Greg Bovino’s Last Stand

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As an ROTC cadet at Western Carolina University, Greg Bovino belonged to the Ranger team, a group modeled on the elite Army unit whose ethos is embodied in its creed: “As a Ranger my country expects me to move further, faster and fight harder than any other Soldier.”

The team competed in commando-style challenges of physical endurance and tactical abilities. Teammate John VanHook said Bovino fit right into the team’s “hooah” culture.

“Greg’s not going to be backed down,” said VanHook, now a lawyer in Franklin. “He’s got a tremendous amount of courage.”

Bovino got backed down this week. 

For much of the past year, he was a top Border Patrol officer and the swaggering leader of immigration enforcement efforts from Charlotte to Los Angeles, winning public praise from President Donald Trump himself.

But he was removed from that role this week after a widespread backlash to the second killing this month by federal agents in Minnesota. On Monday, President Trump ordered border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis, effectively replacing Bovino. 

Videos of the January 24 incident show Border Patrol agents wrestling nurse Alex Pretti to the ground and firing 10 shots. Despite images suggesting otherwise, Bovino told CNN, “The victims are the Border Patrol agents. The suspect put himself in that situation.”

Three weeks earlier, Bovino had defended the fatal shooting of protester Renee Good, a Minneapolis mother. “Hats off to that ICE agent,” he said at the time. “I’m glad he made it out alive.”

The Atlantic reported this week that Bovino would lose his title as “commander at large,” return to his prior assignment in California, and soon retire. The administration also took away Bovino’s access to social media, where he’s been just as aggressive as he was on the ground. 

Bovino, who grew up in Blowing Rock in the North Carolina mountains, had become the face of Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown. He embraced the spotlight, storming in with cameras blazing.

“I think of him as the Liberace of the Border Patrol because he just cannot get enough press,” said Jenn Budd, a North Carolina native and former Border Patrol agent turned critic.

As befits a man once inspired by Hollywood, Bovino employed a video team to document and dramatize his agency’s operations. He knows the power of images.

On May 4, known to fans as “Star Wars Day,” he posted a video on X that depicted the agency as Darth Vader wielding a light saber against “gang members,” “sanctuary cities,” and “fake news.”

“I think of him as the Liberace of the Border Patrol because he just cannot get enough press.”

Jenn Budd, former Border Patrol agent

In November, Bovino posted another video with a Batman-like projection of the Border Patrol logo. “When that light hits the sky, it’s not just a call,” a narrator said. “It’s a warning.”

Even before Minneapolis, images also fueled his critics.

Last fall in Charlotte, a video showed a handful of agents trying to coax a woman out of her car. When she didn’t comply, an agent smashed her window with the barrel of his rifle. Other photos showed masked agents pushing people to the ground or showering protesters with tear gas or pepper spray.

In Chicago, a bystander filmed agents using tear gas in a neighborhood preparing for a children’s Halloween parade. United States District Judge Sara Ellis later chastised Bovino: “Those kids were tear-gassed on their way to celebrate Halloween,” she told him in court. “Their sense of safety was shattered.”

Bovino has plenty of admirers. On X, one called him “an American Hero.” Another, “a national treasure.” He appeared to have the full support of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, to whom he reported directly. 

When The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff emailed questions last summer about why Bovino had been elevated to commander, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded: “Because he’s a badass.” 

Until this week, Bovino also had the backing of the president. But on Tuesday, Trump called him “a pretty out-there kind of guy.”

“In some cases that’s good,” Trump told a reporter. “Maybe it wasn’t good here.”

Immigrant Roots

Bovino, 55, is a solid if diminutive 5-foot-4 with taut biceps and gel-spiked hair. He’s often in front of the cameras in the field and has been a frequent guest on TV news shows. Until this week, he used social media to troll critics. 

After an undocumented immigrant stabbed a passenger on Charlotte’s light rail last month–the second rail stabbing of the year–Bovino posted a message for Gov. Josh Stein.

