With his heavily gelled buzz cut and his willingness to use violence against peaceful protestors, Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, the public face of President Donald Trump’s deportation spree and a so-called commander at large, seemed straight out of central casting. His aggressive tactics and flair for the dramatic made Bovino the perfect avatar for an immigration policy designed to prioritize spreading fear and pain over accuracy and efficiency.
Neither courtroom condemnations nor public backlash seemed to dampen his zeal for transforming the pain of immigrants caught up in federal sweeps into viral content. Bovino, whose career path was inspired by a 1980s Jack Nicholson movie, seemed to relish the opportunity Trump’s deportation ramp-up gave him to play the main character.
Bovino, whose career path was inspired by a 1980s Jack Nicholson movie, seemed to relish the opportunity Trump’s deportation ramp-up gave him to play the main character.
When a federal officer shot and killed Renee Good in her SUV in Minneapolis this month, Bovino continued to encourage his agents’ confrontations with demonstrators and observers. Only when a Border Patrol agent under his command fired his gun into Alex Pretti was Bovino hustled out of Minnesota and back to his base in southern California.
Bovino being sent away was a begrudging acknowledgment from the Trump administration that it’s losing the public relations war. But it’s inaccurate to say he was “demoted” from the role as “commander at large” because that position doesn’t officially exist. More importantly, it’s likely that the forces he marshaled in the field will march on without him.
Bovino’s visibility increased exponentially after the White House became frustrated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has traditionally run targeted operations to detain individuals and not indiscriminate dragnets, wasn’t even getting halfway to deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s goal for 3,000 arrests per day.
As ICE fell in standing, Border Patrol rose in its place. The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff pointed out last year that “Trump’s militarized border crackdown and ban on asylum seekers have reduced illegal crossings to the lowest levels since the 1960s, leaving Border Patrol agents with more time on their hands.” That extra time has been spent acting as added muscle during immigration raids, leading them to be as visible as ICE — if not more so — during Trump’s deportation campaign.
And there at the forefront was Bovino, who joined CBP in 1996 and rose through the ranks to become chief of the patrol’s El Centro sector. When he was a child, Bovino told The New York Times that his parents took him to see “The Border,” starring Nicholson and Harvey Keitel. The film and the books he later consumed painted a picture of “a pretty tough organization to be out there alone with no backup,” he told the Times. “And I began to realize that that thing called the US Border Patrol is probably something pretty special.”
The corruption and lack of morality on display from most of the officers in “The Border” appear not to have bothered him. He instead seemed to internalize the idea that an agent needs to subvert bureaucracy and act on instinct against the evildoers of the world, a view that doesn’t translate into effective law enforcement.
Upon becoming sector chief in 2020, The Atlantic reported, Bovino harnessed his love of the dramatic and “became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP.” According to an April 2025 report by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters, last year, Bovino’s El Centro sector employed “five Border Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos.”
Bovino reportedly bristled at policy shifts during the Biden administration that allowed an estimated 5.8 million migrants to either be granted parole or seek asylum between 2021 and 2024. In 2023, he briefly became the subject of a minor partisan firestorm when he was temporarily relieved of command and assigned a desk job in Washington. Bovino and congressional Republicans called it retaliation for his wanting to testify at a GOP-led hearing on President Joe Biden’s border policies. Or perhaps it had more to do with his social media footprint, which included a profile picture of him in a black bulletproof vest brandishing an M4 assault rifle, looking every inch the image of a maverick willing to kick ass for his country.
The day after Trump’s win was certified last year, that is, still during the Biden administration, a team of Border Patrol agents traveled five hours north of El Centro to take part in a large-scale raid Bovino dubbed “Operation Return to Sender.” A federal judge later determined that the Kern County operation likely hinged on “stopping individuals without having a reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, as required by the Fourth Amendment.” CalMatters likewise reported: “Border Patrol officials misrepresented the very basics of their high-profile, large-scale immigration raid. Data obtained from U.S. Customs and Border Protection reveal that Border Patrol had no prior knowledge of criminal or immigration history for 77 of the 78 people arrested.”
When asked about “Operation Return to Sender,” which he carried out without approval from his superiors, Bovino was unrepentant. If his goal was to get the attention of the incoming administration, though, it worked like a charm. It’s unclear precisely when he came across the radar of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, her unofficial chief of staff, but she elevated Bovino to the head of the vanguard.
In a recently resurfaced video from June, after mass protests followed high-profile ICE raids in Los Angeles County, Bovino tells federal officers under his command: “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top.”
A subsequent ride through the city’s MacArthur Park on horseback as part of a show of force was met with anger and scorn from Angelenos. Bovino responded with a Kendrick Lamar-soundtracked hype video using footage of the operation. It was one of many such videos his office churned out from L.A. that framed Border Patrol and other law enforcement officials as action heroes battling chaos.
Los Angeles was the template for later deployments, sending Bovino traipsing across the country with overarching control of the stepped-up immigration operations. By late October, he had a new title to go along with his newly unfettered position. “Commander at large” is a role that doesn’t exist anywhere on paper, but it reportedly freed him from the chain of command and left him answerable only to Noem herself.
Bovino seemed to test that new authority in Chicago, where his willingness to escalate against protestors and his sworn testimony about his actions led to a sharp judicial rebuke. Video showed Bovino lobbing a canister of tear gas into a peaceful group of protesters, only for him to later claim that he did so in response to being hit with a rock.








