In November, a federal judge in Chicago documented Gregory Bovino’s “outright lying” about his actions in the region’s Operation Midway Blitz. That didn’t stop the Border Patrol commander from being the face of Operation Metro Surge, launched the next month in Minnesota, during which federal officers have killed two U.S. citizens.
That Bovino was already an adjudicated liar who suffered no consequences for lying heading into the latest operation doesn’t mean the federal effort needed to have resulted in the death and destruction that it has. But the Trump administration’s choice to keep him center stage, strutting in his long coat and close-cropped haircut, could only have bolstered a message of impunity to the officers working under him.
In the wake of the latest federal killing, Bovino is apparently out of command in Minnesota. His reported departure doesn’t cure the moral rot in the government, which runs top to bottom, but it provides an occasion to consider how it has festered to this point.
In that November ruling, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis singled out Bovino’s testimony as “not credible.” The Obama appointee wrote that he “appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.” She wrote, “Most tellingly, Bovino admitted in his deposition that he lied multiple times about the events that occurred in Little Village that prompted him to throw tear gas at protesters.”
To be clear, while Bovino is a problem, he’s not the whole problem. He wasn’t the only government actor whose credibility Ellis called out in her ruling.
Plus, President Donald Trump has responded to the latest backlash by sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota to oversee immigration operations there. That Homan could be seen as a healthier option or calming moral force only speaks to the dystopian nature of the status quo. MS NOW reported last year that Homan was investigated in 2024 as part of an undercover operation in which he allegedly took $50,000 in exchange for indicating he could help secure government contracts in a second Trump administration. (Homan has denied accepting the money.) And despite Bovino’s documented record of lying about his work on behalf of the United States, he doesn’t seem to be out of a job enforcing the nation’s laws but is merely moving back to the post in California where he was previously stationed. One can only hope that the apparent demotion (which a Trump administration official told MS NOW was not a demotion) will leave him chastened, but we’ll need to keep the videotape rolling. We’ve heard what he and other Trump officials have said about things we’ve all seen with our own eyes. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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