Gregory Bovino's Final Days: Harsh Words and Few Regrets

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Gregory Bovino’s Final Days: Harsh Words and Few Regrets


Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino is retiring this week. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

He was the face of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. But as he begins a retirement that was not entirely voluntary, the Border Patrol leader says he did not go far enough

By Katie J.M. Baker and Hamed Aleaziz
March 24, 2026
Updated 3:29 p.m. ET

Gregory Bovino has only a few regrets. ... “I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens,” he said in a recent interview. “I mean, we went as hard as we could, but there’s always a creative and innovative solution to catching even more.” ... Until January, Mr. Bovino was the pugnacious face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. As federal agents moved to suppress protests in city after city, Mr. Bovino was often at the center of the scrum, personally lobbing tear gas into crowds and authorizing his team to operate with remorseless aggression.

He had risen from relative obscurity, but Mr. Bovino was built for the moment. He had long harbored hard-line, even radical views on immigration, and said he had a plan to deport 100 million people. And he had a longstanding reputation within the Border Patrol for his eagerness to test the law in service of those views, according to interviews with current and former colleagues and previously unreported documents. ... The administration handed the mid-level Border Patrol leader a highly irregular position that allowed him to leapfrog the usual chain of command and report directly to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.

He was straight out of central casting, often wearing a double-breasted olive green coat that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said looked as if he “literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb.” (Mr. Bovino said the coat is an old Border Patrol uniform that he bought as a young agent.) ... Mr. Bovino eventually started referring to himself in the third person as “Chief Bovino,” one administration official said, and assumed the title of “Commander at Large.”

But Mr. Bovino’s fall was abrupt. The legally contested and chaotic crackdowns he led resulted in the killing of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis. Protests against the government’s immigration enforcement campaign intensified, and polls showed a broad public backlash. The administration pulled the plug on him, and sent him back to El Centro, Calif., where he had previously served as sector chief.


The crackdowns Mr. Bovino led in Minneapolis resulted in the killing of two American citizens by federal agents. Ryan Murphy for The New York Times

{snip}

Georgia Gee contributed reporting and research. Shannon Sims contributed reporting.

Katie J.M. Baker is a national investigative correspondent for The Times.

Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.

[2naSalit]

1. I hope that...

The rest of his fucking life is miserable beyond his ability to live with and, as a result, really short.

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. He better get used to the taste of saliva and mucus in his food whenever he goes out to eat. Nt

[kacekwl]

3. Fuck you coward.

May you rot

[GiqueCee]

4. Bovino is...

... a Nazi wannabe who even dressed like one on the street! Combine that diseased aspiration with a short-man complex and you've got an out-of-control sociopath with the moral compass of a rabid hyena.

[madinmaryland]

5. Fuck that Nazi. Good riddance.