The Dictatorship
Greg Bovino was the hero of his own movie
With his heavily gelled buzz cut and his willingness to use violence against peaceful protestors, Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovinothe public face of President Donald Trump’s deportation spree and a so-called commander at large, seemed straight out of central casting. His aggressive tactics and flair for the dramatic made Bovino the perfect avatar for an immigration policy designed to prioritize spreading fear and pain over accuracy and efficiency.
Neither courtroom condemnations nor public backlash seemed to dampen his zeal for transforming the pain of immigrants caught up in federal sweeps into viral content. Bovino, whose career path was inspired by a 1980s Jack Nicholson movieseemed to relish the opportunity Trump’s deportation ramp-up gave him to play the main character.
Bovino, whose career path was inspired by a 1980s Jack Nicholson movie, seemed to relish the opportunity Trump’s deportation ramp-up gave him to play the main character.
When a federal officer shot and killed Renee Good in her SUV in Minneapolis this month, Bovino continued to encourage his agents’ confrontations with demonstrators and observers. Only when a Border Patrol agent under his command fired his gun into Alex Pretti was Bovino hustled out of Minnesota and back to his base in southern California.
Bovino being sent away was a begrudging acknowledgment from the Trump administration that it’s losing the public relations war. But it’s inaccurate to say he was “demoted” from the role as “commander at large” because that position doesn’t officially exist. More importantly, it’s likely that the forces he marshaled in the field will march on without him.
Bovino’s visibility increased exponentially after the White House became frustrated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has traditionally run targeted operations to detain individuals and not indiscriminate dragnets, wasn’t even getting halfway to deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s goal for 3,000 arrests per day.
As ICE fell in standing, Border Patrol rose in its place. The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff pointed out last year that “Trump’s militarized border crackdown and ban on asylum seekers have reduced illegal crossings to the lowest levels since the 1960s, leaving Border Patrol agents with more time on their hands.” That extra time has been spent acting as added muscle during immigration raids, leading them to be as visible as ICE — if not more so — during Trump’s deportation campaign.
And there at the forefront was Bovino, who joined CBP in 1996 and rose through the ranks to become chief of the patrol’s El Centro sector. When he was a child, Bovino told The New York Times that his parents took him to see “The Border,” starring Nicholson and Harvey Keitel. The film and the books he later consumed painted a picture of “a pretty tough organization to be out there alone with no backup,” he told the Times. “And I began to realize that that thing called the US Border Patrol is probably something pretty special.”
The corruption and lack of morality on display from most of the officers in “The Border” appear not to have bothered him. He instead seemed to internalize the idea that an agent needs to subvert bureaucracy and act on instinct against the evildoers of the world, a view that doesn’t translate into effective law enforcement.
Upon becoming sector chief in 2020, The Atlantic reportedBovino harnessed his love of the dramatic and “became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP.” According to an April 2025 report by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatterslast year, Bovino’s El Centro sector employed “five Border Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos.”
Bovine”https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/who-is-gregory-bovino-coat-border-patrol-j29xxmzmj?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqfNbwp9REBepWQAGSE-V1yzJzVRHepKOAiYfl1EgeJSBt5Xes5f9wN8oyGuRIU%3D&gaa_ts=697d4d81&gaa_sig=P2boAcJS1-_zAEy5wEf6pUXMUmujT6ewSfHWgyUYmJqrboSLnY5i6RHZnex4Ca95N61pGFMeBcVS7c0979ewdg%3D%3D”>reportedly bristled at policy shifts during the Biden administration that allowed an estimated 5.8 million migrants to either be granted parole or seek asylum between 2021 and 2024. In 2023, he briefly became the subject of a minor partisan firestorm when he was temporarily relieved of command and assigned a desk job in Washington. Bovino and congressional Republicans called it retaliation for his wanting to testify at a GOP-led hearing on President Joe Biden’s border policies. Or perhaps it had more to do with his social media footprintwhich included a profile picture of him in a black bulletproof vest brandishing an M4 assault rifle, looking every inch the image of a maverick willing to kick ass for his country.
