In the upper ranks of the Border Patrol, 20 officials have the title of sector chief. Gregory Bovino is the only one holding a gun in his social-media profile photo. Most of the others conform to a pretty standard formula: wearing a crisp green uniform in front of Old Glory and the black-and-green Border Patrol flag.
Bovino’s photo is more like a movie poster, or an AI-generated image of a comic-book character. He stands wearing a bulletproof vest against a black background, holding a tricked-out M4 rifle with a scope in his hands. He isn’t holding the weapon so much as cradling it affectionately, like a cellist getting ready to play. Bovino’s jaw is stiff, and his gaze is distant. Several Customs and Border Protection veterans with whom I spoke—who value the quiet strength of professional modesty—think the photo is ridiculous.
And yet, the performative qualities that have made Bovino a sometimes-mocked figure within CBP are the same ones that have landed him a starring role in the promotion of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. Bovino, whose formal title is chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, has been put in charge of the administration’s immigration crackdown on the streets of Los Angeles, more than 200 miles from his office, which sits near the border. While much of the local anger has been directed at ICE, it’s actually Bovino who’s been calling the shots. The guys in camouflage, masks, and military gear running around Southern California car washes and Home Depot parking lots aren’t Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, but Border Patrol tactical teams trained to hunt drug smugglers in remote mountains and deserts.
When horse-mounted Border Patrol agents rode through MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles with camera crews in tow on July 7, Mayor Karen Bass came rushing to the scene and pleaded with Bovino to call them off. No arrests were made, but the sight of heavily armed federal agents advancing in formation through palm trees and soccer fields was jarring to a city on edge after weeks of raids and protests. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Los Angeles City Council president, told reporters that if Bovino wanted to make Border Patrol promotional videos, he should “apply for a film permit like everybody else” and “stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody.”
“Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon,” Bovino fired back on Fox. On Friday, he released a video—set to the song “DNA” by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is from L.A.—showing National Guard troops and mounted agents parading through the park with an armory of weapons and black masks covering their faces. “People ask for it, we make it happen,” Bovino posted to his government account on X, sounding more like a hype man than a lawman.
[Joshua Braver: When the military comes to American soil]
At a time when Trump-administration officials have done little to conceal their frustration with ICE leaders, demoting several over the past few months for missing the White House’s ambitious arrest quotas, Bovino’s assignment in California has been viewed by some at ICE as a slight against the agency. Current and former CBP officials told me it was more an indication that the White House wants field generals who will press the president’s deportation goals as aggressively as possible.
During the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents were often overwhelmed and exhausted as record numbers of migrants crossed into the United States. Unlawful entries fell sharply during Joe Biden’s last year in office, but they have plunged in recent months to levels not seen since the 1960s as a result of Trump’s all-out push to seal the border. That has left the Border Patrol’s roughly 19,000 agents with far less work and a lot more time. ICE, under relentless White House pressure to ramp up arrests and deportations, is now the agency that needs help.
Bovino, a 29-year veteran of the Border Patrol, seemed to anticipate the opportunity well before Trump took office. Two weeks before Inauguration Day, he sent dozens of El Centro Border Patrol agents five hours north to Kern County, California, near Bakersfield. Over the course of several days, agents in plainclothes made arrests at gas stations and stopped vehicles along the highway. The surprise tactics sent a wave of fear through the farms of California’s Central Valley, and though Bovino said his agents had targeted criminals, only one of the 78 people they arrested had a criminal conviction, according to records obtained by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. The ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the government in February and won an injunction barring the Border Patrol from racially profiling suspects, and a federal district court found that Bovino’s teams likely violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. (Earlier this month, another federal judge ordered the government to stop racially profiling suspects in Los Angeles.)
Bovino had launched the Kern County expedition, which he called “Operation Return to Sender,” without getting clearance from superiors in Washington, according to CBP officials I spoke with who weren’t authorized to speak to reporters. The raids far from the border were not the kind of operation Biden officials would have endorsed. But those officials were already on their way out, and the Trump team coming in was thrilled with Bovino’s audition.
