ConnexionBorder Patrol Thug Greg Bovino Gets Booted Back To The Border By The Trump Administration
Unexpected, but in the most delightful sense of the word — the sort of thing we’ve rarely seen since January 2025.
Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to a DHS official and two people with knowledge of the change.
Get your popcorn, but only because (hopefully) there’s nothing more to see here:
CBP Commander Gregory Bovino made his bones as a Trump soldier before Trump even took office. He went rogue while still working for the Biden administration, engaging in an anti-migrant sweep that no one in the DHS chain of command had signed off on.
Bovino launched “Return to Sender,” the mission to California’s Central Valley earlier this year, without approval from the Biden administration, the Atlantic magazine reported.
Bovino apparently has always desired to take his work inland, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you’d expect from anyone working for the US Border Patrol.
But these inland incursions apparently caught Trump’s eye. Shortly after Trump decided the federal government should be in the business of invading cities, Bovino popped up in Chicago and then Minneapolis.
Everywhere he went he created headlines. He blew off court orders, insulted judges (including the ones he’d just finished lying to), swaggered around in the Border Patrol’s best approximation of Nazi gear, and opened his mouth to any mic a journalist pointed his way. He has swaggered from assault to assault surrounded by federal officers who are not only much bigger than him, but much more expendable.
Scapegoating sucks. But if anyone deserves to be thrown under the bus by an administration that suddenly senses it may have gone too far, it’s a guy who thinks the bus is just another power he doesn’t need to answer to.
Bovino’s sudden demotion is the clearest sign yet that the Trump administration is reconsidering its most aggressive tactics after the killing Saturday of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents under Bovino’s command.
Earlier today, President Trump appeared to signal in a series of social-media posts a tactical shift in the administration’s mass-deportation campaign. Trump wrote that he spoke with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—whom the White House has blamed for inciting violence—and the two men are now on “a similar wavelength.” Tom Homan, the former ICE chief whom Trump has designated “border czar,” will head to Minnesota to assume command of the federal mobilization there, Trump said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, who were Bovino’s biggest backers at DHS, are also at risk of losing their jobs, two of the people told me.
[Head’s up: lots of jpegs and sports metaphors upcoming.]
I can only hope these two unnamed people are right. As great as it is to see Bovino get demoted, it would be Christmas nearly a year early to see Kristi Noem kicked to the curb. If all of this does actually happen, it would be the equivalent of involuntary LASIK surgery. (You know, to expediently fix the optics.) My fingers remain crossed.
Meanwhile, Bovino is going to suffer the relative humiliation of being sent down to the minors. Sure, his pitch-perfect blend of Cap Anson and John Rocker may have played well early on, but now that dudes with more money than training are killing US citizens on nearly a weekly basis, the time has come to reconsider this dance with the whitest of white devils. (To be fair to John Rocker, at least he expressed remorse for the things he said. Anson never did. And I suspect Bovino never will either.)
Bovino has become the JaMarcus Russell to Trump’s Al Davis [switching to football if you’re scoring at home]{and if you’re scoring at home, high five! NICE!}] — someone who looked like a sure thing early on but swiftly proved himself to be an embarrassment of historic proportions.
Or maybe it’s just some sort of professional jealousy. Trump likes to be the focal point for media bullshitting and Bovino has periodically made Trump look almost rational.
Or… maybe it’s something else. Maybe Trump has decided there can only be one prominent official with completely improbable hair and it certainly won’t be this cocky upstart from the California border.
Bovino’s attitude suggests he thinks he’s this guy:
But he’s being clowned by hundreds of regulars in US city streets who clearly have absorbed this guy’s oppositional energy:
But, in reality, he’s this guy with… whatever the fuck is going on up there:
Which pretty much places him in somewhere between this guy:
Given all of that, I’ll leave you with this:
Bovino repeatedly claimed that Border Patrol agents, not Pretti, were the victims.
Hmmm. I thought we were supposed to blame the victims when federal officers execute people. If the real victims are the federal po-po, maybe they shouldn’t have been where they were when they were there. If they knew what was good for them, they would have stayed away from areas where they might trip over each other in their haste to pump a full clip into someone who already wasn’t moving.
Bovino will have to go back to pomading his hair plugs closer to the border. While that will certainly suck for the recipients of whatever abuse Greg “hell hath no fury like a tiny man with anger issues scorned” Bovino inflicts in response to getting benched, it’s at least a trailing indicator that the “might means we’ve righter than any country has been in history historically, you should read the books about it they’re magnificent” administration may finally be recognizing there’s only so far you can push Americans before even the people who are fully MAGA cooked will turn on you.
(@Lindatini) 
On the first anniversary of 
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