Critics have called him a would-be Napoleon and mocked his “Nazi” aesthetic, but with Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant surge into Minneapolis, Gregory Bovino seemed to have found the political moment he had long been seeking.
Bovino, 55, a senior US border patrol official, initially rose to prominence as the figurehead of immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities.
But his provocatively unapologetic utterances in Minneapolis after the shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old American citizen, by border patrol officers propelled him to a new level of notoriety that finally exceeded the tolerance even of the Trump administration.
With the White House under intense pressure amid a fierce backlash against Pretti’s fatal shooting, Bovino – rather than being lionised – has become an early casualty of the Trump administration’s efforts to change its posture. Officials revealed that he was to be withdrawn from his frontline role in the midwestern city. He was expected to be pulled out as Tom Homan, Trump’s “border tsar”, was sent in to oversee the operation on the ground.
In a startling illustration of the extent of his sudden defenestration, the Department of Homeland Security on Monday suspended Bovino’s access to his social media account, which he had used as a vehicle to publicise his militant commitment to Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.
Bovino had put himself in the vanguard of the administration’s initial aggressive pushback against the revulsion sparked by Pretti’s killing by claiming that the dead man had intended to “massacre law enforcement” agents.
As mounting video evidence laid waste those claims, he doubled down defiantly on the US’s Sunday talkshows.
Even while acknowledging that an investigation was under way, Bovino seemed to forestall its outcome by blaming the deceased, whom he continued to call a “suspect” rather than a victim.
“The suspect put himself in that situation,” Bovino told Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, ignoring footage that suggested Pretti had been trying to help a woman who had been violently pushed to the ground by agents. “The victims are the border patrol agents there.”
Rather than retreat from his unsubstantiated earlier claims about Pretti’s murderous intent, Bovino instead embarked on a chilling homily about moral choices.
“When someone makes the choice to come into an active law enforcement scene, interfere, obstruct, delay or assault law enforcement officer and – and they bring a weapon to do that, that is a choice that that individual made,” he told Bash.
Bovino’s appearances in Minneapolis caught widespread attention even before Saturday’s tragic episode. He was captured on film throwing a teargas canister at protesters.
Pictures of him striding around the city wearing a long winter greatcoat with brass buttons were also noted by German media, which commented that his appearance – including a closely cropped haircut – seemed intended to evoke fascist aesthetics, which Bovino has denied.
After the photographed detention of five-year-old Liam Ramos last week, Bovino engaged in incendiary tactics of a different kind, telling journalists that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and border patrol agents were “experts in dealing with children”. Of the boy’s detention in a Texas facility with his father, Bovino added: “That child is in the least restrictive setting possible … I don’t think it gets any better than that.”
He had previously been criticized by a US district judge in Chicago, Sara Ellis, for lying under oath, in his testimony to a court about different aspects of the immigration crackdown in the city. Responding to a challenge from Bovino on social media, CNN presenter Jake Tapper on Monday highlighted Ellis’s criticisms expressed in a 233-page judgement in which she dismissed his testimony as “not credible” and characterised his answers as ranging from “cute responses [to] outright lying”.
Bovino had earlier captured headlines in Los Angeles, the first major city targeted by the Trump administration’s immigration offensive. Amid howls of disapproval from elected Democratic officials, he and squads of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents embarked on aggressive, gun-toting patrols that netted thousands of arrests, often carried out with little more justification than that detainees spoke Spanish or appeared to be from Latin America.
Masked agents smashed car windows, blew open a door to a house and staged an intimidating horseback patrol in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, all supposedly aimed at detaining people in the US without documentation.
Bovino, who formally heads the border patrol’s El Centro sector in southern California and is a 29-year veteran of the agency, organised the production of videos on social media that depicted his team’s work in scenes resembling action films. They seemed tailor-made to appeal to the president’s renowned taste for audiovisual bombast – for example, by portraying his unit on manoeuvres in Los Angeles to a soundtrack of heavy metal music.
He came under further scrutiny after he arrived in Chicago in September to lead an offensive targeting undocumented people in a city Trump has labelled “the most dangerous in the world”.
That appearance drew the attention of WBEZ Chicago, a public radio station, which carried out an investigation into his background, seeking clues as to what drove his zeal for immigration enforcement.
The station reported that Bovino had been inspired to become a border agent in his early teens after watching The Border, a Hollywood film featuring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel. But according to the station, he was apparently disappointed that the production failed to depict border patrol agents as the good guys.
The investigation also noted that Bovino’s father, Mike, a former bar owner, had been jailed when his son was 12 after being convicted of drink-driving over an accident in which a 26-year-old woman was killed and her husband seriously injured.
In his role as a border patrol supremo enforcing the Trump administration’s crackdown, Bovino has frequently cited the dangers supposedly posed by immigrants causing accidents through drink-driving, WBEZ reported.
Bovino’s family background and professional career seem at odds with the mission he has embraced with such gusto.
He was born and raised in North Carolina. Biographies note that his paternal great-grandparents were poor immigrants from rural southern Italy, not unlike many of the people he has been targeting in his aggressive patrols.
His great-grandfather Michele was a migrant coalminer in Pennsylvania when he applied for US citizenship in 1924, shortly after Congress passed a law limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe, which were deemed at the time to be harbingers of crime. He was naturalised in 1927, thereafter bringing his wife and four children from the Italian region of Calabria, in a process of chain migration.
That immigrant background, critics say, somewhat contradicts Bovino’s frequent nativist invocations of “Ma and Pa America”.
His deployment to Minneapolis in freezing midwinter is likewise far removed from his normal border patrol bailiwick in southern California. Minneapolis, and other urban environments he and his agents have recently been sent to, represent drastically different challenges to what they are familiar with – and pose potentially high risks, experienced law enforcement officers say.
“Border patrol is trained and at their most effective on the border or within 25 miles of the border,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who was the CBP commissioner during Barack Obama’s presidency and a former chief of police in Seattle.
“They are not trained in policing a city like Chicago or Los Angeles or Boston [and] they are clearly in the wrong venue. To police an urban environment takes really special skills. They work with senior officers to understand the community they serve.
“They don’t get parachuted in to Los Angeles or other cities marching to some type of rock music.”
Bovino has dismissed Democrats’ criticism – that the raids are targeting people seeking work to feed their families rather than criminals – as “uninformed” and “wishful thinking”.
“Those individuals come in, they may have a criminal history in their home country,” he said. “So, I don’t feel bad.” Discussing the operations in Los Angeles, he pushed back on the criticism of the mayor, Karen Bass: “There’s something here that Bass and the governor and the other folks haven’t seemed to touch on, [which] is look at the professionalism of DHS entities in our allied law enforcement agencies.
“Very few, if any, civilians hurt.”
It is a claim that has a bitterly ironic ring to it several months later.
