In This Episode
[clip of Greg Bovino]: So we’re going to be here until that mission is accomplished, as I said, and better get used to us now because this is going to normal very soon.
Erin Ryan: It’s gonna be normal.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s going to be normal pretty soon. You better watch out for me. I got a horse. [laughter]
Erin Ryan: Welcome to another episode of This F*cking Guy, the series where we pick one guy who is making America worse and explore why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And I’m Alyssa Mastromonaco the other host of the Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Erin Ryan: You asked, we answered, folks. Today’s subject is Greg Bovino, a man who is doing the difficult job of representing the Lollipop Guild while also being the preening, absurd public face of ICE’s disastrously inept operations.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Bovino has put himself front and center of an organization that has positioned itself as the army green berets of armed and untrained losers. We’re going to make a lot of fun of how dumb looking he is today because there’s such a difference between how he thinks he’s coming across, like a strong and tough guy from an action movie, and how he’s actually coming across like a puny little dork who couldn’t strategize his way out of a wet paper bag.
Erin Ryan: Donald Trump obsessed with looks. He is pathologically preoccupied with optics. The entire aim of ICE is to create photo opportunities, and in that context, how Greg Bovino, the face of immigration enforcement, looks or doesn’t look matters. Before we dive into who Greg Bovino is, let’s start with what he’s not. He was calling himself Border Patrol’s Commander-at-Large from October 2025 to January 2026, but that’s a made-up job title that Kristi Noem gave him in an op-ed. It doesn’t exist in the structure of border patrol, which is itself a component of customs and border protection. It is, however, the first time Greg Bovino has had the word large used to describe him.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And probably the last.
Erin Ryan: A New York Times piece from 2025 referred to Greg Bovino as the tactical commander in charge of immigration enforcement actions, specifically in Los Angeles. While this may be an accurate description, it’s still not his actual job title. The X account that he’s currently locked out of… Has Bovino referring to himself clunkily as Commander Op-At-Large-CA, whatever that means.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Greg Bovino is not the border czar. That’s Tom Homan, the guy who looks like Shrek had a baby with a human thumb. He’s not the acting head of ICE, either. That’s Todd Lyons, who is himself facing some legal heat for ignoring the law and judge’s orders. He’s not the head of the Department of Homeland Security. That’s blank-eyed, dog-killing, alleged homewrecker Kristi Noem. Bovino is not Senate-confirmed. He’s a not a cabinet secretary. His technical job title is, boringly, Sector Chief.
Erin Ryan: The banality of evil. One of Bovino’s former colleagues described him to reporters as a little Napoleon and the Liberace of the Border Patrol. Those aren’t official titles either, but they are fun.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Liberace would not like that.
Erin Ryan: Before he was so far above the Constitution that he was also behind the candelabra, this fucking guy was just a kid growing up in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Gregory Kent Bovino was born March 27th, 1970. His mother, Betty, came from a long line of North Carolinians, but not his father.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Nope. Greg Bovino’s Grandpa on his dad’s side was… An immigrant. An immigrant?
Erin Ryan: [gasps] An immigrant. An immigrant, the Chicago Sun-Times, in cooperation with WBEZ, found that Greg’s grandpa on his dad’s side, like a lot of senior citizens’ grandpas, came to the U.S. From Italy. His great-grandpa preceded his family to the US, leaving his wife and kids back in Calabria while he worked in the mines in Pennsylvania. That was in 1909. But that all changed in 1924. You see, at the time, America was into eugenics, like really into eugenics. And fear of bloodline sullying was used as justification. To enact quotas on immigration from the swarthier parts of Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Italy. And around that time, Michele Bovino, who became Michael when he arrived stateside, declared an intention to become a U.S. Citizen and then used that status to bring his wife and four children from Italy to the states. Bovino’s grandpa was one of those children. He was 12 years old.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Chain migration? Chain migration.
Erin Ryan: Like many men who turn out to be pieces of shit, Greg Bovino’s dad, Mike, was a piece of shit. His drinking vexed Betty and often led to fights. Mike’s affinity for the sauce led to him getting a DUI in the mid-1970s.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Do you know how drunk you had to be in order to get a DUI during the 1970s?
Erin Ryan: Yeah, there’s footage of people in California complaining on camera to local news that laws that banned drinking while driving were uncalled for. On the night of June 5th, 1981, when Greg would have been 11 years old, Bovino’s father Mike went over to a friend’s house and drank. He drank a lot. He later told the newspaper that he’d had maybe two, maybe three, six packs of beer before getting behind the wheel shortly after midnight.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I’m sorry, 12 to 18 beers.
Erin Ryan: How does your stomach even fit that much beer in it?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s so much beer.
Erin Ryan: It’s just so much beer. Around the same time Mike was drunk driving down a mountain, a 26-year-old woman named Jane May Mitchell and her husband were heading up the same road, looking for some late night donuts. Mike Bovino crossed the center line in his truck and hit the couple’s car head on. Jane was killed instantly and her husband was seriously injured. Bovino pled guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but he only ended up serving four.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This is where Greg started learning some bad lessons or maybe no lessons at all. Killing a woman and serving a sentence akin to something like drug possession.
