Greg Bovino is retiring from Border Patrol. After over 25 years with the agency, he’s been shown the door, though not by his own choice. The man is known to be boisterous, aggressive, and someone who embodies the ferocity of the Trump administration’s enforcement of immigration law. Perhaps it was too forceful, as even President Trump called for a gentler approach after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two left-wing activists who intervened in police actions that led to their deaths in Minneapolis earlier this year. Good tried to run over an ICE agent and got killed. Pro tip: don’t try to run over federal law enforcement agents. You’ll live longer.
Nevertheless, the situation became a public relations disaster, resulting in Bovino being dismissed by the city and Border Czar Tom Homan taking over. The New York Times published an extensive article about Bovino's career before his retirement, starting with a striking quote in which he expressed a regret: he hadn’t apprehended enough illegal aliens. The article also included interviews with other Border Patrol officials, who agreed that Bovino’s departure was overdue, with typical comments about illegal aliens designed to paint him in a negative light. Despite the language, these officials' concerns are justified — illegal aliens are killing our citizens and stealing resources, making them “trash” (via NYT) [emphasis mine]:
Gregory Bovino has only a few regrets.
“I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens,” he said in a recent interview. “I mean, we went as hard as we could, but there’s always a creative and innovative solution to catching even more.”
Until January, Mr. Bovino was the pugnacious face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. As federal agents moved to suppress protests in city after city, Mr. Bovino was often at the center of the scrum, personally lobbing tear gas into crowds and authorizing his team to operate with remorseless aggression.
He had risen from relative obscurity, but Mr. Bovino was built for the moment. He had long harbored hard-line, even radical views on immigration, and said he had a plan to deport 100 million people. And he had a longstanding reputation within the Border Patrol for his eagerness to test the law in service of those views, according to interviews with current and former colleagues and previously unreported documents.
The administration handed the mid-level Border Patrol leader a highly irregular position that allowed him to leapfrog the usual chain of command and report directly to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.
He was straight out of central casting, often wearing a double-breasted olive green coat that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said looked as if he “literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb.” (Mr. Bovino said the coat is an old Border Patrol uniform that he bought as a young agent.)
Mr. Bovino eventually started referring to himself in the third person as “Chief Bovino,” one administration official said, and assumed the title of “Commander at Large.”
[…]
To some of the colleagues he clashed with over his career, Mr. Bovino’s trajectory was predictable. While popular with direct subordinates for his bold and unapologetic leadership, six current and former homeland security officials described him as a chronic institutional headache whose theatricality, combativeness and disregard for rules and protocol sometimes alienated even those who generally shared his politics. Some of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the department had not authorized them to speak to the news media.
[…]
And, yes, the Commander has a few regrets. But he does not think he went too far. He thinks he did not go far enough.
“We wanted total border domination,” Mr. Bovino said one recent morning, leaning over a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon at Burgers and Beer, a sports bar and restaurant popular with El Centro’s federal agents. “When you use terms like that, perhaps it scares some of the weaker-minded people. Domination. I want you to dominate that border. I’m not going to ‘control’ it. We’re going to dominate the hell out of that damn place.”
[…]
His unapologetic and abrasive persona was on full display, too. Teresa Pedregon, a veteran Border Patrol employee who is now retired, said that in their first meeting in New Orleans, Bovino referred to undocumented immigrants as “filth” and “trash.” Under his leadership, she said, the sector shifted from intelligence-driven operations to those consensual encounters.
Everyone has their faults. The primary one here is that maybe his personality prevented him from being a team player, which is required if you want total domination at the border; no one agency can do it alone. Still, he’s a bulldog, and one who had the stones to do what must be done to get the aftermath of the Biden border invasion under control.
Still, with the swamp loaded with the usual folks who aren’t used to doing what must be done to, you know, solve problems, I can see why many thought Bovino was an issue, and that led to an accumulation of enemies, and alas, his premature exit.
Regardless, this is the face of what needs to be done. It’s going to be messy, made worse by hordes of insufferable rich, white progressives who think it’s their business to make us as mentally ill and miserable as they are. Remember that immigration is how Trump won both of his elections. We voted for this, ICE is still more popular than Democrats, and that’s an NBC poll, and the sob stories the media pushes about the detained and deported are frankly pieces of trash who had to go, who should’ve been gone ages ago.
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