people, a portrait of an authoritarian secret police that seems set to model itself on history’s worst fascist enforcers.”

Today’s court hearing will be Bovino’s highest-profile turn in the spotlight yet.

And, evidently, as of this week, the Trump administration is prepared to remake its national immigration efforts in Bovino’s vision and mold. Last night, Fox News’s regular Border Patrol cheerleader correspondent Bill Melugin wrote, “I'm told there is significant friction within different wings of DHS and the administration, with Border Czar Tom Homan & ICE Director Todd Lyons preferring to prioritize targeting criminal aliens & the ‘worst of the worst’ or those with deportation orders, while DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and BP Commander Bovino prefer to use aggressive tactics to arrest anyone in the US illegally, including but not limited to criminals, to ramp up deportation numbers and achieve President Trump's promises of mass deportations.”

For now, it appears Bovino has won. That should chill Americans who still believe in the Constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Thanks for reading — Have you crossed paths with Gregory Bovino? I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal.

GMG

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