Finalist: Nick Miroff of The Atlantic

The Trump administration says that it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return.

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

Officials were developing a plan to get him back to the United States. Why did they stop?

At each stage in the political and legal fight over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration has pushed back harder and dug in deeper.

The administration first called Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error,” then a “clerical error.” The words trivialized the decision to send a man to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without legal proceedings and in direct violation of a judge’s protective order. Officials insisted that the mistake could not be undone, disregarding a Supreme Court ruling instructing the administration to “facilitate” his return. Now the president and his advisers maintain, almost daily, that Abrego Garcia will never touch American soil again.

“He’s NOT coming back,” the White House has declared on social media, while repeatedly calling Abrego Garcia a dangerous criminal and a terrorist.

But in the days after the administration first discovered its mistake, instead of trying to foreclose Abrego Garcia’s return, officials looked for ways to bring him home. They puzzled over the fragmentary evidence tying him to gang membership. And they worried about his safety in a prison where he could be targeted for attack.

A lawsuit filed by Abrego Garcia’s family sparked urgent conversations among attorneys at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security who were involved in formulating the government’s response. Their discussion—which has not been previously reported—reflected serious concerns, at odds with the administration’s later statements, according to two people familiar with the conversations, as well as notes and memos I reviewed. Both people spoke with me on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter of ongoing litigation.

These conversations show that U.S. officials initially sought to resolve Abrego Garcia’s case quietly and ensure his safety through the conventional diplomatic channels they’ve used in other cases involving a mistaken deportation. This time, though, their efforts were abruptly halted.

Late last month, three days after Abrego Garcia’s family filed its lawsuit over his deportation, government attorneys began discussing how to undo the mistake and bring him back. In their conversations, officials went so far as to float the idea of having the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador make a personal appeal to the country’s president for Abrego Garcia’s return. But first, the State Department’s legal team wanted more information from DHS about his alleged role in the MS-13 gang. The thin evidence supplied in response was met with skepticism from the State Department lawyers. Abrego Garcia, who came to the United States illegally when he was 16 years old, was one of 23 Salvadorans deported on March 15. But his name had not appeared on an internal list of 10 gang members sought by President Nayib Bukele.

Attorneys at DHS had other concerns. They were aware that, six years ago, a judge had granted Abrego Garcia protected status over fears that he could be targeted for violence should he be returned to El Salvador. That protection was still in effect and had been violated by the March 15 deportation. They wanted to know if U.S. diplomats could ask the Salvadoran government to keep him separated from Barrio 18 gang members who had threatened him in the past and might harm him.

But as criticism of the administration over its mishandling of the case spread, White House officials took over the response and began striking a far more strident tone in their public statements. They swiftly turned an admission of bureaucratic error into a political opportunity—a chance to flex executive authority and test the judicial branch’s ability to restrain presidential power. Abrego Garcia’s deportation became far more than just the case of one man; it developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process. All the while, Abrego Garcia has remained in detention in El Salvador, unable to communicate with his lawyers or his family.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that there was an initial effort to return Abrego Garcia. “The Administration has always maintained the position that Abrego Garcia was the man we rightfully intended to deport because he is an illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang Member,” she said in a written response to questions, adding that the administration is complying with court orders in the case.

As the Trump administration resists the pressure to change course, legal proceedings continue. A conservative appellate-court judge issued a blistering opinion rejecting the government’s claims last week, and on Tuesday, the Justice Department said for the first time that U.S. officials had engaged in diplomatic negotiations over Abrego Garcia’s status. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers agreed Wednesday to a one-week pause on the case during closed proceedings whose records are under seal.

Abrego Garcia, 29, was raising three children with his U.S.-citizen wife and working in construction during his time in the United States. While the administration has depicted him in public statements as a dangerous criminal, judges overseeing the case have chastised the government for not backing their claims with evidence in court.

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a member of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote last week. “Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.”

