Gregory Bovino “declined” the administration’s guidance for “targeted” immigration enforcement operations before commanding a surge of officers in Chicago, where officials and protesters accused him of leading a violent assault against immigrants and citizens alike.
Bovino, the now-former “commander-at-large” for Donald Trump’s boots-on-the-ground operations in Democratic-led cities, pushed back against internal efforts to focus Customs and Border Protection operations on “targeted” arrests rather than large-scale sweeps, according to emails obtained by NBC News.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Bovino to focus on “targeted operations” in Chicago and arrest only people already on federal law enforcement’s radar for immigration violations and other laws, according to the messages.
But Bovino said he “declined” the directive and said he reports to a top aide for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“Mr. Lyons seemed intent that CBP conduct targeted operations for at least two weeks before transitioning to full scale immigration enforcement,” Bovino wrote in an email to Homeland Security officials in September. “I declined his suggestion. We ended the conversation shortly thereafter.”
He said that Lyons indicated he “was in charge,” but Bovino said he reports to Corey Lewandowski, an unpaid special government employee working closely with Noem.
That email appears to contradict recent public comments from Noem, who claimed that officers are performing immigration enforcement operations “in every situation.”
“In every situation, we’re doing targeted enforcement,” she said from the White House last month. “If we are on a target and during an operation, there may be individuals surrounding that criminal that we may be asking who they are and why they’re there and having them validate their identity.”
Homeland Security did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.
Noem and Lewandowski have reportedly been sidelined from the Trump administration’s street-level mass deportation campaign after border patrol officers under Bovino’s command fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good two weeks earlier.
After growing public outrage and bipartisan political pressure, Trump deployed White House border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, and Bovino has been sent back to his post at CBP’s branch in southern California near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Homan reports directly to the president, effectively cutting Noem out of the chain of command.
Homan and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott have publicly supported a more targeted approach in Minneapolis, where border patrol officers led by Bovino have been accused of violently targeting immigrants and protesters, including ripping them from their cars and in front of their children, after dozens of similar allegations and lawsuits from operations in other Democratic-led cities.
Under Bovino’s command, DHS deployed thousands of masked border patrol agents into Democratic-led cities, from Los Angeles to New Orleans and Charlotte, North Carolina, where officers have been accused of making indiscriminate, large-scale arrests.
In courtrooms across the country, protesters and detainees alleged officers shot them with chemical weapons at point-blank range and turned neighborhoods into “war zones” filled with tear gas.
Officers have been accused of racially profiling people they see on the street, including U.S. citizens, from hopping out of unmarked cars to stop them on the street or pulling over drivers to search their documents.
In September, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave federal agents permission to stop and detain a person based on their perceived ethnicity, spoken language or occupation. This decision, critics say, has fueled racial profiling and arrests in Home Depot parking lots and worksites to target immigrant laborers, among others.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who authored the ruling, backtracked on that decision in the footnotes of a separate ruling in December, noting that officers “must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”
But by then, Bovino’s forces had gone on “a tour of Chicago neighborhoods, gassing residents in different neighborhoods each day,” according to a federal lawsuit brought by protesters and press groups.
“The use of force shocks the conscience,” District Judge Sara Ellis said in November. “The public has a strong interest in having a government that conducts itself fairly and in accordance with its own rules and policies.”
Bovino testified that his officers’ behavior is “more than exemplary” after plaintiffs accused border patrol officers of violating a protective order against the use of riot weapons against demonstrators and others.
