Trump, Border Patrol Retreat in Failure from Chicago

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In the last few days, roving Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino decamped from Chicago, where his military-style raids have terrorized that community for weeks, for Charlotte, North Carolina — a somewhat inexplicable new target (more on that below) — and a move that underscores what has to be the growing conclusion of the now six-month-old campaign of “acting president” Stephen Miller to turbocharge immigration enforcement: It’s failing. Bigly.

The Border Patrol retreated from Chicago in defeat, not victory.

Writing about the Border Patrol a decade ago, I referred to it as a “fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry,” and watching Bovino’s tactics, I’ve come to believe the analogy has even more truth in the current moment.

Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan “night rides” of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often “respectable” leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history.

Today, Bovino is leading a mounted raiding unit that descends, unwanted, on targeted communities, terrorizes the residents, and then — unable to break and defeat the hostile residents and ill-positioned to fight a sustained losing battle — withdraws, always trying to stay just a couple steps ahead of the judicial orders and court showdowns that have blocked its worst tactics. We’ve seen this pattern now unfold in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and now Charlotte, as well as smaller raids in places like Sacramento, and Bovino’s force has been defeated in each of them. There’s a national trail of court orders left behind in each jurisdiction finding and enjoining their tactics as illegal, unnecessary, and overly violent. In neighborhood after neighborhood, they face resistance and then, literally, pop tear gas canisters and retreat.

In fact, while the trauma and terror that Bovino’s unit instills is certainly real and damaging, it’s remarkable to note how ineffective the force has turned out to be. Time and again, these agents — and the broader DHS and White House policies behind it — are being exposed not for their strength, but their weakness. Ordinary Americas are stronger — braver and better.

Here are five important conclusions we can better understand now, six months into the increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement efforts nationwide:

1. Trump and Bovino face diminishing half-lives.

Bovino’s Border Patrol raiders have one playbook — terror — and it’s less effective each time they deploy it. So far, it’s aging in nuclear half-lives. The shock value is wearing off and, in fact, the targeted communities are fighting back faster and with a more tried-and-true playbook: Organize quickly, step up and document the abuses, protest loudly, and fight in the courtrooms. There’s now an established (and tested) legal playbook to go after CBP’s worst tactics; community members are finding that fighting back against the Border Patrol works, and it’s emboldening even more community members to take stands, even at risk of personal harm. Chicago’s legal strategy built on lessons learned (and even the same witnesses) from Los Angeles and other cities have faced Bovino before — and now their lessons can be applied in Chicago.

Again, none of this is to downplay the legit terror that the masked, military-style Border Patrol raids have inflicted on these communities. “Kids were tear gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween in their local school parking lot,” Judge Sara Ellis said in Chicago. “These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered ... and it’s gonna take a long time for that to come back, if ever.” We can’t forget, downplay, or minimize any of that. Going forward, we must do everything we can to hold Bovino and other DHS leaders legally and criminally accountable for their actions and betrayal of the nation’s trust. But we also can’t afford to make these efforts seem unstoppable or ten-feet-tall. Chicago resisted with everything they could, and it worked:

Bovino’s night-riding cavalry turn out to be, in fact, quite stoppable, which brings us to:

2. The politics aren’t working.

What makes Charlotte such an interesting new target is that North Carolina is a purple state — home, in fact, to one of the most important Senate races of 2026, as GOP senator Thom Tillis retires — and the politics on the ground are almost certainly going to be terrible for Republicans.

Why Charlotte in the first place? The administration doesn’t have a good rationale. My own theory is that they’re targeting Charlotte because it was the target of much right-wing media attention in August when a mentally ill man, with a long criminal record, stabbed and murdered a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, on a public transit bus. (There’s also a sheriff in Charlotte who famously refuses to cooperate with ICE.) Which is to say that in some twisted way, the Trump administration’s crackdown on “illegal alien criminals” has merged with its attack on “out-of-control crime in Blue cities” in a bastardized message where it’s now targeting a city where an actual immigrant was killed by an American. (It goes without saying that, like in many urban areas, crime in Charlotte is actually down significantly year-over-year — homicides alone are down 24 percent this year.)