Some U.S. officials doubted Abrego Garcia’s alleged gang ties from the beginning. In their discussions, State Department officials repeatedly asked DHS and ICE to explain how Abrego Garcia had been identified as an MS-13 member; his possible affiliation with the gang would be a factor in Bukele’s willingness to consider releasing him should the ambassador make a pitch, the officials pointed out. (When Bukele appeared with Trump in the White House on April 14, Bukele called the notion that he would return Abrego Garcia to the United States “preposterous.”)

Abrego Garcia’s record had traffic violations but no criminal charges or convictions. Yet ICE officials told the State Department—falsely—that he had faced criminal charges. They pointed to records showing that Abrego Garcia had been suspected of human or labor trafficking after a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022. State police had referred the incident to federal authorities because Abrego Garcia had been driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland. Abrego Garcia had told officers that he was driving the group to a construction job and that the vehicle belonged to his boss. He was cited for driving with an expired license but not charged with human trafficking or any other crime.

ICE said that Abrego Garcia was a member of an MS-13 group called the Western Clique, citing a 2019 report by a gang investigator in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The investigator who filed the report was suspended soon after and charged with misconduct in an unrelated sex-worker case. The document has not been treated as credible by the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit. The Western Clique operates in New York State; Abrego Garcia has never lived there.

An ICE official who provided sworn testimony for a government court filing, Robert Cerna, explained the nature of the error that had mistakenly sent Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia’s protected status had not appeared on the flight manifest for the deportations. Cerna said that Abrego Garcia had been listed as an “alternate”—not one of the original passengers—and moved up the list because other detainees had been taken off the manifest. Under oath, Cerna referred to Abrego Garcia’s “purported membership in MS-13,” but he did not describe him as a confirmed gang member, gang leader, or terrorist.

In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal, a protected status that prohibited his deportation to El Salvador. The judge found that, should he return, he would likely be targeted by Barrio 18. Abrego Garcia had arrived in the United States in 2011 to join his older brother, and said that he’d fled the Barrio 18 gang that was extorting his mother’s business.

As DHS attorneys scrambled to respond to the lawsuit late last month, they wanted to minimize the government’s liability by seeking to have Abrego Garcia kept away from the gang. But by Monday, March 31, a week after his family filed suit, the Trump administration’s position had begun to harden. In its court filing, the Justice Department acknowledged that Abrego Garcia had been deported as the result of an “administrative error” but said that the government would not take steps to bring him back, arguing that the federal court could not tell the White House how to conduct foreign affairs. One of the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the brief that acknowledged the Trump administration’s error was subsequently fired for, in the words of Attorney General Pam Bondi, not “vigorously” defending Trump.

Leavitt told reporters that Abrego Garcia was a leader of MS-13 who had engaged in human trafficking. Only a few days earlier, government attorneys had discussed how to keep Abrego Garcia safe until they could bring him back. Now the White House was denouncing him as a “terrorist,” saying that he would never return.

As criticism of that stance spread, and federal courts sided against the administration, Vice President J. D. Vance, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, Bondi, and other top Cabinet officials went on the attack. The White House went from calling Abrego Garcia’s deportation a “clerical error” to insisting that no mistake had been made at all.

Miller, in particular, was determined to use the designation of MS-13 and other criminal groups as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” to supercharge deportations and bypass standard due-process protections. The White House’s evolving position fit the pattern of Trump’s second term, in which his administration has responded to mistakes by shrugging them off and refusing to take corrective action. Miller took charge of the White House’s messaging, castigating reporters who asked about the case. He also cheered on the administration’s escalating standoff with the judicial branch. After the Supreme Court directed U.S. officials on April 10 to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, Miller publicly claimed the opposite: that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the White House because the Court had acknowledged the president’s prerogative in managing foreign affairs. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.)

