Who is Greg Bovino, the face of Trump’s Minneapolis crackdown? 

Gregory Bovino, the senior Border Patrol commander who has been leading the federal immigration enforcement effort in Minneapolis, is being moved out of the city, according to reports quoting anonymous sources.

His expected exit comes amid intense scrutiny of the federal crackdown, following two recent fatal shootings involving immigration agents who shot dead protester Renee Nicole Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the city earlier this month.

Here is what we know:

Who is Greg Bovino?

For seven months, Bovino has been a key figure in an immigration crackdown by the United States government.

He drew national attention last summer after helping lead a large operation in Los Angeles that led to more than 5,000 arrests. Since then, he has overseen similar enforcement actions in several Democratic-led cities, including Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans and now Minneapolis.

Alongside his work in the field, Bovino has built a strong public profile, often sharing videos from operations and using social media to promote his agents and respond to critics, a style that has made him highly visible and controversial.

In Minneapolis, videos of him walking down the streets in a long, green military commander-style coat, shouting at protesters to move out of the way, have drawn comparisons to a “fascist” aesthetic, including from some German commentators.

In Minneapolis, Bovino became the most visible federal official during Operation Metro Surge, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) effort that led to intense controversy after two fatal shootings – first of Good earlier in January, and later of Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by Border Patrol agents.

In the aftermath of Pretti’s shooting, Bovino defended the agents’ actions, claiming Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement”.

“The fact that they’re highly trained prevented any specific shootings of law enforcement, so good job for our law enforcement in taking him down before he was able to do that,” Bovino told CNN.

Witnesses, local officials and Pretti’s family have challenged that account, saying he was holding a phone, not a weapon, at the time he was shot.

Bovino was born in California in March 1970 and raised in North Carolina.

His interest in law enforcement took shape early. In an interview last year, Bovino’s sister, Natalie, recalled how strongly he reacted to the television series The Border, which focused on the US Border Patrol.

“Greg was so psyched because he loved the toughness and the values of all these old-timers,” she said, according to a report by the British outlet The Times of London.

“Then he watched it, and the Border Patrol person was a criminal. Greg came home totally pissed about it. Since then, he was like, ‘Dude, I want to do Border Patrol.’”

According to a report by the Chicago Sun-Times, Bovino’s father, Mike Bovino, was involved in a fatal crash in 1981, killing a young woman after “drunkenly crashing his truck head-on into her car.”

Court records show the judge ordered Mike Bovino to serve time in state prison “for treatment of his alcoholism”. He was jailed for four months, and according to the report, the lawsuit forced the sale of the family’s bar and the property it sat on. Greg’s mother, Betty Bovino, later filed for divorce, gaining custody of the couple’s three children as part of the settlement.

Bovino joined the US Border Patrol in 1996, beginning his career in El Paso, Texas, a key hub for border enforcement.

Over the next decade, he moved into senior leadership roles across the southwest, including Arizona and California, and New Orleans in the southeast.

More recently, Bovino has become one of the most recognisable faces of US immigration enforcement, following Trump’s return to the White House.

Was Bovino fired?

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin denied rumours that Bovino had been fired,  saying in a post on X that: “Chief Gregory Bovino has NOT been relieved of his duties.”

Nevertheless, Bovino is now no longer leading ICE’s activities in Minnesota.

Instead, US President Donald Trump has deputed Tom Homan, his so-called “border czar”, to take charge of the crackdown on immigrants in the midwestern state.

A longtime US immigration official with more than four decades of experience in border and immigration enforcement, the 64-year-old Homan became a key figure during the Barack Obama administration, leading ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit. That branch of ICE is responsible for finding people with deportation orders and removing them from the country.

In 2015, when Obama was president, Homan received a Presidential Rank Award, one of the highest honours for senior civil servants.

According to reports, he was at his retirement party in January 2017 when Trump’s then-choice for homeland security secretary, John Kelly, asked him to stay at ICE. Homan accepted, after taking a weekend to think about the offer, and became a leading figure in the first Trump administration through four tumultuous years.

Under Obama, the US carried out 432,000 deportations in 2013, the highest annual total since records were kept – until 2025. Deportations under the first Trump administration never topped 350,000. But in December 2025, the DHS announced that the Trump administration had deported more than 600,000 people in his first 11 months back in office, while another 2.5 million people had “self-deported” – voluntarily fled the country. As a result, the US, for the first time in decades, had net negative immigration in 2025.

Homan, who Trump hired to oversee border security in his second term, has been central to the administration’s crackdown on immigrants. Now, with the Minnesota appointment, the ambit of his role has been widened – to controversial ICE actions far from the southern border.

“I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight,” Trump wrote on Monday on Truth Social. “He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me,” the president added.

What is Homan’s stance on immigration?

When he was appointed border tsar, Homan was widely viewed as a figure who not only shared Trump’s hardline views but also brought extensive hands-on experience in immigration enforcement and policy.

Homan portrays undocumented immigration as black and white and has made no apologies for Trump’s policy of targeting everyone in the country without proper documentation.

“If you’re in the country illegally, you should be concerned,” he said in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press news agency. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Just like if I go speeding down the highway, are you worried about getting a ticket? If you lie on your taxes, are you worried about an audit?”

But Homan himself has been accused of illegalities – in September 2024, he was reportedly recorded accepting a bag containing $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents. Homan and the Trump White House have denied the accusations, but the administration has so far not explained what happened to the cash.