How Gregory Bovino Proudly Became Trump’s #1 Immigration Stormtrooper – “A big part of this newsletter, amid the onrushing tide of news and never-ending flurry of scandal, is to mark when something major changes in our national fabric. Last night, something did — and you probably haven’t even heard about it yet. In a sweeping purge that affected cities from Denver to Philadelphia, the ICE leadership across about half of the country was removed — making room to replace them with leaders from the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). “The mentality is CBP does what they’re told, and the administration thinks ICE isn’t getting the job done,” a DHS official told NBC News, one of the few outlets to report on the purge as it happened last evening. “So CBP will do it.”
- NBC reported that the move was led by Corey Lewandowski, the mastermind behind much of DHS’s enforcement operations, and Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol executive who has been the literal face of much of the agency’s most aggressive (and illegal!) tactics.
- It’s an important recognition of a nuanced point: There are really two separate armed gangs rampaging on America’s streets — while ICE has been primarily leading the way on detentions across the country, ambushing people in places like the hallways outside immigration courts in New York City, it’s really been CBP’s Border Patrol that is terrorizing the residents of places of Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. (The two are now so blob-like that The Atlantic even used a photo of CBP officers to illustrate its article on how badly ICE’s hiring surge is going.) In the race to become America’s secret police and Trump’s goon-squad-of-choice, CBP’s military-style tactics on our streets appears to be winning — laws be damned…”