“The blood of innocents is on you,” he wrote. “We’ve shown and told you for weeks now, yet you continue choosing illegal aliens over Ma and Pa America.”

Trump took note. “Greg Bovino just went scorched earth on Democrat governors–and he didn’t hold back,” the president posted in December. “THAT is how it’s done.”

A spokesperson for Stein said he “believes that if someone is here unlawfully and commits a violent crime, the person should be deported. That is what the Border Patrol should be focused on–not causing fear in our neighborhoods.” 

Through a spokesperson, Bovino declined to be interviewed by The Assembly. 

Bovino has his own immigrant roots.

The Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ traced the Bovinos to the mountains of southern Italy. Bovino’s paternal great-grandfather came to America in 1909. His wife followed, and both became naturalized U.S. citizens. Their Italian-born children, including Bovino’s grandfather, would qualify under a “derivative citizenship” law.

Greg Bovino was born in March 1970 in California where his father, Michael, was stationed in the Army. Two years later they moved to Blowing Rock, where his mother, Betty Hartley, can trace her family back generations.

In the early 1980s, Bovino saw a film that he said changed his life. A relative, Neil Hartley, had helped produce The Border, starring Jack Nicholson.

“My parents took me to see that movie because Uncle Neil produced it,” Bovino told The Daily, a New York Times podcast, last year. “It was a big deal from back in rural North Carolina to see something like that. So we went and watched it. It got me interested in the Border Patrol from an early age.”

As a child, he read stories by early Border Patrol agents Jeff Milton, Col. Charles Askins, and Bill Jordan, he told the Old Patrol HQ podcast. Along with the movie, they inspired him to join the patrol. 

“All those stories that were written by the Jordans and the Askins and the Miltons and many others—it was one of the few times in my life that I can actually say, ‘That came true. It’s really like that.’” 

‘He Was a Firebrand’

In 1981, a highway accident tore apart two North Carolina families.

Bovino’s father owned a Blowing Rock bar called The Library Club. One night Michael Bovino had drunk “two, maybe three six-packs” before getting into his Dodge pickup and driving the wrong way down U.S. 321. He hit a car head on, killing 24-year-old Jane Mitchell and seriously injuring her husband.

Michael Bovino was sentenced to 18 months in prison. His wife filed for divorce and got custody of Greg and his two siblings. After Michael’s release, he left town. Greg’s mother remarried.

Kelly Redmon has known Bovino since grade school. They wrestled together at Watauga High School and found time to hunt squirrels and deer and ski in the mountains. 

“It was a very simple life back then,” said Redmon, now chief deputy in the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office. But they didn’t talk about Michael Bovino. “It’s not pleasant to have discussions about that,” Redmon said.

In the mid-1980s, Lee Stroupe was the high school wrestling coach when he met Greg, who would go on to wrestle for four years, starting in the 98-pound weight class. 

“He was a fun-loving guy,” recalled Stroupe, 76. “Kids liked him. He liked to tell stories.”

(Bovino was one grade ahead of GOP U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley at Watauga High; a Whatley spokesperson said they did not know each other.) 

Bovino went to Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, where he majored in natural resource conservation and management and was active in ROTC and its Ranger Challenge Team. The team traveled to schools such as Clemson University and Wake Forest University, taking part in Army commando-style challenges such as orienteering, rope courses, and long hikes with heavy packs.

“It was like we were little, wannabe Rangers,” recalled team member Patrick Stevenson, who went on to an Army career. 

Bovino, who’d learned to hunt at an early age, got a perfect score in one shooting competition. “He was a firebrand,” said VanHook, the lawyer. “He would give you his opinion, but once he got an order he would salute and execute, which is what you need in a good soldier.”

Calvin Hegeman, the Ranger Club commander, recalls Bovino was one of the team’s youngest members. “I just remember him as the eager beaver with wide eyes–‘What do I need to do?’ [He was] a really active team player. He was impressive.”