Erin Ryan: Indeed. After the drunk driving crash, things went south for Mike Bovino. Jane Mitchell’s husband sued him. Mike didn’t have insurance due to his recent DUI. And Mike had to sell the bar he owned to pay for the lawsuit. Then, Betty divorced him in one custody of their three children. Then, Mike fucked off to New Mexico with a pool table, a lawnmower, and a handful of other divorced guy essentials. One thing we can say about Mike Bovino in a newspaper article from when he was in jail, he expressed remorse for recklessly killing a woman. Which is more than we can say for his son. Another significant moment in Greg’s development happened when he was 11 years old. A film called The Border was released. Later in life, Bovino would claim that he was so distressed by the fact that border patrol agents were the bad guys in the Harvey Keitel, Jack Nicholson film, that he felt called to join border patrol and be a good guy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: How’d that work out?
Erin Ryan: As a high schooler, Bovino was on the wrestling team. People who knew him told reporters that he a friendly guy, albeit not that great of a wrestler. He won most improved one year despite having what one article described as a terrible season.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Young Greg Bovino was also a bit of a snake boy. He was fascinated by them and knew where to find them in the mountains.
Erin Ryan: But alas, that snake boy would not grow into America’s version of the crocodile hunter. More along the lines of the chief child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but without the incredible mustache. Bovino graduated with a degree in natural resource conservation from Western North Carolina University, then got his master’s from Appalachian State University, became cop and then quickly shifted over to working for the Border Patrol in 1996.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: His first assignment was in El Centro, California, which is inland from San Diego.
Erin Ryan: In 2010, Bovino was assigned to the station in Blythe, California. But while there, Bovino had the brilliant idea to raid the airport and bus stations in Las Vegas.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The operation was supposed to last three days, but only ended up lasting an hour. While agents did end up arresting a few dozen people, they made the dire mistake of pissing off then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid.
Erin Ryan: Uh oh.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Forget what we know about Reid as Senate Majority Leader. As chair of the Nevada Gaming Commission, that man so famously confronted mobster Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal that it was recreated as a scene in the Scorsese movie, Casino.
Erin Ryan: Yes, note to self, do not fuck with 2010, Harry Reid.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Nope.
Erin Ryan: In 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term, Bovino was promoted to Chief of El Centro Border Patrol Station. Compared to other stations like El Paso, El Cento is the border uneasy mode.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The New York Times described the 70-mile chunk of land under Bovino’s watch as one of the least busy stretches of the southern border. In other words, other border patrol chiefs had harder jobs than he did. Bovino, of course, talks about it like he’s at the Harvard of the border patrol assignments, but it’s actually more like the University of Phoenix.
Erin Ryan: You might say that Bovino’s rise in Trump world was inevitable. He possesses the perfect combination of traits to make him the perfect errand boy for Trump’s agenda. He’s terminally online, he’s small, and he wants to be big. He’s a natural submissive who likes to pretend he’s a dom, including dressing up in a dom costume. And he wants be a star.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: With his new role as a border patrol station chief, stardom was closer than ever. With the dyspeptic face of Don Knotts’ Wario, the castrato voice of Pee-wee Herman on creatine, and the haircut of a mean old lesbian, Greg Bovino was ready for his close-up.
Erin Ryan: In 2021, he had a camera crew film him leaping into the All-American Canal, an aqueduct in Southern California frequently crossed by migrants, in order to show that swimming across it is hard.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I’m not sure that this video demonstrates what it’s supposed to demonstrate. Why jump in at all? Why not throw a mannequin in and show what happens?
Erin Ryan: It demonstrates that Greg Bovino wants people to think he’s tough. Bovino was inspired by watching a movie to become a border patrol agent, so it follows that the way he moves through the world resembles a guy who thinks he’s in a movie but has never been on a film set. While he has an IMDB page of his own, like Don Rumsfeld and Michael Avenatti, LOL, the closest Greg has gotten to actually making it in pictures was in 2015, when he was given special thanks by the filmmaker behind a movie called La Migra. Based on the available teaser, the film looks a bit like if Sicario 2 were made by Tommy Wiseau.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: During the 2020s, Bovino, like so many other emotionally unwell Americans, was sucked into the world of excessive posting. Sometimes that got him in trouble.
Erin Ryan: Like the time in 2023 when Bovino was forced to take a tweet down because it was deemed too political. The fracas around Bovino’s social media activity made it to Fox News.
[clip of news reporter]: Border protection isn’t just control, it’s protection.
Erin Ryan: He twatted. That’s the past tense of tweet.
[clip of news reporter]: An innocent life was taken by a drunk driver who was found to be in the U.S. Illegally.
Erin Ryan: That’s right, folks. Immigrants are in this country getting drunk and killing people with their cars. Back in Greg Bovinos day, those jobs went to hardworking Americans like his dad.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Just step away from the hashtags, bro. We’re not gonna mince words here. Greg Bovino is short and he feels bad about it.
Erin Ryan: In fact, Bovino suffers from one of the worst cases of little man syndrome we’ve ever seen.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Little man syndrome symptoms include only being able to get it up for violence, beating up on smaller and weaker people, being like way too into guns and driving a big truck. Erin, did you know that some little men are actually of average height?
