From California to Chicago, a Border Patrol boss sparks accusations of race-based arrests

On the morning of Jan. 7, Jesús Ramírez and other day laborers huddled in a Home Depot parking lot in Bakersfield, California, hoping for work.

Suddenly, they were surrounded by U.S. Homeland Security vehicles.

One agent demanded Ramírez show his papers. When he pulled out his wallet, the agent “snatched” it and took his ID without asking questions, Ramírez said.

“It was clear to me the agents did not know who I was,” Ramírez, 64, said in a court filing translated from Spanish. “They did not show me any document or have a warrant for me.”

He was among 78 people arrested during an immigration enforcement mission, “Operation Return to Sender,” carried out less than two weeks before Donald Trump returned to the White House.

Its leader? U.S. Border Patrol veteran Gregory Bovino, who’s using the same playbook to head a Trump administration deportation blitz that’s now spreading tension and fear across the Chicago area.

In January, Border Patrol agents traveled about 300 miles from a sleepy area near the border with Mexico to California’s Central Valley, where they arrested Ramírez and other laborers and farmworkers during traffic stops and outside the Home Depot. Nearly all were Latino.

Ramírez was placed on a bus with dozens of people and driven six hours south to a detention center close to the border. He remained there for weeks, even though he’d explained to agents he was a widower with two kids. A nonprofit group bailed him out and his case remains pending.

A federal lawsuit filed in February claimed the border patrol mission was tainted by race-based stops and warrantless arrests, prompting a judge’s order temporarily barring border agents from unlawfully detaining and arresting people in the Eastern District of California.

The government appealed last month, arguing the order is unnecessary because the Border Patrol issued directives about making lawful stops and arrests and committed to training 900 employees on constitutional enforcement.

By then, Bovino was long gone.

On Sept. 16, after raids in Los Angeles and Sacramento, Bovino took to social media to trumpet his arrival in Chicago — where civil rights attorneys say in a court filing his agents are “taking an equally aggressive, cavalier and unlawful approach to enforcement.”

Border Patrol agents deployed in the Chicago area have kicked in doors in raids. They’ve targeted protesters with tear gas, pepper balls and stun grenades. They also shot a woman accused of sideswiping their vehicle on the Southwest Side.

Bovino is the face of the operation, sometimes the only identifiable federal agent among dozens hiding their visage with a mask. Wearing a green Border Patrol jacket and sporting a high-and-tight spiky hairdo, he led his heavily armed crew on a Chicago River boat ride and personally tussled with demonstrators at an immigrant holding center.

His exploits have been captured in Hollywood-style videos posted on social media to further the agency’s narrative.

As he took his agents on a roving patrol through the Downtown area Sept. 28, Bovino made this admission to WBEZ: They were targeting passersby for arrests based partly on “how they look.”

Michelle García, deputy legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, said the Border Patrol’s approach hasn’t changed since the April 29 court order in California — despite the agency’s commitment to training its agents.

“It’s all the same people," Garcia said. "They’re using the same tactics because it’s intended to scare people. It’s intended to terrorize people.”

Disloyal to Biden or victim of retaliation?

Bovino has worked for the Border Patrol since 1996 and was the chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector headquartered near the Mexico border in California. The North Carolina native held the same role in the New Orleans sector, where he directed operations across the coastline of seven states and helped lead federal drug and terrorism task forces.

In July 2023, Republican congressional leaders raised alarms when Bovino was stripped of his command after sitting for an interview with two committees about President Joe Biden’s management of the border.

Republican leaders said he was reinstated the next month.

Bovino launched “Return to Sender,” the mission to California’s Central Valley earlier this year, without approval from the Biden administration, the Atlantic magazine reported.

Bovino, 55, has now emerged as a key figure in Trump’s second term with his immigration enforcement campaigns in Los Angeles and Chicago. Left in his wake are lawsuits the courts are working to untangle even as he continues to carry out the largest, most aggressive deportation effort in generations.

Bovino’s legal wake

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompasses California and eight other states, is weighing whether to uphold the order blocking the Border Patrol from making warrantless arrests and stops without having reasonable suspicion the targeted person is in the country illegally.