Abrego Garcia was initially sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)—a mega-prison from which, the Salvadoran government boasts, no one has ever been released back into society—as part of three planeloads of Venezuelan and Salvadoran detainees. He was transferred out of the facility earlier this month, according to Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who was allowed to meet with Abrego Garcia last week at a hotel in San Salvador.

Attorneys for the U.S. government said the Bukele administration has told them that Abrego Garcia is being held at a lower-security facility “in good conditions and in an excellent state of health.”

“With respect to any other communications, disclosing any diplomatic discussions regarding Mr. Abrego Garcia could negatively impact any outcome,” the Justice Department said on Monday in a court filing. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia say the Trump administration has the ability to ask for his return because Washington is paying El Salvador at least $6 million each year to imprison detainees sent by the United States. (Van Hollen said he was told that the amount is $15 million.)

“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy,” Bukele wrote on social media last week, “he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”

Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia’s wife, recently told The Washington Post that she had moved with the couple’s three children to a safe house after DHS posted online a 2021 court document with the family’s address.

Her attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, declined on Wednesday to discuss the agreement with the government, citing the court seal. “We remain focused on bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia home,” he told me in a text message. “We will not rest until he’s brought home.”

This article originally misidentified Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III as the chief judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Wilkinson is a former chief judge and a current member of the court.

The administration is cutting deals with felons, driving out federal prosecutors, and threatening to abandon its criminal case—all to avoid admitting error.

The Trump administration’s long, belabored campaign to prove that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a gang leader, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy—not a wrongfully deported Maryland man—has produced some extraordinary legal maneuvers. The administration fought Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, and eventually brought him back to the United States to slap him with criminal charges it had started investigating after it had already sent him to a foreign prison.

But with that criminal case off to a shaky start, the administration is threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again—this time to a country other than his native El Salvador—because the judge has ordered his release while the trial is pending. Having spent months trying to gather evidence against Abrego Garcia, the administration is suggesting it may walk away from it all by sending him to Mexico, Guatemala, or another nation willing to take him.

The threat of Abrego Garcia’s imminent re-deportation prompted his attorneys to take the extraordinary step today of asking a district court to delay their client’s release and keep him locked up for several more weeks to protect him from ICE. “The irony of this request is not lost on anyone,” his attorneys told the court. “In a just world, he would not seek to prolong his detention further.” The lawyers accused the government of pretending to want Abrego Garcia to face “American justice,” while really only wanting to “convict him in the court of public opinion.”

The head-spinning developments of the past several days add to the administration’s running tab in a case that has challenged its determination to admit no wrongdoing. The case has produced nearly 57,000 pages of documents; ended the Department of Justice careers of one, perhaps two, prosecutors; and prompted the Trump administration to cut deals with convicted felons that protect them from deportation in exchange for testimony.

Some of the most remarkable accommodations appear in the transcript of a June 13 pretrial hearing for Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, where the government is trying to convict him of human smuggling. Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, the government’s lead investigator, the Department of Homeland Security agent Peter Joseph, told the court that his primary cooperating witness—the source of the most damning testimony—is a twice-convicted felon who had been previously deported five times.

Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes, who was presiding over the hearing, did a double take. “Sorry. Deported how many times?” she asked.

Joseph, who confirmed the total, said the cooperator has been moved out of prison to a halfway house and is now awaiting a U.S. work permit. He told the court that a second cooperating witness is seeking similar inducements from the government.

Trump and his top officials have said for months that their mass-deportation campaign would prioritize the swift removal of criminals from the United States. But in its effort to punish Abrego Garcia—who does not have a criminal record—the administration is protecting convicted felons from deportation.

Other costs include ending the 15-year career of a Department of Justice attorney, Erez Reuveni, who filed a whistleblower claim with Congress this week alleging that he had been fired for refusing to go along with unsubstantiated claims, pushed by the White House, that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang leader and a terrorist.

When Reuveni’s superiors told him to sign a legal brief making those claims, he refused, saying he “didn’t sign up to lie” when he became a federal prosecutor. He was suspended seven hours later and fired on April 11.

