MINNEAPOLIS — On Greg Bovino’s last day as a roving U.S. Border Patrol commander, protesters gathered outside the hotel where the 55-year-old was rumored to be staying. Night had fallen and the temperature was well below freezing. The demonstrators had convened to say goodbye in the loudest and least restful manner possible.
They banged on pots, pans, and drums in the falling snow; shouted into megaphones; and blew into their orange emergency whistles — a shrill call that’s become synonymous with the Trump administration’s assault in the Twin Cities.
From the building’s fourth floor, a group of men looked down on the raucous crowd, drinks in hand. They appeared to be off-duty members of Bovino’s locally despised detail. One of the men turned, set his can down, dropped his shorts, and shook his bare ass at the protesters before giving them the finger. Not long after, local police and state troopers wielding wooden clubs overtook the crowd. Several arrests were made.
“All that we know at this moment is that they’re swapping out personnel. That doesn’t tell us anything about policies.”
The motivations for the send-off stemmed from masked federal agents running wild throughout Minnesota for the past two months, and from the trail of civil rights abuses, constitutional violations, and violent videos left in their wake.
The most recent insult was the killing of Alex Pretti. On Saturday, federal immigration agents shot the 37-year-old dead in the street while he attempted to help a woman whom they had shoved to the ground.
In the wake of the killing, Bovino claimed that Pretti, who worked as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” despite abundant and immediately available evidence to the contrary.
On Monday, amid a wave of national outrage that even had some Republicans questioning the heavy-handedness in Minnesota, Bovino was removed from his unusual “commander-at-large” position and booted back to California. He will reportedly retire soon.
The local relief at Bovino’s departure is easy to understand. What is far less clear is how much of a change his replacement, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, will bring.
“There’s been no changes in legal filings, no withdrawing claims, no admissions that people are being detained without cause,” University of Minnesota law professor Emmanuel Mauleón told The Intercept. “All that we know at this moment is that they’re swapping out personnel. That doesn’t tell us anything about policies. That doesn’t tell us anything about enforcement priorities. That doesn’t tell us anything about tactics — and to the extent that we look at the court filings, there are no indications that those things have changed.”
As one example among many, Mauleón noted that the Trump administration has provided no indication that it intends to rescind a recently disclosed internal memo that purports authorize immigration agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant, an assertion of authority legal scholars have decried as patently unconstitutional.
This is an election year, and so far, the ultra-nationalist, hyper-militarized crackdown ordered up by White House adviser Stephen Miller and manifested in the streets of Minneapolis is proving decidedly unpopular. Currently, the messaging from both the president and Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz is that Homan’s arrival may bring a less divisive, more professional brand of federal immigration policing to the state.
And yet, there’s little evidence of ideological distinction between the new head of “Operation Metro Surge” and the rest of the Trump administration’s immigration hawks. The most notable difference between Homan and Bovino in particular is that Homan has deported a lot more people, and he’s done so at a national level.
“Certainly, swapping out Bovino for Homan might result in different policies,” said Mauleón, For now, though, “it seems to be a matter of crisis management more than anything.”
“A lot of this,” he said, “I read more as political cover rather than any real meaningful signals about what’s going to happen on the ground.”
Homan’s Record
Most recently, Homan has been in the news for being targeted in an FBI corruption investigation in which he allegedly accepted a paper bag stuffed with $50,000 in exchange for contracting favors. (The Trump Justice Department dismissed the case.)
Those with a somewhat longer memory will recall that Homan — along with Miller and others — was an architect of “zero tolerance,” a policy that saw thousands of immigrant children separated from their parents and spawned nationwide protests, much like the country is seeing today.
Those with an even deeper knowledge of immigration history will remember that Homan was key to President Barack Obama earning the monicker “deporter-in-chief.”
Like Bovino, Homan was once a Border Patrol agent, before transferring to the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. After September 11, 2001, INS earned the dubious distinction of being the only federal agency to be disbanded over the terror attacks. (The agency approved visas for two 9/11 hijackers.)
Under the colossal new Department of Homeland Security, Homan and his colleagues were folded into a novel agency called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE, which was divided into two wings, the deportation officers of Enforcement and Removal Operations, and the special agents of Homeland Security Investigations.
Homan moved to Washington in 2009 and quickly climbed the bureaucratic ladder, becoming head of ERO in 2013. Under Obama, he and his colleagues expanded a controversial program known as Secure Communities, which allowed ICE to work inside jails and prisons. The administration defined its enforcement priorities as people who presented a threat to “national security, public safety, and border security.”
During Obama’s second term, DHS ordered ICE to stop deporting people whose only offense was an immigration violation that occurred prior to January 2014. By the time he left the White House, Obama had more than 3 million deportations to his name.
Even amid the changing priorities, Homan distinguished himself as a high-functioning deporter, embracing the “worst first” mantra ICE used to refer the administration’s goals. At ERO, he deported more than 920,000 people — 534,000 of them being what ICE called criminal aliens. For this achievement, Obama awarded him a Presidential Rank Award in 2015, the highest annual honor given to the government’s senior service members.
Despite the recognition he received, Homan bristled at the Obama administration’s enforcement priorities. As ICE’s acting director during Trump’s first term, his big talking point was that all undocumented people — criminal record or not — should live in fear that the government is coming for them.
Homan’s agency ramped up arrests by more than 40 percent during Trump’s first year. In New York City alone, the Immigrant Defense Project reported a 900 percent increase in ICE arrests or attempted arrests at local courthouses. Nationwide, the greatest increase in arrests was among immigrants with no criminal convictions. Under Homan’s watch, ICE’s “noncriminal” arrests more than doubled.
At a Border Security Expo in 2018, Homan railed against the institutions challenging ICE, especially lawmakers and the press.
“When they’ve seen what we’ve seen, then you can have an opinion,” he told agents and industry vendors. “Until then we’re going to enforce the law without apology.”
Nothing in nearly a decade since Homan’s leadership at ICE suggests his views have changed. What has changed, particularly in the past year, is the overtly militarized tactics of both Border Patrol and ICE; while it was personnel from Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol’s parent agency, that killed Pretti, it was an ICE agent who shot Minneapolis mother Renee Good to death three weeks earlier.
Those operations have spawned a resistance the likes of which Homan never encountered during Trump’s first term.
Under Trump 2.0, federal agents in Minnesota have run up against a network of tens of thousands of digitally connected rapid responders committed to preventing mass deportations in their neighborhoods and communities.
Homan has threatened those networks directly, warning that people who follow and film ICE operations will be arrested, prosecuted, and included in a “database.”
“We’re gonna make ’em famous,” he told Fox News the week after Good was killed. “We’re gonna put their face on TV.”
DHS correspondence obtained by CNN indicates the building of such a database is well underway, with agents in Minneapolis directed to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc.” Among those swept up in the department’s data collection efforts, prior to his killing, was Alex Pretti.
Homan’s interest in targeting Trump’s political opponents echoes a national security memorandum the White House released last year, NSPM-7, which orders federal law enforcement to direct its investigative powers against what the president has called the “enemy within.”
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