Gregory Bovino is indisputably a man of the political times, perfectly in harmony with the signature theme of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
A previously unheralded regional border patrol agent, Bovino, 55, has risen to prominence in recent weeks as the publicity-hungry spearhead of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented people in Los Angeles.
Amid howls of disapproval from elected Democratic officials, Bovino and squads of Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents have embarked on aggressive, gun-toting patrols that have netted thousands of arrests, often carried out with little more justification than that detainees are Spanish-speakers or appear to be Latino.
Masked agents have smashed car windows, blown open a door to a house and staged an intimidating horseback patrol in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park in the service of detaining those suspected of being in the US without documentation.
Bovino, a 29-year CBP veteran who formally heads the border patrol’s El Centro sector in southern California, has trumpeted the operations in a series of videos posted on social media and depicting his team’s work in scenes resembling action films. Put together by a team of agents employed specially for the purpose, the productions seems tailor-made to appeal to the president’s renowned taste for visual imagery.
Now his attention-grabbing approach is set to draw further scrutiny after he arrived in Chicago this past week to lead an offensive targeting immigrants in a city Trump has labelled “the most dangerous in the world”.
Related: US immigration officers ramp up sweeps in LA after raid restrictions are lifted
Bovino, distinguished by his spiky hairstyle that he keeps closely cropped at the sides, has also been tapped to lead a similar expected drive in Boston as part of the White House’s assault on Democratic-run so-called sanctuary cities, where officials decline to cooperate with Trump’s mass deportations.
Situated about 2,000 miles (3,200km) from the headquarters of Bovino’s El Centro bailiwick, the Chicago mission represents – like Los Angeles – a drastically different urban landscape to the rural setting he and his agents are used to, posing potentially high risks, experienced law enforcement officers say.
“Border patrol is trained and at their most effective on the border or within 25 miles of the border,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who was the CBP commissioner during Barack Obama’s presidency and a former chief of police in Seattle.
“They are not trained in policing a city like Chicago or Los Angeles or Boston [and] they are clearly in the wrong venue. To police an urban environment takes really special skills. They work with senior officers to understand the community they serve.
“They don’t get parachuted in to Los Angeles or other cities marching to some type of rock music.”
That was a reference to some of Bovino’s self-promotional videos, portraying his unit on maneuvers in Los Angeles to a soundtrack of heavy metal music.
Another video depicts El Centro with a Star Wars theme, with Darth Vader slaying a list of foes that are popular Trump targets, including “fentanyl”, “invasion”, “fake news” and “sanctuary cities”.
Those themes, critics say, are out of character for border patrol chiefs, who generally adopt a neutral tone, and suggest that Bovino is signaling to Trump.
In a recent interview with a local California television station, Bovino declared himself “apolitical”. His actions and statements suggest otherwise.
Last month, he and his agents seemed to deliberately court controversy by patrolling outside a rally staged by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who has frequently sparred publicly with Trump on migration and other issues. The event was unconnected with immigration.
These remarks are really unheard of, but he’s playing to an audience of one and we’ve seen that before
Gil Kerlikowske, former CBP commissioner
“We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that,” Bovino said at the time.
Newsom branded the appearance “sick and pathetic”, dismissing Bovino’s claim that he did not initially know the governor was inside the building.
Bovino also clashed with Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, over the MacArthur Park patrol in July, an event local officials condemned as triggering unnecessary panic in a popular leisure space.
He justified the patrol by calling the park “the birthplace of MS-13”, an international criminal gang.
“That’s not their park. That’s Ma and Pa America’s Park,” he said.
He has dismissed Democrats’ criticism that the raids are targeting people seeking work to feed their families rather than criminals has likewise been dismissed as “uninformed” and “wishful thinking”.
“Those individuals come in, they may have a criminal history in their home country,” he said. “So, I don’t feel bad.”
He went on: “There’s something here that Bass and and the governor and the other folks haven’t seemed to touch on, [which] is look at the professionalism of DHS [Department of Homeland Security ] entities in our allied law enforcement agencies. Very few, if any, civilians hurt.”
In fact, the New York Times reported, two undocumented people have died trying to flee Bovino’s agents. A Mexican farm worker fell from a greenhouse and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle following a raid at Home Depot.
In another episode, the paper reported, they detained a disabled 15-year-old high school student in a case of mistaken identity after drawing their guns and handcuffing him, leaving unfired bullets on the ground.
The Trump administration appears untroubled by such incidents.
In fact, Bovino appears to have been signaling his readiness to serve Trump’s cause even before he returned to the presidency.
On 7 January, nearly two week’s before Trump’s inauguration, Bovino led a sweep of suspected undocumented people in Kern county, hundreds of miles north of El Centro’s border headquarters.
Bovino said his team had a list of targets, including many with criminal records, before embarking on the operation, codenamed Return to Sender. Over three days, agents detained laborers and farm workers in raids on a Home Depot car park, a convenience store, and along a main road between orchards that employed fruit pickers.
Some 78 arrests were made of people Bovino claimed had criminal records. But in an investigation, CalMatters reported that only one of those detained had a prior record with the Border Patrol agency. In an interview, Bovino made it clear that his definition of criminality included entering the US without proper documentation.
Trump’s incoming administration may have been impressed with the disdain for fine distinctions – and with Bovino’s willingness to target immigrant workplaces.
Related: Plane to purgatory: how Trump’s deportation program shuttles immigrants into lawless limbo
In May, berating senior Ice officials to intensify their arrest activity, Stephen Miller, Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff – who has spearheaded much of the White House’s immigration policy behind the scenes – urged them to target Home Depot and 7-Eleven convenience stores, in the manner of Bovino’s raid.
Now, bolstered by a US supreme court interim decision that allows immigration operations to continue using what critics say is racial profiling – and which a lower federal court had earlier ruled unconstitutional – Bovino’s star may rise higher still.
Kerlikowske, the former CBP commissioner, said his statements appeared to be fueled by a desire to win Trump’s favour.
“Everyone I’ve ever worked with at federal law enforcement level would pride themselves on working cooperatively with state and local officials, not making statements that local officials aren’t protecting you, or ‘we don’t answer to local officials,’” said Kerlikowske, who added that he would have relived Bovino of his duties over the MacArthur Park episode.
“These remarks are really unheard of, but he’s playing to an audience of one and we’ve seen that before. He’d very much like to become the chief of the border patrol, and there’s no better way to do that than to get the favor of the president in the United States.”
Responding an emailed inquiry from the Guardian as to why Bovino had been chosen for missions in cities far removed from his normal purview and what his goals were, a homeland security department spokesperson responded: “Stay tuned.” There was no additional comment.