The day after Trump’s win was certified last year, that is, still during the Biden administration, a team of Border Patrol agents traveled five hours north of El Centro to take part in a large-scale raid Bovino dubbed “Operation Return to Sender.” A federal judge later determined that the Kern County operation likely hinged on “stopping individuals without having a reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, as required by the Fourth Amendment.” CalMatters likewise reported: “Border Patrol officials misrepresented the very basics of their high-profile, large-scale immigration raid. Data obtained from U.S. Customs and Border Protection reveal that Border Patrol had no prior knowledge of criminal or immigration history for 77 of the 78 people arrested.”
When asked about “Operation Return to Sender,” which he carried out without approval from his superiors, Bovino was unrepentant. If his goal was to get the attention of the incoming administration, though, it worked like a charm. It’s unclear precisely when he came across the radar of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowskiher unofficial chief of staff, but she elevated Bovino to the head of the vanguard.
In a recently resurfaced video from June, after mass protests followed high-profile ICE raids in Los Angeles County, Bovino tells federal officers under his command: “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top.”
A subsequent ride through the city’s MacArthur Park on horseback as part of a show of force was met with anger and scorn from Angelenos. Bovino responded with a Kendrick Lamar-soundtracked hype video using footage of the operation. It was one of many such videos his office churned out from L.A. that framed Border Patrol and other law enforcement officials as action heroes battling chaos.
Los Angeles was the template for later deployments, sending Bovino traipsing across the country with overarching control of the stepped-up immigration operations. By late October, he had a new title to go along with his newly unfettered position. “Commander at large” is a role that doesn’t exist anywhere on paper, but it reportedly freed him from the chain of command and left him answerable only to Noem herself.
Bovino seemed to test that new authority in Chicago, where his willingness to escalate against protestors and his sworn testimony about his actions led to a sharp judicial rebuke. Video showed Bovino lobbing a canister of tear gas into a peaceful group of protesters, only for him to later claim that he did so in response to being hit with a rock.
During a deposition for a lawsuit that followed, Bovino acknowledged that he hadn’t been hit by a rock. During that same deposition, he declined to make any distinctions between lawful protesters and violent rioters. While imposing an injunction barring federal officers from using excessive force, U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis called Bovino’s “testimony not credible” and said in some of his testimony he was “outright lying.”
But as The Wall Street Journal reported in October, rather than leading Noem and Lewandowski to withdraw their support, Bovino’s tactics “earned plaudits from the pair, who have given him wide latitude to run his own operation.” By mid-November, he was spotted in North Carolina for the disgustingly titled “Operation Charlotte’s Web.” Quoting the classic children’s book, Bovino boasted, “We take to the breeze, we go as we please.” He proceeded to breeze back out of the state after only a week on the ground and roughly 450 arrestsa small amount given the magnitude of the disruption his agents caused.
His goal in New Orleans was 5,000 arrestsaccording to The Associated Press, but he was deployed to Minneapolis before he got anywhere near that goal.
He spent seven weeks on the ground in Minnesota, and not even an ICE officer killing Renee Good or Alex Pretti changed his tune. When BLN’s Dana Bash told Bovino that his remarks about Pretti “feel as though in some ways you’re blaming the victim here,” Bovino responded, “The victim? The victims are the Border Patrol agents.”
While his so-called turn and burn tactics won’t have his direct blessing, Border Patrol officers are still on the ground in Minneapolis
Two days later, Bovino was removed from his post and sent back to California. The role of “commander at large” now sits empty. His once frenetic social media feed has been quiet since Monday.
Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned immigration activist, told The Times of London that in her research, Bovino popped up as “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. It’s all a show for him.” Small wonder then that he was cast in the role he played so effectively for the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Bovino’s removal from the field may have little immediate effect on how ongoing immigration operations play out. While his so-called turn and burn tactics won’t have his direct blessing, Border Patrol officers are still on the ground in Minneapolis. And there’s no reason to assume the violent raids and indiscriminate attacks on observers and demonstrators will end just because he’s gone.
Border Patrol has a mandatory retirement age of 57meaning Bovino doesn’t have long left as a member of the agency he’s idolized. When he finally hangs up his green uniform, whether that’s sooner or later, he’ll have a legacy that, for better or for worse, will endure.
Last year, the Trump administration overhauled ICE’s leadership to place current and retired Border Patrol officials in charge of field offices around the country. NBC News reported then that the changes were orchestrated by Le wandowski and Bovinowho worked together to draw up the list of ICE offices they believed were lagging.