The Department of Homeland Security did not approve my request to interview Bovino. I sent a list of more than a dozen questions to DHS and CBP, asking about his record in the Border Patrol and why he’s been elevated to his current role. “Because he’s a badass” was all that the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote back.
What Bovino is doing in Los Angeles is a pilot of sorts. It showcases the potential for a broader Border Patrol role in U.S. cities and communities, especially those that have adopted “sanctuary” policies restricting local police cooperation with ICE. By law, the Border Patrol’s ability to conduct warrantless searches is limited to within 100 miles of the nation’s international boundaries. But that includes maritime borders, and roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, including the country’s largest metropolitan areas, fits within those boundaries.
ICE has only about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers nationwide, and though the president’s tax-and-immigration bill includes funds to hire thousands more, recruiting, hiring, and training them will likely take at least a year. The Border Patrol has idle agents who are ready to go now.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty
Border Patrol agents generally have less experience than their ICE counterparts with the procedural elements of civil immigration enforcement in urban environments. Video clips went viral last month showing a masked Border Patrol team pummeling Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and the father of three U.S. Marines, as the agents arrested him outside an IHOP in Santa Ana. Viewers were shocked, but the tactics used were not out of line with the way agents often handle migrants who try to run or resist arrest near the border. (The Department of Homeland Security justified the use of force and claimed that Barranco had tried to “mow” them with his trimming tool.) The difference this time was that the arrest occurred on the streets of a U.S. city, not out in the desert with no one watching.
[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]
During the past five and a half years in El Centro, which covers southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, Bovino has repeatedly insisted that he oversees the “premier sector” of the Border Patrol. It’s a facetious claim. El Centro is not considered a top-tier CBP assignment like El Paso or San Diego, where there’s a lot more smuggling activity.
“It’s the type of sector where someone would usually be chief for a couple years and then move on to a larger sector,” one former DHS official told me. Bovino’s long tenure in El Centro without a promotion points to a lack of confidence from senior CBP leaders, the official and three former CBP officials said. DHS declined to respond.
Border Patrol chiefs have always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from Washington regarding day-to-day operations, but they aren’t supposed to make partisan statements in uniform or criticize elected officials in the states where they work. During Biden’s term, Bovino was the chief who created the most consternation among CBP officials at headquarters because of his outspoken conservative views and social-media enthusiasm, current and former DHS and CBP officials told me.
“He has done things that Border Patrol leadership has had to spend time cleaning up, such as posting information that was law-enforcement-sensitive on social media, which can hamper broader law-enforcement operations,” said the former DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal disciplinary actions.
But the contentious relationship Bovino had with his superiors during those years has only bolstered his standing among Trump-aligned border hawks. As El Centro chief, Bovino became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP.
During the first Trump administration, the Border Patrol launched its own public-relations operation—the Strategic Communications division, or StratComm—to give rank-and-file agents a bigger role in touting their work, improving the agency’s reputation and boosting recruitment. Many of the videos emphasized Border Patrol humanitarian efforts and rescues of distressed migrants in remote areas, or the benevolent serve-and-protect image of agents and officials attending parades and community events.
Bovino has taken StratComm messaging in a different direction. In September 2020, soon after he took command in El Centro, his social-media team released “The Gotaway,” a fictionalized video showing a migrant sneaking into the United States and murdering the first person he encounters. The video caused an uproar, and the Border Patrol temporarily took it down, as lawmakers demanded to know why agents were spending time making movies. (One former CBP official told me El Centro benefited from the talents of two agents who had taken filmmaking courses before signing up for the Border Patrol).
Bovino has had legal problems as well. In 2022, a federal judge in Louisiana rejected DHS’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two Black Border Patrol employees who claimed discrimination when Bovino became sector chief in New Orleans. The two were finalists for the second-ranking position in New Orleans in April 2018 when Bovino abruptly canceled the job listing and used a transfer process to hire his close friend, a white Border Patrol official. The court found an email from the friend that compared Bovino to a Confederate general and the New Orleans office to a unit of Black Union soldiers. “Oh jeez. DELETE!!!!” Bovino replied.