Reuveni’s career may not be the only DOJ casualty. Another federal prosecutor, Ben Schrader, the head of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville, submitted his resignation last month when the government brought Abrego Garcia there to face charges. Schrader, who declined to comment and has not discussed his departure publicly, wrote in a LinkedIn post that “the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.”

As Reuveni and others have pointed out, ICE officials initially recognized that Abrego Garcia had been deported on March 15 due to an “administrative error.” His removal from the country was in violation of a 2019 order protecting him from being sent to El Salvador, which he fled at age 16, after a U.S. immigration judge found that he was likely to be attacked by gangs. At that point, the Trump administration could have brought Abrego Garcia back and deported him to another country, or reopened his case to try to strip him of his protected status. But Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the White House aide Stephen Miller, and other administration officials dug in and insisted there was no error. They declared that Abrego Garcia would never come back and never go free in the United States. They launched an all-of-government campaign to make the case about his character, not his due-process rights.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement that Abrego Garcia “is a terrorist illegal alien gang member.” Those who defend him “should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really want to side with this heinous illegal criminal,” she said, “simply because they dislike President Trump.”

“If the answer is yes, they need to seek help,” Jackson added. “The American people elected President Trump to hold criminals like Abrego Garcia accountable.”

But as attorneys for the Justice Department put it in a court filing Wednesday: “This is no typical case.”

Not one, but two, overlapping cases will determine Abrego Garcia’s fate. The first is the civil lawsuit that Abrego Garcia’s wife, a U.S. citizen, filed in district court in Maryland in March, which seeks his release.

The Trump administration opened a second case when it brought Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador earlier this month to face criminal charges in Tennessee. The charges stem from a 2022 highway stop in which Abrego Garcia was pulled over in a Chevrolet Suburban by officers who said he’d been driving 70 miles per hour in a 65-miles-per-hour zone. Police said there were nine passengers in the vehicle and no luggage, raising suspicions of smuggling. Abrego Garcia told officers that he was driving construction workers from St. Louis to Maryland on behalf of his boss.

The highway-patrol officers reported the incident to federal authorities, but Abrego Garcia was not charged and was allowed to continue the journey. Police-bodycam footage of the stop was obtained and released by the Trump administration as it called him a “human trafficker” and later alleged, citing unnamed cooperating witnesses, that Abrego Garcia transported thousands of migrants during smuggling trips across the United States as part of a conspiracy dating back to 2016 that earned him roughly $100,000 a year.

Joseph, the Homeland Security investigator, said cooperating witnesses told him more: that Abrego Garcia transported guns and narcotics, that he sexually abused younger female passengers in his care, and that he routinely endangered underage minors, including his own children, whom he left sitting without seat belts on the floor of the vehicle during lengthy trips from Texas to Maryland. The government made its claims to convince Judge Holmes that Abrego Garcia should remain in federal custody while awaiting his criminal trial.

Holmes was not swayed. The defense attorneys representing Abrego Garcia pointed out that the government was relying on stories transmitted through multiple levels of hearsay—claims made outside court, not under oath—by cooperating witnesses seeking some benefit from the government.

“You’ve got agents going to jails and prisons around the United States right now trying to talk to people who you think might know something about Mr. Abrego?” the federal public defender Dumaka Shabazz asked Joseph, the investigator.

“They have done it through the course of the investigation, yes, sir,” Joseph answered.

Shabazz told the court that the first cooperator, “despite all of his deportations, his criminal history, being the criminal mastermind behind a transport business,” was “chilling at the halfway house.”

“He’s not in jail. He’s not getting deported. He’s living his life right here in the United States of America. But he sounds like the exact type of person that this government should be wanting to deport.”

Holmes largely agreed, issuing a decision Sunday denying the government’s attempt to keep Abrego Garcia locked up. Her decision did not seem to bode well for the evidence and testimony the government is preparing against Abrego Garcia.

