Donald Trump’s disgraced former Border Patrol commander has accused the president’s current top immigration official of “political theater” over the president’s mass deportation policy.
Gregory Bovino, 56, was the public face of Trump’s first-year immigration crackdown. He was pulled out of Minneapolis in late January and retired in March after the fatal shooting of two Americans by federal agents. Since then, the former Customs and Border Protection official has waged an escalating public campaign against his old colleagues for going soft on deportations, as the Beast’s sister Substack PunchUp reported earlier this month.
Bovino’s latest attack came in a Wednesday X post. It followed a vow made by Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, on the Scott Jennings Show to send “a hell of a lot more agents to New York” to counter Gov. Kathy Hochul’s curbs on ICE. Bovino was unimpressed.
“He sounds super tough,” he wrote of Homan, 64. “But zoom in. All he’s actually promising is rounding up the ones who already have known criminal records.” Homan, he said, “is denying reality.”
The rest, Bovino claimed, are “staying right where they are… until they rob or kill you.” He again put the number of undocumented immigrants “laughing at us” at “100 million” and declared the only fix was “mass deportations.” “Anything less is just political theater,” he said.
That math, though, PunchUp reported, is fiction. Pew Research Center put the entire undocumented population at about 14 million in 2023. DHS’s own statisticians counted 11.6 million in 2022. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, has dismissed Bovino’s figures as “fantasy” numbers “pulled out of the thin air.”
This is not the first time Bovino has gone rogue in naming Trump officials he believes are going soft on immigration.
On a right-wing podcast in late April, he warned that “some of the team may not have the fortitude that President Trump does,” singling out White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Homan. He has also stated his view that Homan and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott “do nothing.”
The feud cuts to a central criticism of Trump—that his deportation drive has stalled far short of its promises. The president’s stated target is one million removals a year. The actual pace has held at roughly 1,286 a day—about 460,000 annually—according to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, as analyzed by researcher Austin Kocher.
Bovino was pulled from Minneapolis after agents from his self-styled “Green Machine” shot dead VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti, 37, 17 days after unarmed mother Renee Nicole Good, also 37, was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
Ross, as PunchUp exclusively reported last month, has been quietly moved to another state and is still on duty.
That news led Hochul to write to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 48, demanding to know if Ross was working in her state. Hill Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also expressed their anger to PunchUp over the Trump administration’s failure to investigate and discipline Ross.
The White House has tried to crush Bovino’s rebellion. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson previously told PunchUp, “nobody is changing the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” and DHS insisted, “ICE is NOT slowing down.” Mullin has repeated the line during media interviews.
However, their stance is undermined by the news that ICE arrests still fell nearly 12 percent in the weeks after Bovino was removed and then-Secretary Kristi Noem, 54, was fired in March.
In a New York Times exit interview, Bovino said his only regret was that he had not “caught even more illegal aliens.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