When you boil down Bovino’s position as “commander at large,” it wasn’t about increasing the number of arrests; those are still far below Stephen Miller’s quotas. Nor was it about the number of dangerous individuals taken off the street, especially with an administration that falsely lumps together all undocumented immigrants as criminals. It was about content: Bovino’s specialty.
At the height of Operation Midway in Chicago, a massive force of more than 300 federal agents descended on an apartment building in the middle of the night. Agents rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter, dragging residents from their homes and into the streets. ProPublica reporting later showed that no federal criminal charges were filed against anyone arrested that night, nor were the government’s claims that the building was a hub of gang activity borne out. But the video the administration released of the raid had all the hallmarks of a leader whose inspiration to join Border Patrol was born at the movies.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily.
The Dictatorship
What Tom Emmer said about Somalis was racist. What’s worse is he doesn’t believe it.
ByMichael Tisserand
There was a time when President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans didn’t think House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., had a sufficient understanding of who his enemies ought to be. But in remarks he made Wednesday at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, Emmer did his best to signal that Trump’s enemies are his enemies, too.
Emmer’s 11-minute talk, during which he expressed racism and transphobia and railed against abortion, also served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be. The name of the state party used to be Independent-Republicansand the late U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger used to describe the state party’s worldview, without irony, as progressive Republicanism.
Emmer’s talk served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be.
That party is long gone. At Wednesday’s event, Emmer theatrically dismissed a few sheets of paper he said were his talking points and proclaimed, Trump-like, that he was going rogue. He took aim at transgender youth (“there’s a reason why Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed”), at “elite radical lefties,” at “evil Marxists,” at the media, called his state’s abortion laws “as bad as North Korea” and called the state itself the “People’s Republic of Minnesota.”
But Emmer earned some of the most enthusiastic applause in his racist rant against the state’s large Somali American population. “Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re going to call us a racist, you’re going to call us an Islamophobe,” he said, before saying, “But I’m done being careful. Even the least bit careful.”
He said, “I don’t really care where you come from. But if come to this great country, you have to understand, you’re coming here to be an American.” Somalis “don’t assimilate,” he said, “And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
Among the people who responded angrily to Emmer’s slander of Somalis was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who was born in Somalia. “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back to where I came from,” she wrote on X.
In the debacle that followed Kevin McCarthy being voted out of the House speakership in 2023, Emmer was not elected to replace him because, by MAGA standards, he was too moderate. Trump called him a “Globalist RINO” and was still fuming that after Joe Biden won the race for president in 2020, Emmer voted to certify that election.
Emmer has worked harder to be seen as MAGA since then. In December, he appeared on “Varney & Co.” on Fox Business to support an Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge that made Somalis among its primary targets and became known as Operation Metro Surge. He offered up conspiracy theories and lies about Somali Americans committing 80% of the crime in the Twin Cities. He said money was being stolen from Minnesota state and federal programs to fund the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab.
When he signed up with the so-called Sharia Free America Caucus in February, he railed against letting “anti-American ideologies take root in our communities” and said he had been fighting against the nonexistent threat of Sharia law since he was a state legislator. I was unable to find stories of Emmer as a state legislator fearmongering about Sharia law. However, in 2015, when one of Emmer’s fellow Republicans was being rightly rebuked for attending an anti-Muslim event in St. Cloud, Emmer was a voice of reason and tolerance. He wanted his constituents to know that Somali Americans were contributing to the Minnesota communities they had made home and that they were “some of the fastest-assimilating populations.”
That same year, Emmer joined then-Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat who’s now the state’s attorney general, to found the Congressional Somalia Caucus: to help Somali Americans here and to promote peace and stability in Somalia.
Now Ellison is taking the lead in legal challenges against the ICE assaults Emmer champions.
This is the ticket into MAGA world: an embrace of abdication of decency and a necessary rejection of the spirit of welcome and tolerance one once held.
This is the ticket into MAGA world.
In April, a west central Minnesota event called “Understanding Immigration: A Community Conversation,” included Ayan Omar, a Somali American from St. Cloud, as a speaker. She works as equity director for the public schools and has been active in interfaith dialogues in the city.