Erin Ryan: I once knew a tall guy with little man syndrome.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, turns out he had a small penis. The only treatment for little man’s syndrome is an ancient remedy called get over yourself. Unfortunately, that’s not possible for many sufferers, including Gregito Bovino, a man who will always be small. And will always have a voice that sounds like that.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Gregito?
Erin Ryan: Yes, in Spanish if you put it at the end of something it means little, little Greg.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Let’s settle this now. How small is Greg Bovino?
Erin Ryan: Que tan pequeño es Gregito? That’s a great question. Sources indicate itty bitty. Most of us have probably seen the footage of lawyer and activist Rachel Cohen heckling Bovino outside of a grocery store and pointing out that he appears to be several inches shorter than she is.
[clip of Rachel Cohen]: Hey fam, I was in Minneapolis and look, we just stumbled upon Greg Bovino at a fucking speedway for a pre-Hague photo shoot. Good for him, I guess. For those following along at home, I have nothing against short men, but I do just have to report back. There is about a four inch height difference. [laughter] Do you wanna get closer so they can see? There’s so many short men in the world who do not deal with their anger by separating families.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: There’s also the fact that the Sun Time’s WBEZ profile we keep referencing is teeming with subtle jokes about how he’s a wee man. When discussing his time on his high school wrestling team, they point out that he was hardly the biggest guy.
Erin Ryan: The piece also shares an anecdote about Bovino’s little wall. As a sector chief for the Border Patrol, the area under his jurisdiction was one of the small portions of the border where President Trump’s wall had actually been built.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The wall that Mexico was going to pay for but didn’t.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, that one, but Bovino built a second wall parallel to the first wall. This one was shorter in height and only 0.15 miles long. It’s a metaphor.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And then there are the memes.
Erin Ryan: I’d say I feel bad for him, but what’s the saying about living by the sword and dying by the sword? This dude deserves to be bullied so hard that his daddy feels.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It. The next thing that makes Greg a perfect MAGA bootlicker, how much he loves posting and lives on the dopamine shot of online approval. In the 2020s, Greg posted and posted. The harder he posted, the more his profile rose in the web sick world of MAGA. This despite the fact that he tweets like a fucking moron.
Erin Ryan: Which is an asset in the MAGA world where the platonic ideal of communication is to sound like a punchy wraparound shades guy calling actresses fat from his truck. Let’s take a quick journey through the carnival of illiteracy that is Greg Bovino’s social media footprint. Here are some weird tweet replies Gregito sent to Chicago Tribune journalist Gregory Royal Pratt as Gregory Royal Pratt was reporting on the Bovino-led chaos inflicted across Chicago in late 2025. Now, as you can see here, Alyssa, in response to this reporter, he said, “Now, Gregory, there you go again,” with three exclamation points, and in the final sentence he uses the improper form of two, and he uses four laugh-cry emojis.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: So many emojis!
Erin Ryan: Okay, in this one, he uses a sentence that makes no sense. Quite the condition to be devoted to. No period. Huh?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Mmkay.
Erin Ryan: Is that a saying? Or my favorite, and yet another response to this poor reporter, whom he seems to be a bit obsessed with. Truth sting a bit there, sir. Truth sting a bit?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Such a short sentence to have no structure.
Erin Ryan: And if you’re wondering if, in addition to sending cunty misspelled bon mots to journalists while drawing a publicly funded salary, Greg Bovino falls for obvious parody accounts, the answer is yes. Here’s a time when Bovino thought that a satirical newspaper story about Ted Nugent pledging money to feed ICE agents in Minneapolis was real. A community note appears just above his credulous reply. Yikes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: On July 12th, 2023, Bovino, about as high on his own supply as Tony Montana at this point, sat for a closed-door hearing with House committee members.
Erin Ryan: Shortly thereafter, he was moved from the little Keebler elf tree he’d been assigned to in California to a sad office in D.C. Bovino said that right after the congressional hearing during which he was critical of the Biden administration’s approach to border security, he told that he was being relieved of his duties at Border Patrol and pressured to retire.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Republican congressmen lost their goddamn minds over this, claiming that Bovino was demoted for telling the truth about what was really going on at the border. CBP officials above Bovino’s pay grade countered that, actually. Bovino’s transfer was a routine HR thing that had been in progress before his testimony, so there was no way it could been due to what he’d said before the committee.
Erin Ryan: Plus, there’s no evidence that Bovino was ever actually demoted from a purely HR perspective. He was transferred to a different job and kept the same rank in the hierarchy that he’d had before.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Greg Bovino lies a lot.
Erin Ryan: But if he had been demoted in an official sense, he probably would have deserved it. Greg Bovino acted like a performative fool online. In a more innocent time, if anybody else high ranking in government acted like Bovino acted on social media, they would be rightfully reprimanded.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But MAGA never lets the truth get in the way of a good conservative victimhood narrative. Ignore the inconvenient facts. Of course, if Bovino was transferred, it had to be because the Libs were punishing his bravery, not because Bovino had a user pic of himself posed next to an M4 automatic rifle. What the Biden administration should have done was shitcan him for being such an serious cornball, but instead they restored him to his position in El Centro that fall.