Holmes said she gave “little weight to this hearsay testimony” of the top cooperating witness, whom she called “a two-time, previously-deported felon, and acknowledged ringleader of a human smuggling operation.” Holmes wrote that she considered the hearsay statements of the second cooperator no more reliable.

Furthermore, she said the testimony and statements “defy common sense,” because she did not believe the claims that Abrego Garcia drove thousands of miles every week with his children—two of whom have autism—sitting on the floor.

Another federal judge in Tennessee decided on Wednesday that Abrego Garcia should not remain in criminal custody. District Court Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw, who is overseeing the criminal case, said that the government had largely failed to prove he was a flight risk or a threat to the community.

The Trump administration made clear that as soon as Abrego Garcia was released, ICE could immediately take him back into custody. Then it played a new card, warning that ICE could try to deport Abrego Garcia before the criminal case goes to trial. By threatening to deport Abrego Garcia again, the government was pressuring his legal team and the judge to agree to his continued detention.

Crenshaw tried to shift responsibility from his courtroom back to the administration, saying that the Justice Department needed to convey its deportation concerns to DHS, which oversees ICE, not him. “If the Government finds this case to be as high priority as it argues here, it is incumbent upon it to ensure that Abrego is held accountable for the charges in the Indictment,” Crenshaw wrote. “If the Department of Justice and DHS cannot do so, that speaks for itself.”

Negotiations over where Abrego Garcia should go next ping-ponged through the courts yesterday, as his lawyers reacted to the administration saying one thing in court and other things in public.

At first, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in Maryland asked the district court to have him transferred there while he awaits the Tennessee criminal trial. “Absent order from this Court, the Government will likely shuttle Abrego Garcia elsewhere,” they wrote.

The attorneys said the government’s public statements “leave little doubt about its plan: remove Abrego Garcia to El Salvador once more.” The last time the government detained Abrego Garcia for deportation, they noted, it sent him to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas, a move they said was part of a “pattern” in which the administration sends detainees to those states in anticipation that the more conservative federal courts in that circuit are likelier to side with the government.

The administration’s position became even more muddled after a Justice Department attorney told the court in Maryland that the administration was indeed planning to deport Abrego Garcia if he’s released from custody but would send him to a country other than El Salvador. Abrego Garcia’s 2019 protections—the ones that the Trump administration violated—prevent his deportation only to El Salvador. The Trump administration has secured agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries around the region to take back deportees from other nations.

Jackson, the White House spokesperson, said on social media last night that the Department of Justice threat to deport Abrego Garcia was “fake news” and that the criminal case in Tennessee would go forward. “He will face the full force of the American justice system - including serving time in American prison for the crimes he’s committed,” Jackson wrote.

In response to the mixed messages and distrust of the government’s intentions, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote today that they would rather keep him in jail than trust the administration not to deport him. “When Mr. Abrego revealed the weaknesses in that case—securing the pretrial release to which he is entitled—the government threatened to remove him to a third country,” they wrote.

Government attorneys said they intend to “see this case to resolution,” a message echoed by White House officials.

But if Abrego Garcia were poised to walk out of detention and reunite with his family as news cameras rolled, those involved know the administration could be tempted to do something drastic, even if it meant ditching their own case.

“Anything is possible,” an attorney who is tracking the case but did not want to be named told me. “It seems clear they are committed to not allowing him to be at liberty during the case.”

Gregory Bovino has taken his aggressive tactics and propaganda videos from the southern border to the streets of California.

In the upper ranks of the Border Patrol, 20 officials have the title of sector chief. Gregory Bovino is the only one holding a gun in his social-media profile photo. Most of the others conform to a pretty standard formula: wearing a crisp green uniform in front of Old Glory and the black-and-green Border Patrol flag.