Omar spoke of coming to the U.S. as a child, learning English by watching “The Simpsons” and learning self-value by watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The message from Mr. Rogers, she said, was especially important because “I just wanted to cower and hide away because I stood out. Not only because I was a Somali-American refugee, but I was also poor.” It was learning about Frederick Douglass that inspired her to become a teacher.
What she was describing was the process of her becoming more and more American. Countless other Somali Americans have had similar experiences. OEmmer knows that.
And not so long ago, he wasn’t afraid to say it.
Michael Tisserand
Michael Tisserand is a Minnesota-based writer whose works include “Krazy,” a biography of cartoonist George Herriman, and Sugarcane Academy, a memoir of his family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently writing a book about Charlie Chaplin and “The Great Dictator,” for Oxford University Press.
An appeals court on Friday upheld Harvey Weinstein’s2022 rape and sexual assault conviction in California, but ordered the trial judge who gave him 16 years in prison to resentence him.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously issued the decision, saying his trial judge did not violate the former movie magnate’s constitutional rights.
“We reject his attempts to disturb the jury’s guilty verdicts,” the judges wrote in their opinion.
Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said in an email that “We are disappointed by today’s decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal’s conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein’s trial. At the same time, the court correctly recognized that his sentence cannot stand.”
The decision came a day after prosecutors in New York decided Weinstein would not face a fourth trial there, dropping the #MeToo-era case after the accuser said she could not bear to testify again.
The California panel said that resentencing was necessary because the judge that sentenced him considered New York convictions that were later thrown out as an aggravating factor. California’s attorney general agreed.
Weinstein, 74, still stands convicted of another sexual felony in New York, and he remains behind bars awaiting a September sentencing there. Prosecutors there are seeking a 20-year prison term.
In California, Weinstein was convicted in December 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault against an Italian model and actor known during the trial as Jane Doe 1. He would serve his new sentence there only after his New York term is complete.
After the trial, Jane Doe 1 came forward under her name, Evgeniya Chernyshova, when she sued Weinstein in civil court.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Chernyshova did. Her attorney also said she consented to being named.
Chernyshova testified that Weinstein arrived uninvited to her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival and assaulted her.
Weinstein’s defense argued that Weinstein deserved a new trial because Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly prevented his trial lawyers from asking about Facebook messages between Chernyshova and festival head Pascal Vicedomini that would have shown they had a sexual relationship.
The questioning would have demonstrated that she perjured herself when she said she and Vicedomini were just friends and colleagues, the defense said. And the lawyers argued it would have bolstered their assertion that she was not even in her room on the night of the alleged assault.
“The lower court all but gutted Mr. Weinstein’s defense,” attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the appeals judges at April 23 oral arguments.
But the appeals court said in its ruling that Weinstein did make the arguments he wanted during the trial based on other evidence, including another set of Facebook messages that Lench allowed.
“Thus, there was no denial of Weinstein’s constitutional right to present a defense,” the panel wrote in its opinion.
The three judges also found that Weinstein’s lawyers failed to adhere to California’s rape shield law prohibiting evidence of an accuser’s sexual history when they tried to introduce the messages. Weinstein’s lawyers had argued that the shield law was not pertinent because they wanted to use the messages only to impeach the witness’s credibility.
And the appeals judges said testimony from accusers describing sexual assaults Weinstein was not charged with was appropriate, and allowed under state law.
Before his sentencing, Weinstein told the judge that this was a “made-up story” from a woman he had never met.
The Los Angeles jury acquitted Weinstein of the sexual battery of a massage therapist and failed to reach verdicts on counts involving two other women.
“This is not the end of the appellate process,” Engelmayer said in his email Friday. “We intend to seek review in the California Supreme Court because we continue to believe significant legal errors affected the proceedings and warrant further review.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said it would not have comment on the decision until the office reviewed it.
An email seeking comment from Chernyshova’s attorney was not immediately answered.
ByGarry Pierre-Pierre
One of the first people, and the very first doctor, to publicly receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States was Dr. Yves Duroseauthe chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
At a time when fear had emptied city streets and refrigerated trucks were lined up near hospital loading docksthat son of Haiti was a face of hope.