Erin Ryan: And that only fed the narrative that Bovino had been unjustly disciplined and that the Biden administration had bowed to political pressure from the right.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Outside of only the most pathetically online of Republicans. You’re Senator Mike Lee’s and JD Vance’s, for example. By the beginning of 2025, Greg Bovino was still a relatively obscure figure to most Americans. That was about to change.
Erin Ryan: On January 7th, the day after Donald Trump’s second election was certified by Congress, Bovino sent several dozen ICE agents up to Bakersfield, 229 miles from the Mexico border, to launch a series of immigration raids inspired by Greg Bovino’s pathological desire to be a character in a movie. Border Patrol hit places like Home Depot parking lots, farm roads, and gas stations, eventually crowing about arresting 78 people in what they called Operation Return to Center. ICE didn’t release much information about the raid, why they were doing it, or who they were targeting. But Greg Bovino, like a lot of 53-year-old guys whose dads didn’t love them, posted a lot about it to Facebook.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I’m going to read from a report on the raid by CalMatters. Quote, “Most of the official information about the raid came from Bovino’s Facebook comments. He posted blurred photos of three Latino men alongside a photo of 33 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of a car. He wrote, here in the hashtag premier sector, we go the extra mile or 500 of them to protect our nation and communities from bad people and bad things.”
Erin Ryan: Bovino claimed that he was targeting specific people and told media outlets that his agency had, quote, “done their homework” to single out criminals. But the CalMatters investigation found that Bovino and other officials misrepresented that.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: AKA, they lied.
Erin Ryan: Turns out the data that CalMatters analyzed found that Border Patrol had no information or knowledge of prior criminal activity from 77 of the 78 people nabbed during that campaign. How much money do you think they’re spending per arrest? Probably a lot.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Operation Return To Sender should have been assigned to the general public that Greg Bovino is a reckless, image-obsessed liar.
Erin Ryan: At this point, you might be wondering, if they weren’t relying on data around criminal activity, then how was Border Patrol deciding who to arrest? And the answer is vibes, and by vibes, I mean racism. ICE specifically targeted Latino farm workers, spreading so much terror among agricultural workers that for weeks, people were so scared of raids that they just weren’t showing up for work. And with nobody to harvest the crops, what happened to the food? It rotted in the fields.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This is also a big deal because of how indispensable California is to the American food supply.
Erin Ryan: This, like most raids conducted under Bovino, was incredibly inefficient. So they got a small amount of meth. Cool. How many edible fruits and vegetables went bad because people were too scared to pick them? How many people were traumatized? How many communities were damaged? How could it possibly be worth it?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The ACLU and the United Farm Workers filed a lawsuit against Border Patrol and were granted an injunction.
Erin Ryan: Unfortunately, modern technology allows all manner of loser chuds to cosplay like action stars. And thanks to the Trump administration’s hunger for racialized, made-for-TV cruelty, Bovino was about to have more starring roles than he could have ever dreamed of, albeit not the kind that would bolster his anemic IMDB credits, unfortunately.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: A normal bureaucrat would keep their head down and make sure the I’s were dotted and the T’s were crossed, but not Bovino. Unlike the image of the masked ICE agent that is now unfortunately commonplace, Bovino never wore a mask. It’s pretty clear why he wanted to be famous.
Erin Ryan: Bovino rolled into Los Angeles in June 2025, newly appointed, unofficially, the mascot of ICE, the overfunded, undertrained, and bloodthirsty paramilitary squad emboldened by the second Trump administration. Again, he wasn’t the director of ICE. He was, you know, the Mascot.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Like the Mr. Met of ICE!
Erin Ryan: Bovino turned the City of Angels into a real-life staging ground for his action hero LARPing. His untethered squad of amateurs did things like use their cars to ram civilian cars, arrest people due to mistaken identities, lose track of people they’d arrested, and generally make Los Angeles worse. But how, you ask, was Bovino deciding on which neighborhoods to hit? Weird that they were scooping up gardeners and landscapers in Echo Park, day laborers in Glendale, and car wash employees in Studio City, but pretty much left the San Gabriel valley alone.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: For non-Angelinos, they were targeting Latino-heavy neighborhoods and leaving areas known for having large populations of immigrants from other communities alone.
Erin Ryan: On June 7th, ICE agents attempted a raid on a Home Depot in Paramount, but they couldn’t get out quickly enough to avoid attracting protesters. There was a standoff that lasted hours, and in response, Trump called up the National Guard and the fucking Marines to calm things down. Later in 2025, a federal judge would rule that this action from the Trump administration was illegal. It was a clown show, Alyssa. I was here for it. It was goat rodeo. At one point, almost adjacent to a real rodeo because the absurd peak of this cosplay was when Bovino, with a straight face somehow, rode into MacArthur Park on horseback.
[clip of news reporter]: About 10:30 Monday morning, heavily armored Border Patrol officers with a fleet of vehicles and some on horseback, descended on MacArthur Park. This is the heart of the immigrant community, just two miles from downtown LA. Sky Fox was overhead as the operation kicked in.
