Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander-at-large” who terrorized people across America in his Nazi-like trench coat, is being put out to pasture by President Donald Trump. The cause was Bovino’s stupidity, not his cruelty.
After his Border Patrol agents disarmed and killed Alex Pretti in broad daylight on Saturday, Bovino shamelessly slandered the 37-year-old nurse only to have his lies immediately and irrefutably exposed by numerous videos of the killing.
Instead of leading his band of masked agents from city to city, Bovino is now returning to his original role as the head of California’s not particularly busy El Centro border sector. The Atlantic reports that the 55-year-old is expected to soon retire. In place of Bovino, Trump has sent his border “czar” and first-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan to Minneapolis. Unlike Bovino, who had an unusual arrangement in which he reported to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instead of his immediate supervisors, Trump has said that Homan will answer directly to him.
It is worth stressing what Bovino got away with before Trump shoved him aside. In Los Angeles, Bovino and his gang occupied the city like an invading army, marching through MacArthur Park as a public relations stunt and pulling people off the street in obvious spasms of racial profiling that led to Trump’s Supreme Court explicitly legitimizing stops based on skin color.
In Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez multiple times while she was in her car. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” Exum later bragged in a text message. “Put that in your book, boys.” (Martinez survived the shooting and is now asking a judge to release evidence from a now abandoned federal case against her.)
In November, Sara Ellis, a federal judge for the Northern District of Illinois, made clear that Bovino lied repeatedly to defend his and Border Patrol’s conduct in Chicago. As Ellis wrote about Bovino in a 233-page decision, “the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.” That included, she added, lying multiple times about the events that led to him throwing tear gas at protesters.
He did this all with gleeful menace. His signature look was an authoritarian haircut paired with a winter trench coat reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany. As a writer for the German publication Der Spiegel put it, Bovino “stands out from this thuggish mob, just as an elegant SS officer stands out from the rowdy SA mob. The dashing undercut is also spot on; all that’s missing for the perfect cosplay is a monocle.” As noted by the Guardian, a second German outlet wrote that Bovino looked like “he had taken a photo of [assassinated Nazi paramilitary leader] Ernst Röhm to the barber.”
None of this stopped Noem and Miller from sending Bovino to Minneapolis, where he and his men predictably continued their anonymous thuggery. That culminated on Saturday with the killing of Pretti. From there, Bovino did himself in through sheer idiocy. Unlike the shooting of Martinez, for example, Pretti’s death was captured from numerous angles. The footage made clear that he was peacefully observing and recording Border Patrol agents before they tackled him, removed the handgun he was legally carrying, then shot him to death.
But Bovino had apparently become so accustomed to lying that he went ahead and pushed the DHS falsehood that Pretti appeared to have “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Pretti, a former Boy Scout and VA ICU nurse, was too sympathetic to be smeared so brazenly. Trump recognized that and sent Bovino packing. But there should be no doubt that Bovino would still be in his job if his agents had done the same thing off-camera, or perhaps even on camera to a more easily maligned victim. His removal was also likely hastened by the lingering outrage from ICE agent Jonathan Ross brazenly killing Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this month.
At least for the time being, Trump is taking a less confrontational approach in public by touting a “very good telephone conversation” on Monday with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, as well as another one with Gov. Tim Walz, who he now says he appears to be on a “similar wavelength” with. He has also avoided repeating the obvious lies about Pretti spread this weekend by Bovino, Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Vice President JD Vance.
Sources apparently loyal to Noem are now leaking to Axios to pin the blame on Miller for the false statement that was released by DHS on Saturday and repeated by Noem and Bovino. If true, it makes Bovino something of a fall guy for Miller, whose longtime role alongside Trump does not appear to be in jeopardy. (Miller was notably absent from a two-hour meeting between Noem and Trump on Monday, the New York Times reports.)
Homan is a hardliner who has been described by The Atlantic as the “intellectual ‘father’” of the first Trump administration’s family separation policy. Unlike Bovino, however, his most recent experience is with ICE rather than Border Patrol. Along with acting ICE director Todd Lyons, he is reported to favor a somewhat more targeted approach to mass deportation that prioritizes people with actual deportation orders or criminal histories. Whether that changes DHS’ behavior on the ground—especially with Miller still in the picture—remains to be seen.
Trump’s pullback on Monday is reminiscent of his abandonment of the family separation policy in the face of widespread outrage in 2018. The images and sounds of separated families came to define Trump’s first term on immigration—even though the policy ended well before the midpoint of the administration. It would not be surprising if the images of Pretti being shot in the back, then again and again as he lay motionless on the street, go on to occupy the same position.
In that sense, what followed family separation may be instructive. Trump and Miller’s hardline measures to seal the US-Mexico border continued through policies like Remain in Mexico, multiple asylum bans, and expanding detention of asylum seekers who’d recently crossed the border. But the outrage over family separation also helped to wipe away the political advantage on immigration that helped Trump win for the first time in 2016.
The killings of Pretti and Good, along with countless videos of immigrants and citizens being abused by masked federal agents, have similarly degraded the support for Trump on immigration generated by the chaos at the border during Joe Biden’s presidency. On Monday, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted before and after Pretti’s death showed that 53 percent of respondents disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, compared to 39 percent who approve. That is a 23-point swing from February 2025 when voters approved of Trump on immigration by a nine-point margin.
Six in ten independents now say that ICE has gone too far, along with more than 90 percent of Democrats. Perhaps more surprisingly, Republicans are now nearly as likely to say ICE has gone too far as they are to say that ICE has not gone far enough, according to the Reuters poll.
After years of trying to avoid talking about immigration on the campaign trail, Democrats are recognizing that times have changed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling on social media for fellow Democrats to reject an upcoming DHS spending bill. Democratic House leaders have joined efforts to impeach Noem.
It is now Bovino who is silent on X, and not by choice. In the Trump administration’s equivalent of Siberian banishment, he has reportedly been blocked from posting by his superiors.