Bovino’s photo is more like a movie poster, or an AI-generated image of a comic-book character. He stands wearing a bulletproof vest against a black background, holding a tricked-out M4 rifle with a scope in his hands. He isn’t holding the weapon so much as cradling it affectionately, like a cellist getting ready to play. Bovino’s jaw is stiff, and his gaze is distant. Several Customs and Border Protection veterans with whom I spoke—who value the quiet strength of professional modesty—think the photo is ridiculous.

And yet, the performative qualities that have made Bovino a sometimes-mocked figure within CBP are the same ones that have landed him a starring role in the promotion of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. Bovino, whose formal title is chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, has been put in charge of the administration’s immigration crackdown on the streets of Los Angeles, more than 200 miles from his office, which sits near the border. While much of the local anger has been directed at ICE, it’s actually Bovino who’s been calling the shots. The guys in camouflage, masks, and military gear running around Southern California car washes and Home Depot parking lots aren’t Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, but Border Patrol tactical teams trained to hunt drug smugglers in remote mountains and deserts.

When horse-mounted Border Patrol agents rode through MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles with camera crews in tow on July 7, Mayor Karen Bass came rushing to the scene and pleaded with Bovino to call them off. No arrests were made, but the sight of heavily armed federal agents advancing in formation through palm trees and soccer fields was jarring to a city on edge after weeks of raids and protests. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Los Angeles City Council president, told reporters that if Bovino wanted to make Border Patrol promotional videos, he should “apply for a film permit like everybody else” and “stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody.”

“Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon,” Bovino fired back on Fox. On Friday, he released a video—set to the song “DNA” by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is from L.A.—showing National Guard troops and mounted agents parading through the park with an armory of weapons and black masks covering their faces. “People ask for it, we make it happen,” Bovino posted to his government account on X, sounding more like a hype man than a lawman.

At a time when Trump-administration officials have done little to conceal their frustration with ICE leaders, demoting several over the past few months for missing the White House’s ambitious arrest quotas, Bovino’s assignment in California has been viewed by some at ICE as a slight against the agency. Current and former CBP officials told me it was more an indication that the White House wants field generals who will press the president’s deportation goals as aggressively as possible.

During the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents were often overwhelmed and exhausted as record numbers of migrants crossed into the United States. Unlawful entries fell sharply during Joe Biden’s last year in office, but they have plunged in recent months to levels not seen since the 1960s as a result of Trump’s all-out push to seal the border. That has left the Border Patrol’s roughly 19,000 agents with far less work and a lot more time. ICE, under relentless White House pressure to ramp up arrests and deportations, is now the agency that needs help.

Bovino, a 29-year veteran of the Border Patrol, seemed to anticipate the opportunity well before Trump took office. Two weeks before Inauguration Day, he sent dozens of El Centro Border Patrol agents five hours north to Kern County, California, near Bakersfield. Over the course of several days, agents in plainclothes made arrests at gas stations and stopped vehicles along the highway. The surprise tactics sent a wave of fear through the farms of California’s Central Valley, and though Bovino said his agents had targeted criminals, only one of the 78 people they arrested had a criminal conviction, according to records obtained by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. The ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the government in February and won an injunction barring the Border Patrol from racially profiling suspects, and a federal district court found that Bovino’s teams likely violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. (Earlier this month, another federal judge ordered the government to stop racially profiling suspects in Los Angeles.)

Bovino had launched the Kern County expedition, which he called “Operation Return to Sender,” without getting clearance from superiors in Washington, according to CBP officials I spoke with who weren’t authorized to speak to reporters. The raids far from the border were not the kind of operation Biden officials would have endorsed. But those officials were already on their way out, and the Trump team coming in was thrilled with Bovino’s audition.

The Department of Homeland Security did not approve my request to interview Bovino. I sent a list of more than a dozen questions to DHS and CBP, asking about his record in the Border Patrol and why he’s been elevated to his current role. “Because he’s a badass” was all that the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote back.