[clip of Greg Bovino]: The federal government is not leaving L.A. I don’t work for Karen Bass, the federal government doesn’t work Karen Bass. We’re going to be here until that mission is accomplished as I said and better get used to us now because this is going to normal very soon.
Erin Ryan: It’s gonna be normal.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s going to be normal pretty soon. You better watch out for me. I got a horse. [laughter]
Erin Ryan: Bovino publicly questioned an Army general’s loyalty to the country after the general voiced concerns about using the National Guard for the show of force in a Los Angeles park, according to court testimony. This, despite the general’s reasonable questions about mission creep.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This man does not understand the chain of command. The army general must have been like who is this little snot?
Erin Ryan: In Los Angeles, two immigrants died while fleeing Bovino’s agents. A Mexican farm worker fell from a greenhouse roof, and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle on a freeway following a Home Depot raid. Under Bovino’s leadership, agents fired on a vehicle they said tried to hit them, detained a disabled 15-year-old high school student in a mistaken identity incident, drawing guns, handcuffing him, and leaving live ammunition on school grounds. And were recorded on social media breaking windows of drivers who wouldn’t stop, while also questioning U.S. Citizens and in one instance urinating on storage containers at a high school campus.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Fucking gross. Bovino personally led two high-profile summer operations that provoked immediate backlash from local leaders. In one instance, he and his rifle-armed agents appeared outside a Los Angeles museum during Governor Gavin Newsom’s redistricting rally, unrelated to immigration, where Bovino told reporters, we’re here making Los Angeles a safer place. Since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves. We’re glad to be here. We’re not going anywhere. Dressed in his little tough boy army costume, of course.
Erin Ryan: ICE drew down in LA after causing generously stupid amounts of damage, costing a lot of money, and causing death and mayhem. But hey, at least they didn’t make a positive difference in the lives of anybody.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: We cannot emphasize enough how unnecessary this all was.
Erin Ryan: And is, because they’re still here. They’re still doing dumb shit and nobody wants them here.
[AD BREAK]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: After the giant waste of money that was ICE’s attempts to goad Los Angeles into providing pretext for martial law, Bovino headed to Chicago.
Erin Ryan: Operation Midway Blitz started in Chicago in September and October. Shortly after midnight on September 30th, 2025, 300 feds, 300 feds, including Border Patrol, FBI, and the ATF literally repelled down from Black Hawk helicopters onto the roof of an unassuming 130-unit apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: They were basically there to a non-consensual action movie flash mob featuring unsuspecting extras in the form of peacefully sleeping residents.
Erin Ryan: It was an over-the-top fiasco. Masked agents, stormed hallways, kicked in doors, destroyed tenants’ personal property, zip-tied everybody they could get their hands on, including U.S. Citizens, children, and a sobbing six-year-old clinging to his uncle. They lit the hallways up with loud flashbangs. Residents hid in elevator shafts and under beds to escape. Some jumped from windows. And for what?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The Trump administration bragged that the raid had led to the arrest of 37 terrorists, including two confirmed members of the Tren de Aragua gang. They said that the building was teeming with threats, but no guns, drugs or explosives ever materialized. No evidence supported the fed’s entrance into units of people who weren’t suspected of anything. ProPublica found that 35 of the 37 people arrested had no serious criminal ties.
Erin Ryan: Okay, so just to get it all out there, they were playing Call of Duty cut scene on a building full of randos.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yep. On October 4th, 2025, U.S. Citizen Marimar Martinez was shot five times by supervisory border agent Charles Exum from Maine after a collision between her car and his government SUV. Wait, why was a border patrol agent from Maine in Illinois? Doesn’t Maine have border to protect?
Erin Ryan: I think so. Maybe they’re just trying to blow ICE’s big budget by having people travel to states where they don’t live because they like don’t know how to spend all the money. Okay, stop me if we’ve heard this one before. ICE and DHS swiftly branded Martinez a domestic terrorist armed with a semi-automatic weapon, actually legally carried in her purse, with a valid FOID card and concealed carry license. ICE claimed she deliberately rammed their vehicle and drove toward Exum post-crash. They claimed that her shooting was defensive. She and a co-defendant were indicted for assault with a deadly weapon. Video evidence that her lawyer Chris Parente shared on 60 Minutes shows that there were no vehicles blocking the agent’s car. And then she passed him safely on the left before he inexplicably jumped out of his vehicle yelling, do something, bitch, and unloading five rounds, hitting her with seven holes total per his own boastful text to his friends. Quote, “I fired five rounds and she had seven holes. Put that in your book, boys.” Wait a minute. Ugh. Do you mean a literal book? Like, hey, attention.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: You know that’s not, they don’t have books.
Erin Ryan: Investigators, law enforcement. Is there a place where ICE is writing this down? Put that into your book boys. What the fuck?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Exum was then allowed to drive the evidence SUV back to Maine, dodging preservation protocols while DHS stonewalled body cam release under a protective order despite being confronted in court with those texts. Prosecutors’ narrative crumbled under video evidence showing no ambush or threat for Martinez, just an emotionally untethered armed man calling a woman a bitch and trying killer with his car and then with his gun.