The exchange raised “concerns of racial animus” in the hiring process, the judge wrote. DHS settled the case.
In 2023, Bovino landed at the center of a partisan fight in Congress when Biden officials blocked him from testifying during a Republican-led investigation of the administration’s border policies. Top Republicans sent a letter to CBP claiming Bovino had been silenced and retaliated against when he was temporarily reassigned to a desk job in Washington. Rodney Scott, the current commissioner of CBP and the former Border Patrol chief, was one of Bovino’s most ardent defenders.
Bovino returned to El Centro, his social-media enthusiasm undiminished. He published holiday-themed videos, including hokey parodies of Home Alone and A Christmas Story. The old serve-and-protect messaging was out in favor of guns, ATVs, and tactical teams kicking ass to heavy metal and thumping bass tracks.
More recently, the messaging has turned messianic. A CPB video circulated this month by the Department of Homeland Security embodies a new synthesis of high-paced action with Christian-nationalist themes. The video, “Bible Verse,” opens with a monologue by the actor Shia LaBeouf, lifted from the World War II movie Fury, in which a soldier prepares his comrades to fight the Nazis with a stirring passage from the Book of Isaiah about answering the call of God. The song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays to stylized, washed-out footage of Border Patrol tactical agents zooming around in helicopters and speedboats.
The video has nearly 3 million views on X, and as a work of pure propaganda, it’s the most engrossing CBP video I’ve ever seen. But former DHS and CBP officials I shared it with recoiled at the underlying message that Border Patrol agents are delivering holy vengeance.
The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which performed the song in the video, sent a cease-and-desist warning to the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s obvious that you don’t respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution,” the band wrote, adding: “Oh, and go f… yourselves.”
I have gotten to know at least a dozen Border Patrol sector chiefs during the decade I’ve spent reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. The chiefs are police commanders, but they are also politicians. They tend to value the same skills required of any good leader: smooth public speaking, personal decorum, equanimity under pressure. They are not especially impressed by guns or social-media posting, and they dislike anything that elevates individual flash over institutional traditions.
Much of the job of the Border Patrol is mundane and uneventful; it consists of sitting alone in a truck and watching “the line” for hours on end in case anyone or anything potentially threatening comes across. There are periodic moments of action, especially when smuggling activity increases, but fewer now that the border is so locked down.
[Adam Serwer: The deportation show]
Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border-policy official during the Biden administration, told me that Democrats have at times been too reluctant to let the Border Patrol trumpet its work stopping actual threats and capturing dangerous criminals. The stressful, tedious work agents perform while processing record numbers of asylum seekers is not meant to be their primary job, Nuñez-Neto said.
“The Border Patrol’s job should focus on detecting and preventing the entry of people who may present a threat to our security, not serving as the entry point for the asylum system,” he said. “We should have an organized, safe, and orderly process for people who want to claim asylum that doesn’t involve distracting the people who work between ports of entry from doing their core mission.”
The Trump administration’s social-media messaging has become extreme and dehumanizing, Nuñez-Neto said, but he understands Bovino’s push to make the job look exciting and heroic.
The former DHS official I spoke with told me he is concerned that Bovino’s hard-charging approach will ultimately hurt recruitment, even if it’s popular among the most gung-ho agents.
“They’re going to end up with a growing recruitment challenge, because the people that they will be attracting are not actually the people that they will need to do the unglamorous work,” the former official told me. “And most law-enforcement work is unglamorous work.”
Bovino, now with a bigger stage, has continued making the work look as glamorous as possible as he and his team move from Los Angeles to other parts of California. He released another video Thursday, this one set to Kanye West’s “Power” and showing his agents rolling into Sacramento and chasing people through a Home Depot parking lot. “There is no such thing as a sanctuary state,” Bovino says to the camera, his thumbs tucked in his belt in the style of an Old West sheriff. Tear-gas canisters dangle from his vest like hand grenades. “This is how and why we secure the homeland,” Bovino says. “For Ma and Pa America: We’ve got your backs.”