In the 1982 action movie The Border, Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel play border guards posted along the Texas frontier. The film sets up their federal force as a bunch of gunslingers operating with little to no moral code.
But the way an 11-year-old Gregory Bovino saw it, watching at the cinema in his hometown of North Carolina, Keitel and his posse were the heroes, foot soldiers fuelled by a sense of duty and patriotism.
The Border would set the course for Bovino’s life, inspiring him to join his local police department straight out of college.
Fast-forward 30 years and he finds himself the star of President Trump’s immigration show as commander-at-large of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
His stage: the streets of Minnesota, where he has filmed Hollywood-style promotional videos sporting a buzzcut and a brass-buttoned, olive-green greatcoat marching alongside masked and heavily armed officers set to rock music:
Photograph by Mike Madison for The Times
But the brutality with which he and his agents have been carrying out immigration raids has begun to draw criticism even among Republican allies of the president after the killing over the weekend of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, in Minneapolis.
In an apparent response to the backlash over Pretti’s death, the Trump administration is expected to withdraw Bovino from Minneapolis, although it denied reports he had been removed from his post as commander-at-large of Border Patrol.
Alex Pretti was shot dead last week
US DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS’ AFFAIRS/REUTERS
• Who is Alex Pretti? Minneapolis shooting victim
Bovino’s coat has drawn particular attention, with German media describing him as having a “Nazi aesthetic”.
Like most of the men and women he has been rounding up, Bovino, 55, has his own immigration story. His great-grandfather Michele emigrated in 1909 from Calabria, southern Italy, to Pennsylvania’s coal country to work as a miner. Michele would later change his name to Michael to better assimilate.
Bovino in his controversial greatcoat
MUSTAFAH HUSSAIN FOR CNN
His wife and four children had stayed behind in the village of Aprigliano — a region lacking opportunity and plagued by organised crime — before joining him in the mid-1920s and becoming naturalised citizens.
Gregory Kent Bovino was born half a century later in 1970 in San Bernardino County, California, where his father served on a military base after being drafted during the Vietnam War. Two years later his parents, Michael and Betty, moved the family across the country to Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
Michael bought Bovino his first gun aged eight, and taught him how to shoot rabbits and squirrels. “He was hard,” Bovino’s sister Natalie said of their late father. “Toughness, hard work that baked in.”
She remembered how excited her brother had been to watch The Border. “Greg was so psyched because he loved the toughness and the values of all these old-timers,” she said in an interview last year. “Then he watched it, and the Border Patrol person was a criminal. Greg came home totally pissed about it. Since then, he was like, ‘Dude, I want to do Border Patrol.’”
The family fell apart around this time. Mike Bovino killed a young woman when he drunkenly crashed his truck into her car, having shut up his bar The Library Club late one night in 1981. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of death by motor vehicle and spent four months in prison. He was forced to sell the bar and the family struggled financially, which led to the parents divorcing three years later.
The Border starred Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel
ALAMY/UNIVERSAL/EVERETT COLLECTION
Bovino attended Watauga High School, where staff remembered a middling sportsman who enjoyed wrestling but lacked both the height and strength to make it far.
Lee Stroupe, an old coach of Bovino’s, recalled a young man who “was not bashful” and who “liked snakes”. “He knew exactly where to find a snake,” he told Minnesota Public Radio. “We don’t have many poisonous one up here in the mountains, but Greg somehow knew exactly where to find them.”
According to reports Bovino married and had children, but next to nothing about his family is available online. Bovino began his CBP career in 1996 and quickly rose through the ranks, serving in tactical units and later leading sectors in New Orleans and El Centro in California.
It was there he earned a reputation as a strict enforcer who didn’t always strictly play by the rules, and as a boss who had a flair for the dramatic. He once invited reporters to watch him swim across an irrigation canal in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, hoping it would serve as a deterrent to any migrants thinking of crossing.
Jenn Budd, author of the book Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist, researched Bovino’s early years in CBP and described him as “the Liberace of the Border Patrol”.