Erin Ryan: Sounds like ICE has a misogyny problem. The charges against Martinez and her co-defendant were dismissed with prejudice. But the feds kept smearing Martinez anyway, refusing to retract press releases or social posts, calling her a terrorist, prompting her January 2026 motion for public release of body cam footage, photos, and coms to counter the counterfactual public relations war. That case is ongoing.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Days later, a judge issued a temporary restraining order limiting the tactics of agents operating under the umbrella of DHS, ICE, Border Patrol, and CBP. But did they listen? Not really.
Erin Ryan: Agents racked up violations fast. On October 12th, in Albany Park, they defied the TRO by gassing crowds after denying Catholic clergy Eucharist access to Broadview ICE detainees. October 14th saw tear gas, their second violation, after ICE caused a multi-car crash during a chase, hitting protesters and Chicago cops alike. October 24th brought a fourth violation in Lakeview and Lincoln Park, where agents gassed around 50 people. November 8th, they gassed people in Little Village. Agents claimed a shot from a vehicle, but no injuries. And pepper sprayed a U.S. Citizen family, including a one-year-old in a Cicero Sam’s Club lot, hospitalizing the dad who suffered from asthma.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: On top of that, Bovino personally hurled a tear gas canister into a little village crowd, plus incidents in residential areas like Old Irving Park near a kids’ Halloween parade, prompting Judge Sara Ellis to summon him for testimony and order daily 6 p.m. Courtroom check-ins to monitor arrests and use of force reports.
Erin Ryan: In the courtroom and a follow-up deposition, Bovino tried to defend his actions by claiming he’d been hit in the head by a rock from an unruly mob before deploying the gas, but body cam and aerial videos debunked that. He eventually admitted to straight up lying about it. He gave short, clipped answers to Ellis’ pointed questions, insisting tactics like tear gas were fine based on the situation, even as she grilled him line by line on the TRO and prior consent decree, to which he nodded compliance but came off like thought his evasiveness was terribly cute. Ellis walked him through specific clashes highlighting how agents fired on protesters almost immediately, and noted patterns of falsified reports, including some generated with AI, because not only are ICE agents stupid, they’re also lazy. The judge’s scathing written opinion called Bovino’s testimony not credible, granted a preliminary injunction curbing force, though the Seventh Circuit paused it as broad and painted a picture of agents operating outside constitutional bounds.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Illinois politicians like Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson piled on with Johnson dubbing Bovino barbaric. A former ICE official labeled it a black eye for Feds, Bovinos daily appearances became a spectacle of accountability.
Erin Ryan: Naturally, Bovino made some enemies in Chicago. In October, a 37-year-old union carpenter named Juan Espinosa Martinez sent messages on Snapchat offering, quote, 10K if you take him down, alongside a photo of Bavio, plus some hand signals from the Latin King Street Gang, which is based in Chicago. One of the message recipients turned out to be a government snitch who turned it over and the rest is history. Prosecutors took this as a sincere, honest-to-goodness attempt to hire somebody to kill Bovino and charged Martinez. If convicted, he would have faced 10 years behind bars.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Martinez’s three-day-long federal trial was held in January 2026 and hinged on whether or not the messages were truly attempts to get Bovino killed or just a man getting his jollies from a revenge fantasy. Martinez’s defense team claimed that there’s no way anyone could take the messages seriously. No money was exchanged and there was no follow-through. His brother Oscar quipped on the stand, nobody’s going to do that for 10K.
Erin Ryan: That is a great point. The jury deliberated for four hours before acquitting Martinez, which brings up an important point. If you’re an American who might be called for jury duty during this moment in our history when your fellow countrymen are gonna be facing trumped up charges brought by the Greg Bovinos of the world, you might wanna look up what jury nullification means. It’s helpful to know.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Unfortunately, within 24 hours of his acquittal, Martinez was picked up by ICE. While he lived in the U.S. For many years, he was undocumented.
Erin Ryan: However, the legacy of Operation Midway Blitz, ugh, dumb name, and all of the Chicagoans who caught charges as a result of their actions during the federal government’s chaotic invasion is that the feds are doing a terrible job proving their cases in court due to credibility issues, aka chronic lying. Something interesting about Greg Bovino is that his preening and attention seeking tends to make things worse in ways he doesn’t intend. He’s an equal opportunity ruiner. For example, him flapping his yap about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Abrego Garcia has been in legal limbo for months after the Trump administration illegally deported him, even after a judge ordered he be allowed to remain stateside. It’s all very complicated, and because of that, a judge issued a gag order around the case.
Erin Ryan: Enter Greg Bovino, the bovine in the China shop of the American immigration system. After Abrego Garcia’s release from ICE detention, Bovino appeared on Fox News running his mouth to Jesse Watters. Remember, there’s a gag order on this case.
[clip of Greg Bovino]: Once he becomes deportable for the second time, remember, he was deportable the first time and actually got deported. When he becomes deportable the second time we’re going to deport this individual. It’s too bad that we have these activist judges that legislate from the bench and put MS-13 gang members back out on the streets to harm Americans. That’s what we’re doing in these American cities are taking individuals like this quote “Maryland dad” out of circulation and putting them back where they need to be, and that’s in their country of record.