What Bovino is doing in Los Angeles is a pilot of sorts. It showcases the potential for a broader Border Patrol role in U.S. cities and communities, especially those that have adopted “sanctuary” policies restricting local police cooperation with ICE. By law, the Border Patrol’s ability to conduct warrantless searches is limited to within 100 miles of the nation’s international boundaries. But that includes maritime borders, and roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, including the country’s largest metropolitan areas, fits within those boundaries.

ICE has only about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers nationwide, and though the president’s tax-and-immigration bill includes funds to hire thousands more, recruiting, hiring, and training them will likely take at least a year. The Border Patrol has idle agents who are ready to go now.

Border Patrol agents generally have less experience than their ICE counterparts with the procedural elements of civil immigration enforcement in urban environments. Video clips went viral last month showing a masked Border Patrol team pummeling Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and the father of three U.S. Marines, as the agents arrested him outside an IHOP in Santa Ana. Viewers were shocked, but the tactics used were not out of line with the way agents often handle migrants who try to run or resist arrest near the border. (The Department of Homeland Security justified the use of force and claimed that Barranco had tried to “mow” them with his trimming tool.) The difference this time was that the arrest occurred on the streets of a U.S. city, not out in the desert with no one watching.

During the past five and a half years in El Centro, which covers southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, Bovino has repeatedly insisted that he oversees the “premier sector” of the Border Patrol. It’s a facetious claim. El Centro is not considered a top-tier CBP assignment like El Paso or San Diego, where there’s a lot more smuggling activity.

“It's the type of sector where someone would usually be chief for a couple years and then move on to a larger sector,” one former DHS official told me. Bovino’s long tenure in El Centro without a promotion points to a lack of confidence from senior CBP leaders, the official and three former CBP officials said. DHS declined to respond.

Border Patrol chiefs have always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from Washington regarding day-to-day operations, but they aren’t supposed to make partisan statements in uniform or criticize elected officials in the states where they work. During Biden’s term, Bovino was the chief who created the most consternation among CBP officials at headquarters because of his outspoken conservative views and social-media enthusiasm, current and former DHS and CBP officials told me.

“He has done things that Border Patrol leadership has had to spend time cleaning up, such as posting information that was law-enforcement-sensitive on social media, which can hamper broader law-enforcement operations,” said the former DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal disciplinary actions.

But the contentious relationship Bovino had with his superiors during those years has only bolstered his standing among Trump-aligned border hawks. As El Centro chief, Bovino became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP.

During the first Trump administration, the Border Patrol launched its own public-relations operation—the Strategic Communications division, or StratComm—to give rank-and-file agents a bigger role in touting their work, improving the agency’s reputation and boosting recruitment. Many of the videos emphasized Border Patrol humanitarian efforts and rescues of distressed migrants in remote areas, or the benevolent serve-and-protect image of agents and officials attending parades and community events.

Bovino has taken StratComm messaging in a different direction. In September 2020, soon after he took command in El Centro, his social-media team released “The Gotaway,” a fictionalized video showing a migrant sneaking into the United States and murdering the first person he encounters. The video caused an uproar, and the Border Patrol temporarily took it down, as lawmakers demanded to know why agents were spending time making movies. (One former CBP official told me El Centro benefited from the talents of two agents who had taken filmmaking courses before signing up for the Border Patrol).

Bovino has had legal problems as well. In 2022, a federal judge in Louisiana rejected DHS’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two Black Border Patrol employees who claimed discrimination when Bovino became sector chief in New Orleans. The two were finalists for the second-ranking position in New Orleans in April 2018 when Bovino abruptly canceled the job listing and used a transfer process to hire his close friend, a white Border Patrol official. The court found an email from the friend that compared Bovino to a Confederate general and the New Orleans office to a unit of Black Union soldiers. “Oh jeez. DELETE!!!!” Bovino replied.

The exchange raised “concerns of racial animus” in the hiring process, the judge wrote. DHS settled the case.

