Top deportation goon gets ejected from Minnesota

On Monday, the mad king Donald Trump cried uncle in Minneapolis, uncharacteristically making nice with Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and, for the first time since taking office, appearing to de-escalate his war on Democratic-run cities.

By Monday evening, The Atlantic’s Mick Miroff reported that Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino wasn’t merely being sent out of Minnesota, he was being fully demoted, with his entire social media operation dismantled.

“Bovino became a MAGA social-media star as he traveled the country with his own film crew and used social media to hit back at Democratic politicians and random critics online,” reported Miroff. “Veteran ICE and CBP officials grew more and more uneasy as Bovino worked outside his agency’s chain of command and appeared to relish his role as a political actor.”

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There is zero chance Trump cared about any official unease. What likely enraged him was how catastrophically he and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem handled the aftermath of the Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti. The lies that followed were so brazen and clumsy that even many Republicans struggled to defend them. That list, apparently, included Trump himself.

And the fallout may not stop with Bovino. Miroff reported that Noem and her close adviser Corey Lewandowski, Bovino’s biggest backers inside DHS, are now themselves at risk of losing their jobs. One can only hope.

The demotion also follows Miroff’s reporting from Saturday detailing deepening recruitment and training problems inside Border Patrol and ICE, problems that the Minneapolis operation has only made worse.

“One ICE official I spoke with told me that some of the new hires, especially rehired retirees, are having second thoughts,” Miroff wrote. “Hundreds of the returning officers have been ordered to Minnesota, two officials said, where the administration is conducting the largest-ever DHS crackdown. Some officers have been so cold and miserable that they’ve already quit, and ICE officials have held calls to figure out how to deal with the sudden resignations.”

But the problem isn’t just the weather. Previous administrations were capable of deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records without laying siege to entire cities. What’s changed is the job itself.

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“Returning officers who have come back from retirement are finding themselves in unfamiliar roles,” Miroff reported. “They spent much of their careers trying to conduct low-key ‘targeted enforcement’ operations in which they planned arrests in advance and sought to take suspects into custody in the safest and least dramatic way possible. Now they’re out in the streets wearing masks, with protesters yelling at them and video cameras rolling. ICE has changed, and the job isn’t the same.”

ICE and Border Patrol have certainly changed. Defenders will argue that this is just a temporary deviation, that these agencies can be restored to their prior norms under a future administration. Maybe that will be true someday. But it won’t be easy, because Trump and his allies didn’t just politicize these agencies, they actively selected the worst people to staff them.

Who else willingly signs up to terrorize fellow Americans while hiding behind masks, basking in confrontation as crowds scream in their faces? It takes a particular kind of damaged psyche to want that job. And as countless videos have shown, many of these people don’t just tolerate it, they revel in it.

That rot can’t be reformed away. It has to be torn out. The entire structure needs to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch, with everyone who participated in this era barred from future government service.

But that reckoning can wait. For now, good riddance to Bovino. If luck holds, he’s gone for good.

Noem should be next. Perhaps she’ll spare herself the humiliation and resign before Trump does what he always does in the end: making sure loyalty is a one-way street.

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