[clip of Jesse Watters]: Alright, just keep an eye on him because he could fly the coupe, go to Chicago, just blend in in a bull’s game. You gotta, you gotta watch guys like this, they’re slippery.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: [laughter] Just blend into the bulls game.
Erin Ryan: Jesse Watters is such a fucking pussy sitting there in his like Fox News studio caked under makeup being like oh go go get him. Track em down.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Abrego Garcia’s legal team filed a sanctions motion against federal officials on December 19, highlighting Bovino’s clear violation of the gag order and demanding the Department of Justice explain who authorized his media appearances. The DOJ responded evasively, claiming the gag orders did not apply and focusing instead on Abrego Garcia’s own statements, an argument the lawyers called frivolous, and deliberately misleading, which prompted the judge to reprimand the government for noncompliance with court orders.
Erin Ryan: On December 26, the conservative YouTuber and self-styled independent journalist named Nick Shirley released a video in which he claimed to point to hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud perpetrated by the Somali community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Basically this guy showed up to some daycare centers and demanded to see the children and took the fact that the centers were not allowing a random man to film the children as a sign that they were doing fraud.
Erin Ryan: Now, there have been issues with social program fraud in the Twin Cities, but those cases had already been investigated, resulting in dozens of arrests and convictions, including the fraud Ringleader, which was a white woman.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But again MAGA has never let some inconvenient facts get in the way of a juicy story and the Somalis are doing fraud implications were used by the Trump administration as pretext for unleashing a chaotic, disastrous invasion by federal forces.
Erin Ryan: Of course, Bovino was front and center, not wearing a hat on his head in the midwinter in Minnesota, probably because he thinks it makes him look tough. But he does not look tough, he looks like Snow White’s eight dwarf, Fasci.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Bovino’s sartorial choices invoke some uncomfortable comparisons between his fascist adjacent and another historic moment, Nazi Germany. California governor Gavin Newsom said, Greg Bovino dressed up as if he literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb. [laughter] Greg Bovin, secret police, private army, masked men, people disappearing quite literally, no due process.
Erin Ryan: No lie spotted. Trump administration officials claimed that the Minneapolis operation was to be the largest immigration operation of all time. They sent three times the number of ICE and CBP officers to the cities, then there were police in the police force. They canvassed neighborhoods with little regard for who they rounded up and arrested. They acted like complete and utter shitheads and looked like terrified dorks while doing it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: One day, ICE agents ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant and returned later in the shift to detain the people who had just served them food. Another time, they broke into the house of a 56-year-old Hmong man and dragged him out into the freezing cold in a robe and underwear. Days later, it was revealed that it was not only a case of mistaken identity, they were actually after a different Asian guy. The guy they were after was already in jail.
Erin Ryan: Oh god. They arrested and detained a five-year-old boy named Liam Ramos on his way home from preschool and tried to use him as bait to lure his pregnant mother out of their home, while the boy’s father, who had tried to run and was detained, screamed for her to not open the door. Rather than giving the boy to friends, neighbors, and school officials who were there and offered to take him, or calling social services, which is what police would do if they detained the guardian of a child, ICE arrested the boy. And shipped him and his father to a detention facility in Texas. After more than a week in detention and the efforts of multiple members of Congress, Liam and his father were finally returned home. But they shouldn’t have been in detention in the first place. On January 7th, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a 37-year-old mother named Renée Good. She was trying to leave the scene of an ICE presence. Videos from multiple angles show that Good was being shouted conflicting orders by ICE agents. Ross deliberately walked around to the front of her car while filming her. Ross then switched his phone to his non-dominant hand to free up his other hand to draw his weapon. As she tried to turn her wheel and drive away from him, Ross fired once through the windshield and at least three times through the driver’s side window, killing her. So her dog was in the backseat of her Honda Pilot and the glove compartment in the front seat was stuffed with plushies and dog toys. After Ross killed Good, he can be heard on a video that he shot and leaked to a conservative outlet. Calling Renée Good a fucking bitch. An autopsy would later show that she’d been shot multiple times in the head. Bovino and other Trump administration officials would spend the next hours and days smearing Good’s name and claiming the officer was acting in self-defense. A team of federal agents also helped clear Ross’s nearby home before police officers were able to search it for evidence. Bovino’s take on the killing was hats off to that ICE agent.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Well, that’s exactly what they tried to do to Marimar Martinez in Chicago except she lived, right down to calling the woman a bitch.
Erin Ryan: Like we said, they’re too dumb and lazy to have more than one play. And that play is immediately deny any wrongdoing, smear the victim as a terrorist, claim the officer’s life was in danger, sabotage any investigation, and protect the officer. But what Bovino and the Trump administration didn’t account for was the fact that Minnesotans banded together to protect each other. They raised money, they gathered supplies, they waited outside detention facilities to help people get back home when they were released into the freezing cold without appropriate clothing. Business owners kicked ICE agents out. Agents were driven away from grocery stores. Neighbors patrolled streets to keep kids safe during school drop-off times. Even Bovino remarked on how well-organized Minnesotans were against the pandemonium of ICE.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: On January 23rd, tens of thousands of people gathered in dangerously cold temperatures to peacefully march against ICE presence in the Twin Cities.
