One Bovino After Another

After a disastrous tenure in Minneapolis, and flailing attempts to assail murdered victims of his occupying force that only made the situation worse, Customs and Border Protection “commander-at-large” Gregory K. Bovino is now being ordered home with his tail between his legs. Thanks to a classic Trump reversal in the face of widespread public outcry at CBP and ICE operations in the city, border czar Tom Homan will take Bovino’s place. Bovino himself may soon retire, according to The Atlantic; even his social media accounts have been taken away.

Bovino, a border patrol officer for 30 years, previously served as a chief in the backwater sector of El Centro, California. But after taking a high-profile role as tactical commander for a mass raid in Los Angeles last June, he has become a walking avatar for Trump’s immigration blitzes in Chicago and Minneapolis. Bovino has cultivated the image of shock troop general, storming through urban centers with a four-man-deep escort cloaked in a suspiciously German trench coat. Until this week, Trump administration officials had further raised Bovino’s profile with claims that he is the target of cartel assassination attempts, a fabrication that disintegrated in federal court last week. 

But while the coverage of Bovino has largely focused on his love of tear gas and steadfast support of immigration officers who carried out the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, he also exhibits a striking number of similarities to Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, the fictional villain of the Oscar-nominated Paul Thomas Anderson film One Battle After Another. 

A Mutual Association With Confederate Generals

In the film, Col. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn (who received a Best Supporting Actor nomination), is promoted in rank and receives “The Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor” after a successful operation against the fictional left-wing terrorist group French 75. The medal is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader turned confederate general who would go on to hold the title of first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Before his ascension as the face of American immigration enforcement, Bovino was himself embroiled in a discrimination suit that was ultimately settled by the Department of Homeland Security in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. The origin of the discrimination suit was Bovino’s alleged efforts to manipulate the CBP hiring process to bar the hiring of qualified Black and Latino agents into senior supervisory roles. 

According to allegations in the lawsuit, brought by Jon Joyner and eventually followed by other CBP employees seeking remedy for discrimination, Bovino canceled a job posting and then surreptitiously hired a white supervisor into the role over a number of other qualified applicants. Court records show that during the hiring process, the man Bovino selected for a senior role, Christopher Bullock, wrote that Bovino was like a confederate general, set to liberate a fort from Black union soldiers.  

When Bovino received the email, he immediately responded “Oh jeez, DELETE!!!!!” but did not reprimand Bullock for sending the racially charged email or inquire why he had sent it. During a deposition, Bullock testified that he sent the email to Bovino because Bovino was a “history buff” who would think the email was funny. Mr. Bullock admitted that the emails were inappropriate and agreed that someone could look at the email and find it to be racially charged. 

Bovino acknowledged that the email was not appropriate and described it as “bogus,” “worthless,” and a waste of government resources, but stopped short of describing it as racially motivated. He also claimed that the email did not warrant further action, even though Bullock was later investigated and formally reprimanded for sending the message. 

Secret Passwords

A running gag in One Battle After Another concerns Leonardo Dicaprio’s character’s inability to remember the secret passwords used to communicate with members of his terror cell. After years of drug use, his efforts to get through to his comrades using an operator line set up by French 75 fall flat after he biffs a password sequence multiple times. 

All of this is relevant given the passwords of email accounts associated with Bovino’s name and home address. The passwords were leaked on the dark web and aggregated by multiple data breach scrapers which are available to the public. One password is the word Redbone combined with numbers. This could refer alternatively to a ’70s rock band, slang for light-skinned Black woman, or the Childish Gambino hit of the same name. Another password appears to be a misspelling of the word Sepuku, or japanese ritualized suicide. 

In the film, the password sequence to unlock contact with the renegade group is a sequence from the poet Gil Scott-Heron:

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction
Will no longer be so damn relevant
And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane
On Search for Tomorrow
Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day
The revolution will not be televised

Whether Bovino’s passwords are as politically charged remains unclear. CBP did not immediately respond as to the meaning of his passwords, or whether he had taken steps to secure his personal email accounts.  

Border Control On The Silver Screen 

Furthering the question of whether Bovino may have borrowed tactics, his haircut, or his general attitude from Sean Penn’s character is his love of actors carrying out immigration enforcement operations onscreen. In an interview with a fellow CBP employee, Bovino said that it was the depiction of border patrol officers in a movie produced by a family member that made him want to enlist in the first place. 

“I had a distant family member that was involved in the production of The Border with Jack Nicholson,” Bovino told an interview in 2021 on a CBP YouTube channel. “It was actually my great-uncle Neil Hartley, he was a producer who produced the movie, and we all know what that movie was about. So I thought maybe I’d get a little bit on the other side and take it back the other way. So it got me interested in the Border Patrol.”

Hartley was indeed a producer on The Border, along with several other films from director Tony Richardson, including the sex comedy The Hotel New Hampshire.

For those unfamiliar with the 1982 film, The Border follows an immigration officer who moves to Texas with his wife and racks up a massive credit bill furnishing their duplex. When it comes time to settle the bill, Charlie Smith (Jack Nicholson) becomes involved in a human trafficking operation, before killing its ringleader because he is selling babies, which crosses an internal red line. 

On Monday, it seemed as though Bovino’s antics, which some credit for escalating violence in Minneapolis, had fallen out of favor with the president. Worried at the raging response to footage showing the unarmed killing of Alex Pretti, Trump signaled he is attempting to descalate, scaling back immigration efforts in the city, and sending Gregory Bovino back El Centro, near the hilly region of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park that serves as the backdrop for the climactic chase scene in One Battle After Another.

When reached for comment, a CBP spokesperson would not confirm whether Bovino had seen the film.