For Haitians, that image carried a deeper resonance. Ours is a community that America has often noticed only in moments of crisis. For once, the country was looking at a Haitian because he represented hope.
Ours is a community that America often noticed only in moments of crisis.
That memory from five and a half years ago is one reason the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians hit me so hard. Not with anger, but with deep sadness.
When I took the oath of citizenship decades ago, I believed America rewarded commitment with belonging. I still want to believe that. Thursday’s ruling suggests that, for some immigrants, the word “temporary” didn’t just describe their legal status but the nature of America’s welcome.
The first TPS recipients from Haiti arrived after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2010. Today, Haiti faces a different catastrophe. Armed gangs control much of the capitalthousands have been killed or displaced and the State Department continues to warn Americans not to travel there.
For many TPS holders, the country they fled has not recovered. In many ways, it has become even more dangerous.
They believed something basic: that the United States would not send them back to a country engulfed by political violence, armed gangs and institutional collapse. TPS was created for those for whom returning home is unsafe. That humanitarian commitment should matter just as much as the lives those TPS holders have built since arriving.
They waited for Congress to do what some members had pushed for for years: create a pathway from temporary protection to permanent belonging. Instead, the years passed. Children became adults. Mortgages were paid. Careers were built. Entire lives unfolded while Washington postponed action. Temporary Protected Status became less a bridge than a waiting room. The finish line kept moving. Now, for many, it has disappeared altogether.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Haitian nurses, home health aides and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. Their work was indispensable then, and healthcare leaders say it remains indispensable today.
This dependence is not sentimental. It is measurable. The Boston Globe, citing data from the National Domestic Workers Alliancereported that roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
According to a report by Massachusetts lawmakers Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, ending TPS for Haitians “threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care and disability care workforces amid a nationwide health care crisis and persistent staffing shortages.”
Roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
There is nothing temporary about the lives these TPS holders have built. There is nothing temporary about paying taxes for decades, buying a home, planting a garden or knowing your neighbors by name. There is nothing temporary about raising children who begin each school day by pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. There is nothing temporary about risking your life to care for strangers during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I never imagined that, decades after taking my own oath of citizenship, I would be writing about a generation of immigrants who walked that same path with the same faith only to discover that the road ended before they reached their destination.
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, it must also confront a question that has shadowed much of its history: Who gets to belong?
Too often, America has answered that question by welcoming people when their labor is needed most, only to question their place later.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people we continue to call temporary have spent years proving their commitment to this country. This ruling is bigger than Haitians or Syrians. It speaks to the covenant a nation makes with the people who answer its call during moments of need.
Though that process has never been smooth, America has always been at its best when it expanded the circle of belonging. Italians, Jews, Asians and even Black Americans born here were all told at one time that they could never fully be American. The country was not diminished by widening the definition of who belongs — it was strengthened by it.
The question is no longer whether Haitians who have their built lives here belong. They have answered that question through years of work, sacrifice and service.
The question is whether America still remembers what it means to be a country that welcomes immigrants.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum. They also reflect the promises a nation makes about who belongs. After more than 16 years, the Haitians affected by Thursday’s ruling are no longer strangers passing through. They are co-workers, parishioners, homeowners and taxpayers woven into the fabric of neighborhoods from New York to Florida to Massachusetts.
Pull one thread and you do more than remove one person. You weaken the fabric itself.
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Garry Pierre-Pierre is a Pulitzer-prize winning, multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist. In 1999, he left The New York Times to launch the Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language publication serving the Haitian diaspora. He is also the co-founder of the City University Graduate School of Journalism‘s Center for Community and Ethnic Media and a senior producer at CUNY TV
- Palestinian flags fly in Texas
- Trump-backed Letlow wins GOP primary for Sen. Bill Cassidy’s seat
- House panel subpoenas Leon Black, escalating tactics in Epstein investigation
- Congressional Black Caucus blasts Slotkin over her calls for new leadership in the House
- Key Democrats urge House to reject kids’ safety proposal
- Moderates beware: Mamdani coalition portends a dramatically different Democratic Party in NYC
- Divisive Israel vote to be discussed on Sunday House Democrats call
- House panel subpoenas Leon Black, escalating tactics in Epstein investigation
- The Dallas booboys
- Rubio, Patel at Miami match
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship10 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words