“He was just a little Napoleon who wants you to think that he is the most moral and capable guy in the world, and everything around you is dangerous but he’s the one who’s going to save you,” Budd said. “It’s all a show for him.”
ICE officers raid south Minneapolis
VICTOR J BLUE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
Bovino was leading the El Centro district during the final year of Trump’s first term in 2020. He was full of rage at what he saw as progress on immigration control being undone when President Biden relaxed border security, allowing millions of illegal immigrants to cross into the country.
Bovino was briefly relieved of command in 2023 after he testified critically about conditions along the border under the Biden administration. He was also investigated for posting incendiary messages on social media, including one in which he called two Yemeni citizens terrorists.
That same year, while serving as head of CBP in New Orleans, he was sued by two black officers who were looked over for promotion in favour of a white one, a friend of Bovino’s. A court found an email sent by that officer comparing Bovino to a Confederate general and the New Orleans office to a unit of Black Union soldiers. The judge found evidence of racial bias in the hiring. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reached an out-of-court settlement.
After Trump was re-elected, Bovino worked hard to be noticed. Two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, he sent dozens of agents to arrest migrants at petrol stations and along the highway.
When asked by reporters at the White House why Bovino was chosen to lead the force, Tricia McLaughlin, DHS spokeswoman, replied simply: “Because he’s a badass.”
Trump was impressed not only by Bovino’s long service in CBP but his unapologetic machismo. The president saw him as the strongman who would help him fulfil the central promise of his presidential campaign.
Bovino has said in interviews over the years that his main concern is to protect what he calls “Ma and Pa America” from bad people and bad things that cross the border. “What happens at the border never stays at the border,” he told a podcast in 2021.
• Trump: ‘Phenomenal’ ICE will leave Minneapolis at some point
His immigration sweeps have stretched far beyond CBP’s usual remit, into midwestern cities including Chicago and Minneapolis.
Illegal crossings at the southern border have reached historic lows and the administration has been using an expansive definition of the border to justify Bovino’s mission.
Bovino has coined the phrase “turn and burn” to describe his enforcement strategy, which often entails officers jumping out of unmarked rental vans to ambush immigrant day labourers at places such as Home Depot.
He has been accused of using racial profiling to round up Hispanic men, women and children, despite claims he is apprehending only the “most dangerous of criminals”.
Bovino said his agents did not profile someone because of skin colour alone, but could use a “totality of factors” to make the call. “Are you panic-stricken? Are your eyes wide? Do you look furtive?” he said. “How are you looking different than those other 1,000 people that I’ve encountered on the street that day?”
Some cities, including Minneapolis, have risen up in a protest, which has been met by teargas and rubber bullets fired by CBP agents.
Supporters of the administration’s aggressive mass-deportation push see Bovino as a hero, one modelled on Harvey Keitel’s antagonist Cat. But critics see him as pushing legal and political lines, and Democrats have drawn stark historical parallels between Bovinos’s force and the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany.
“Greg Bovino dressed up as if he literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb. Greg Bovino, secret police, private army, masked men, people disappearing quite literally, no due process,” Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said recently. Bovino claimed he had had the coat for more than 25 years, and got it from the Border Patrol.
Bovino is flanked by federal agents in Minneapolis
OCTAVIO JONES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The tactics of Bovino and his officers have even begun reaching the courts. Bovino’s conduct during last year’s Chicago operation drew criticism from a federal judge, who ruled that his descriptions of events were not supported by video evidence.
The US District Judge Sara Ellis found last month that Bovino was not hit in the head with a rock before he deployed tear gas, which he claimed justified his use of force. The judge said Bovino had admitted he lied.
Local officials described the dramatic scene as a little more than a photo op for Bovino, who later shared footage of it on social media.
“He laughs when they call him out on the stuff, and it’s just a bro thing,” Budd said. “He’s just going around with his bros, just capturing migrants and people of colour and harassing people. They will lie constantly, like you saw in the Chicago courts. They will not think twice about doing it, and nobody will hold them accountable.”
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