Government lawyers argued in a Sept. 26 appeal that the judge who signed the order, Jennifer L. Thurston, erred “in issuing a sweeping, districtwide injunction” in response to “Return to Sender.”

The lawyers pointed to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said federal agents could continue to stop people based on factors such as race and language.

The 6-3 majority didn’t explain itself, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh issued a controversial concurrence that found “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but can be a “relevant factor.”

Legal experts say the practices the lower federal court in California ruled were unlawful are now being used across the Chicago area.

“You can’t go a day without looking at your phone and seeing a video of some family member being stopped [and] pulled out of their car,” the ACLU's García said.

Top aide: Violence surpasses L.A.

Border Patrol officials didn’t respond to requests to interview Bovino. But in a sworn statement this month in another federal court case in Chicago, Bovino’s right-hand man, Daniel Parra, said the roughly 200 agents who were deployed from the border to Chicago have faced “escalating hostility and violence from rioters and other individuals in Chicago and nationwide” — the worst he’s seen in 23 years.

“The violence I have seen is quickly eclipsing the violence I saw in Los Angeles,” Parra said in a written statement as the Trump administration defends itself against an Illinois lawsuit seeking to prevent the use of National Guard troops.

One of the examples he cited was a man charged recently in federal court with offering $10,000 for someone to kill Bovino.

U.S. District Judge April Perry, the Chicago judge overseeing the National Guard case, has cast doubt on how immigration officials like Parra view the situation on the ground in the Chicago area, asserting that the Trump administration’s “perception of events” is "simply unreliable."

Chicago has long been a legal battleground for disputes over immigration enforcement tactics.

In 2018, the ACLU sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a sister agency to the Border Patrol, for stopping people based on racial profiles and making warrantless arrests in “Operation Keep Safe,” which targeted more than 100 people. The suit led to a 2022 settlement, known as the Margarito Castañon Nava consent decree, which restricted ICE’s ability to make warrantless arrests in Illinois and surrounding states.

But the ACLU said ICE resumed such arrests in January after Trump returned to power. So it has gone to court seeking to extend the consent decree’s duration.

In recent filings, the ACLU has pointed to a dramatic escalation in tactics following Bovino’s arrival in Chicago — similar to those used in California. A week ago, a federal judge in Chicago found that ICE agents had arrested 22 people without a warrant in violation of the Castañon Neva order. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings extended the court order to February 2026.

Bovino on the front lines

Chicago is one of the Trump administration’s biggest stages for photo ops.

On Oct. 3, Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood on the roof of an ICE processing facility in Broadview, looking over a crowd of nearly 100 protesters as news cameras recorded it all.

The facility has become a hot spot for tense clashes between protesters and federal agents.

Juan Muñoz, an Oak Park township trustee, was part of what he called a “generally peaceful” crowd of protesters on Oct. 3.

The mood changed when Bovino arrived and marched toward the demonstrators with more than a dozen masked agents and a large military vehicle, according to Muñoz, who said Bovino then gave a “vague order.”

“It was disorganized, people were unsure what the instruction was — where to be, where to move back to,” Muñoz said. “It felt like they didn’t have the purpose of creating security. They were just creating chaos.”

He said he saw Bovino right behind him.

“He grabbed me by the shoulder, pulled me to the ground and told me, ‘You’re under arrest,’ ” Muñoz said.

Muñoz said he and about a dozen others were taken to the Broadview parking lot. At one point, Noem pulled up to take a look at them all, Muñoz said.

They were brought to a cell inside the holding center, where each was questioned by FBI agents, Muñoz said. His lawyer wasn’t allowed in the building.

Muñoz said he told the authorities that he is an elected official but still was fingerprinted by ICE. Eight hours later, federal agents put the protesters into a van, drove them to a nearby gas station and let them go.

Muñoz said coming face to face with Bovino and Noem gave him better perspective.

“Before, they were just this image that they’ve created, this fear campaign that he’s put on, the rhetoric that she continues to just espouse,” he said. “And honestly it felt like they were more human, weaker than what they’ve painted themselves to be.”