While there’s a certain amount of firing-up-the-base and feeding-the-right-wing-outrage-machine that Bovino’s raids accomplish, overall the immigration raids are motivating Democrats, empowering state leaders who criticize them, and — in North Carolina — even turning faith communities against the GOP. Swing voters and independents hate the raids, which brings us to:

3. The data shows Trump’s lies — these aren’t the worst of the worst.

We’re getting a picture of how ineffectual these high-profile operations are: Across Operation MIDWAY BLITZ in Chicago, it appears that ICE and CBP arrested somewhere north of 3,300 people — a shockingly small number for a huge, expensive weeks-long operation.

We may never fully know the cost of MIDWAY BLITZ, which lasted just about two months, but it was surely tens of millions of dollars — probably millions of dollars a day, in fact — and in the most concentrated and violent set of raids over the better part of two months, the Trump administration managed to arrest roughly the number of people it hopes to arrest and deport every single day across the nation. These are PR stunts — not a serious strategy. The terror is real; the impact is a rounding error. That means that it’s going to be really hard to scale or sustain this level of terror across the country. To me, one of the interesting questions is that these operations are so resource intensive and ultimately unsustainable, even with the huge funding being thrown to ICE and CBP, that I wonder whether they will actually undermine CBP’s effectiveness over time — not to mention turn CBP and ICE into a politically toxic employer for all but the least qualified and most racist.

Most of all, the data shows that all of the Trump administration’s “we’re arresting the worst of the worst” isn’t reality at all. Of 614 people included in a recent court order, just 16 of them — roughly two percent — had a meaningful existing criminal record. Those 16 — just sixteen! — included five with domestic battery charges, two drunken driving records, one narcotics convictions, and five who faced other battery charges, two of which involved guns, and one person who is said to have a criminal history in some country overseas. Just one was deemed a “national security risk” and “no one had any convictions for murder or rape,” the Chicago Tribune reported. The local police in a city like Chicago or D.C. surely arrest more serious criminals in run-of-the-mill encounters across a single weekend than CBP and ICE managed to round up in weeks.

The other 598 people had no existing criminal record, which brings us to:

4. Most of the arrests are being rounded up in “Kavanaugh Stops.”

Earlier this year, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh beclowned himself enabling and allowing ICE and CBP to make stops based on nothing more than racial profiling — explicitly endorsing and allowing what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called a new “second-class citizenship,” where brown people now face the presumption of guilt on the streets rather than the presumption of innocence about their citizenship status. He described said stops in even-then-laughable terms:

In Charlotte, we got another window and reminder about how those “Kavanaugh stops” play out in reality: A Honduran-born US citizen who possessed a valid “REAL ID” had his truck window smashed by the Border Patrol and he was hauled out and thrown to the ground. And then, ultimately, he was released because he was, you know, an actual US citizen. The insane thing is this was the second time he’d been stopped by immigration agents — so clearly they’re relying just on him being a brown person out in the world to stop and assault him.

They don’t know who they’re stopping, and they’re moving too fast and unsophisticatedly to bother trying to figure out the real “worst of the worst.” This is a clown show with tear gas — not a serious law enforcement operation.

So far, Bovino’s cavalry raiders are bragging about detaining 81 people in and around Charlotte. As Mark Jerrell, the chair of the Mecklenburg County Commission, said when I was on CNN this morning discussing this, “We don’t know who these 81 people are,” but there’s every reason to believe that the vast majority of those 81 people are based on a high level of profiling, rather than any targeted enforcement actions against serious criminals, which brings us to a final important conclusion:

5. Operation CHARLOTTE’S WEB is horrid, ahistorical, and anti-American. 

E.B. White has been a hugely important influence in my life; he and my grandfather, also a writer, kept up a charming correspondence about the vagaries and absurdities of rural life, and I was raised on STUART LITTLE, TRUMPET OF THE SWAN, and CHARLOTTE’S WEB as a child and came more recently to deeply appreciate and rely upon his writing for the New Yorker and even on nuclear war, which he so wisely challenged early on.

Please take a few minutes today to go read Chris Geidner’s essay on why E.B. White would have so hated DHS naming its Charlotte operation after his most famous and beloved children’s book. Every so often I read an essay that every fiber of my being wishes I wrote myself; Chris managed to do that last night. E.B. White was one of the great, clear-eyed writers against fascism in the 20^th century and stood for, politically, everything that the current immigration raids are not.

We need more E.B. Whites in this moment now.

All told, months into Bovino’s raid, it’s increasingly clear that his efforts would be a farce — except for the very real trauma being inflicted on lots of innocent Americans by their own government. Nevertheless, it’s important to realize they’re losing — not winning. History and the American people are not on their side.

GMG

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