In 2023, Bovino landed at the center of a partisan fight in Congress when Biden officials blocked him from testifying during a Republican-led investigation of the administration’s border policies. Top Republicans sent a letter to CBP claiming Bovino had been silenced and retaliated against when he was temporarily reassigned to a desk job in Washington. Rodney Scott, the current commissioner of CBP and the former Border Patrol chief, was one of Bovino’s most ardent defenders.

Bovino returned to El Centro, his social-media enthusiasm undiminished. He published holiday-themed videos, including hokey parodies of Home Alone and A Christmas Story. The old serve-and-protect messaging was out in favor of guns, ATVs, and tactical teams kicking ass to heavy metal and thumping bass tracks.

More recently, the messaging has turned messianic. A CPB video circulated this month by the Department of Homeland Security embodies a new synthesis of high-paced action with Christian-nationalist themes. The video, “Bible Verse,” opens with a monologue by the actor Shia LaBeouf, lifted from the World War II movie Fury, in which a soldier prepares his comrades to fight the Nazis with a stirring passage from the Book of Isaiah about answering the call of God. The song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays to stylized, washed-out footage of Border Patrol tactical agents zooming around in helicopters and speedboats.

The video has nearly 3 million views on X, and as a work of pure propaganda, it’s the most engrossing CBP video I’ve ever seen. But former DHS and CBP officials I shared it with recoiled at the underlying message that Border Patrol agents are delivering holy vengeance.

The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which performed the song in the video, sent a cease-and-desist warning to the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s obvious that you don’t respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution,” the band wrote, adding: “Oh, and go f… yourselves.”

I have gotten to know at least a dozen Border Patrol sector chiefs during the decade I’ve spent reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. The chiefs are police commanders, but they are also politicians. They tend to value the same skills required of any good leader: smooth public speaking, personal decorum, equanimity under pressure. They are not especially impressed by guns or social-media posting, and they dislike anything that elevates individual flash over institutional traditions.

Much of the job of the Border Patrol is mundane and uneventful; it consists of sitting alone in a truck and watching “the line” for hours on end in case anyone or anything potentially threatening comes across. There are periodic moments of action, especially when smuggling activity increases, but fewer now that the border is so locked down.

Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border-policy official during the Biden administration, told me that Democrats have at times been too reluctant to let the Border Patrol trumpet its work stopping actual threats and capturing dangerous criminals. The stressful, tedious work agents perform while processing record numbers of asylum seekers is not meant to be their primary job, Nuñez-Neto said.

"The Border Patrol's job should focus on detecting and preventing the entry of people who may present a threat to our security, not serving as the entry point for the asylum system,” he said. “We should have an organized, safe, and orderly process for people who want to claim asylum that doesn’t involve distracting the people who work between ports of entry from doing their core mission.”

The Trump administration’s social-media messaging has become extreme and dehumanizing, Nuñez-Neto said, but he understands Bovino’s push to make the job look exciting and heroic.

The former DHS official I spoke with told me he is concerned that Bovino’s hard-charging approach will ultimately hurt recruitment, even if it’s popular among the most gung-ho agents.

“They’re going to end up with a growing recruitment challenge, because the people that they will be attracting are not actually the people that they will need to do the unglamorous work,” the former official told me. “And most law-enforcement work is unglamorous work.”

Bovino, now with a bigger stage, has continued making the work look as glamorous as possible as he and his team move from Los Angeles to other parts of California. He released another video Thursday, this one set to Kanye West’s “Power” and showing his agents rolling into Sacramento and chasing people through a Home Depot parking lot. “There is no such thing as a sanctuary state,” Bovino says to the camera, his thumbs tucked in his belt in the style of an Old West sheriff. Tear-gas canisters dangle from his vest like hand grenades. “This is how and why we secure the homeland,” Bovino says. “For Ma and Pa America: We’ve got your backs.”

Push-ups, sit-ups, and a brisk jog pose a threat to Trump’s deportation campaign.