How Greg Bovino Proved Too Openly Fascistic for Trump |
One German outlet wrote that Bovino looked like “he had taken a photo of [assassinated Nazi] Ernst Röhm to the barber.”Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty
Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol “commander-at-large” who terrorized people across America in his Nazi-like trench coat, is being put out to pasture by President Donald Trump. The cause was Bovino’s stupidity, not his cruelty.
After his Border Patrol agents disarmed and killed Alex Pretti in broad daylight on Saturday, Bovino shamelessly slandered the 37-year-old nurse only to have his lies immediately and irrefutably exposed by numerous videos of the killing.
Instead of leading his band of masked agents from city to city, Bovino is now returning to his original role as the head of California’s not particularly busy El Centro border sector. The Atlantic reports that the 55-year-old is expected to soon retire. In place of Bovino, Trump has sent his border “czar” and first-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan to Minneapolis. Unlike Bovino, who had an unusual arrangement in which he reported to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instead of his immediate supervisors, Trump has said that Homan will answer directly to him.
It is worth stressing what Bovino got away with before Trump shoved him aside. In Los Angeles, Bovino and his gang occupied the city like an invading army, marching through MacArthur Park as a public relations stunt and pulling people off the street in obvious spasms of racial profiling that led to Trump’s Supreme Court explicitly legitimizing stops based on skin color.
In Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez multiple times while she was in her car. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” Exum later bragged in a text message. “Put that in your book, boys.” (Martinez survived the shooting and is now asking a judge to release evidence from a now abandoned federal case against her.)
In November, Sara Ellis, a federal judge for the........