After graduating magna cum laude in 1993, he went to Boone for a masters of public administration, a degree he got in 1996. Bovino didn’t serve in the military. He was briefly a part-time officer in the Boone Police Department until leaving for the Border Patrol in 1996.

That’s where Jonathan Morales met him.

“He’s a good leader, hard worker, and a supervisor who leads by example,” said Morales, president of the union that represents agents in the California sector that Bovino headed. “He’s well respected.”

Natalie Bovino told the Daily Mail that her older brother is a big fan of the late boxer Rocky Marciano, an undersized (and undefeated) heavyweight boxing champion in the 1950s, and still looks to him for inspiration.

“When he gets ready to do something difficult, he’ll watch the video Rocky Marciano Was A Savage,” she told the publication. “And Greg gets motivated to not stop, to never give up, never quit.”

The Border Patrol has taken Bovino to Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, and California, where he now lives. Minneapolis wasn’t his first brush with controversy.

‘Return to Sender’

As chief of one of his agency’s California regions in 2010, Bovino led what was intended to be a three-day operation at the Las Vegas airport and bus stations. The raid was stopped in an hour after it provoked outrage from then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

In 2023, his career took a brief detour after he appeared before a U.S. House panel looking into border security. 

That July, he and other regional Border Patrol officers testified to the Republican-controlled House Committee on Homeland Security about what committee leaders described as the border crisis. Among other things, Bovino said that handling the influx of people crossing the border was taxing the agency’s staffing.

“The blood of innocents is on you. We’ve shown and told you for weeks now, yet you continue choosing illegal aliens over Ma and Pa America.”

Greg Bovino

“Any illegal alien … presents a threat to national security or a threat to the taxpayer of the United States,” he told the committee. “We see that time and again, whether it’s planes crashing into buildings, or whether it’s, you know, the vast amount of American citizens that die each year at the hands of illegal aliens.”

Within hours of testifying, Bovino was transferred from his California command to a desk job in Washington by Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, according to the panel’s GOP chairs.  

A month later, in August 2023, he was reinstated after pressure from GOP leaders.

With the advent of the second Trump administration, Bovino’s authority quickly widened.

On January 7, a day after Congress certified Trump’s election, Bovino sent agents to raid agricultural farms in central California, far from the southern border. “Operation Return to Sender” was the Border Patrol’s first large-scale enforcement campaign of the year. It resulted in 78 arrests and was the start of a busy year. 

Six months later, he was leading Border Patrol raids in Los Angeles. In September he was on to Chicago and in November, Charlotte and Raleigh. By October, Noem had begun referring to him as commander at large.

Budd, the former agent, considers Bovino “a quintessential Border Patrol man.”

“He’s just trying to prove he’s the toughest of the toughest,” she said.

Erin Siegal McIntyre, a UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor who’s writing a book about the Border Patrol, said, “There’s a cowboy culture, a frontiersman mindset. It implies a certain kind of bravado.”

Still, Bovino’s outspokenness is unusual for law enforcement officials, said Seth Stoughton, a professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina law school.

It’s “inconsistent with the measured approach from most modern police leaders,” Stoughton, a former police officer, told The Assembly. “Entering any public debate in a very public way is going to cost you legitimacy because you’re inevitably going to be pissing off someone.” 

Bovino’s comments are also part of a Tennessee court case. He appeared on Newsmax days after Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national deported to a notorious prison in his home country, was released from detention on December 11. Bovino called Abrego Garcia an “alien smuggler,” a “wife beater,” and an “MS-13 gang member,” according to court documents.

Lawyers said he violated a judge’s order that bars Homeland Security officials from making prejudicial comments. The case is ongoing.

Use of Force

Shortly after 6 a.m. on June 27, Bovino stood in a quiet street in the Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Park as a dozen heavily armed agents approached a home. A security camera saw them plant explosives on windows and doors. Agents ordered the residents to leave. Just 14 seconds later, an explosion blew out a window. Then another blew out the door.  

Jenny Ramirez and her two children walked out.

According to The New York Times, agents were looking for Ramirez’s partner, a U.S. citizen who’d been involved in a minor accident with a Border Patrol vehicle. He wasn’t home. 

Critics say Huntington Park is an example of the Border Patrol’s improper use of force.

“There’s never been anything like it,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who served as U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner for President Barack Obama. “CBP and ICE never used tactics like these [and] this level of cruelty. … The complete disdain they’ve shown for local police departments, whether it’s Charlotte, Chicago, or Louisiana, is unheard of in this organization.”

Bovino has said agents use force only when assaulted. But a study last fall by the Project On Government Oversight and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop found otherwise. 

Researchers analyzed federal data from 2022 to 2025. In Bovino’s California sector, the researchers found the ratio of “use of force” incidents to assaults on the agents far outpaced that of anywhere else in the country. 

ProPublica reported this month that immigration agents have used banned chokeholds at least 40 times in the past year. That includes one case caught on camera in Charlotte.

In November, Judge Ellis blasted the Border Patrol’s use of force in Chicago.

She also accused Bovino of “outright lying,” including saying he sprayed tear gas only after being hit in the head with a rock thrown by a protester. “Bovino admitted in his deposition that he lied multiple times about the events…that prompted him to throw tear gas at protesters,” Ellis wrote.

Worst of the Worst?

When Bovino and the Border Patrol came to Charlotte in November, they arrested more than 400 people. A Homeland Security news release posted mug shots of many of them with the caption: “The Worst of the Worst arrested in Charlotte.”

But news reports suggest that’s far from the case.

The Washington Post reported in November that while agents had arrested more than 4,000 people in Chicago, they had publicly identified only about 120 (less than 5%) with a criminal arrest or conviction. The New York Times reported that a third of those arrested nationwide had no criminal charges. 

During the Charlotte operation, Border Patrol agents swooped into Klever Auto Repair, which caters to Latino customers. A manager, who gave his name only as David, said five employees and two customers were detained. He said most of them were documented.

“The color of my skin does not define who I am,” he said. “You look Hispanic, you’re illegal.”

Accusations of racial profiling aren’t new for Bovino. Last July, after he led a series of raids on California farms, a federal prosecutor in the state told him that he’d violated a federal court order blocking him from arresting people without probable cause. Six hours later, she was fired, according to The New York Times.

The federal judge who issued the April court order had said, “You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers.’”

But in September the U.S. Supreme Court said you could. “To be clear,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion… however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered with other salient factors.”

Kerlikowske said such detentions are now called “Kavanaugh stops.”

‘Dream Team’

When Bovino and his agents were going into Chicago, they posted a video, not of them chasing down migrants but praying.

The video showed agents in a vehicle reading from the Bible. Over the sounds of bagpipes, a narrator says, “Isaiah 6:8: ‘Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And I said here am I. Send me.’

“And that’s what a warrior does,” the narrator continues. “He answers the call with no excuses. God doesn’t ask for the most polished. Or the most powerful. He asks for the most willing. The ones who won’t run.”

“CBP and ICE never used tactics like these [and] this level of cruelty. … The complete disdain they’ve shown for local police departments, whether it’s Charlotte, Chicago, or Louisiana, is unheard of in this organization.”

Gil Kerlikowske, former U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner

Over the video, Bovino wrote: “Here am I, send me.”

That was a more somber, reflective side of Bovino than he typically shows. 

In The Daily podcast, Bovino, who has described himself as “apolitical,” made clear he was no fan of Biden. When it came to immigration enforcement, he said, “it was like turning the light switch off. We went back to the Dark Ages.”

“That light switch that I said went off during the last administration went back on this administration,” he said, “except when it went on, it’s so bright that I have to put sunglasses on just to even see now.”

Bovino reveled in what he called “the leadership dream team.”

And for almost a year, he was their go-to guy. But he just got kicked off the team. 

Emily Vespa contributed reporting.