Erin Ryan: The next morning, on January 24th, a 37-year-old registered nurse named Alex Pretti, an American citizen, was beaten, shot, and killed by immigration agents as he tried to protect two women who had been knocked to the ground during a protest outside of a donut shop. Pretti’s death was filmed from multiple angles and seen by millions of people. There wasn’t a lot of ambiguity about what had happened, but that didn’t stop Bovino and the rest of the super team from flocking to their old playbook. Bovino was completely untethered after Pretti’s death, tussling with politicians online. And making a disastrous appearance with CNN’s Dana Bash.
[clip of Dana Bash]: What you are saying is, he went there to try to stop this law enforcement operation. All of the video that we have seen shows him documenting it with his cell phone, which is a lawful thing to do. And the only time he seemed to interact with law enforcement is when they went after him when he was trying to help an individual who law enforcement pushed down. So where do you have the evidence to show that he was tried to impede that law enforcement operation?
[clip of Greg Bovino]: Dana, at first he was there in the scene. He was in the same actively impeding and assaulting law enforcement to the point.
[clip of Dana Bash]: But that’s not illegal. He wasn’t impeding it. He was filming it, which is a legal thing to do in the United States of America.
[clip of Greg Bovino]: Now, Dana, let’s don’t freeze frame adjudicate this now.
[clip of Dana Bash]: The Homeland Security secretary said he was brandishing a weapon. Do you have evidence that we haven’t seen that he was brandishing the weapon?
[clip of Greg Bovino]: He brought a semi-automatic weapon to a riot, assaulted federal officers, and at some point, they saw that weapon.
[clip of Dana Bash]: You keep saying that he assaulted a federal officer. But again, we have not seen evidence that that happened. It looked like he was on the defense. And again, he had a gun legally.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This denial of truth was so beyond the pale that even conservative elected officials and conservative media started turning on Bovino and ICE. The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of them ran op-eds condemning the Trump administration and Bovino’s out-of-control goons.
Erin Ryan: And that’s the root of it. It’s not actually that hard to go into a city and cause pandemonium if you’ve got a large group of angry losers with subhuman levels of empathy, weapons, an unlimited budget, and high-tech spy tools that turn everybody’s phone into a tracker the government can hack into. Bovino’s strategy is about as sophisticated as letting a truck full of greased hogs loose in a shopping mall.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And he’s not even good at taking care of the hogs, to carry the metaphor forward.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, the hog’s are sad. The hogs are not doing well emotionally. He’s just having a terrible time hiring and retaining people. This despite the fact that the government is offering $50,000 bonuses and student loan forgiveness as well as generous pay packages. Reporting indicates that many recruits can’t meet the physical standards necessary to work for immigration enforcement, which are 15 pushups in one minute, which I haven’t done pushups in like a while and I could do that now.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I can do them.
Erin Ryan: 32 sit-ups in under a minute? Playing Call of Duty might make you think you know how to handle a weapon, but it doesn’t make your muscles big. Additionally, reporting indicated that recruits were having trouble passing the written exam. The open book written exam!
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Dummies!
Erin Ryan: Dummies. Third, there just aren’t enough evil people in the U.S. To pull off what ICE’s stated goal is. It was a cynical gambit by Stephen Miller and the other architects of this attempt at ethnic cleansing through terror. That there are enough people in America who can completely shut off their humanity for the right price to build an overwhelming force.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That might be one of the main drawbacks to spending as much time as the way-too-online far-right spend on social media. They have a warped worldview. They truly think that the makeup of humanity is similar to the makeup of X or Truth Social or the people brigadiering racism in Instagram comments. And it’s just not.
Erin Ryan: From the mess he’d made in Minneapolis, back to his familiar perch along the boring part of the U.S.-Mexico border. Reports indicated that he was going to be forced into retirement soon. Now for somebody who hasn’t been paying attention to Greg Bovino’s career, this might sound like a win. But the thing is, in our opinion, this was window dressing.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Why, Bovino was not actually punished at all, beyond having a few bad headlines and some snowballs chucked at his SUV as he pulled away from the Whipple building for the last time.
Erin Ryan: Bovino joined the Border Patrol in 1996, which means this November, November 2026, that will mark 30 years with the force, which means—
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He’s eligible for full retirement benefits. He was already going to retire this year most likely.
Erin Ryan: And as for that demotion, remember that we said at the beginning that his title is made up. It’s made up. And because his job was made up, Bovino wasn’t demoted at all within the Border Patrol. He just has the same job he had before, but with less visibility, and minus this one very special assignment that allowed him to prance around in various cities doing photo shoots about being a badass with an old man ass. My theory is that they were always going to offer Bovino up as a fake olive branch, but he’s not suffering, except maybe from the fact that he can’t tweet from his weird little Twitter account anymore.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Until Greg Bovino is dragged into court and forced to answer for the crimes he encouraged in a legal environment that will actually take the law seriously, he’s still entitled to that fat-ass government retirement package, which of course we will pay for. So just something to think about when they think about what happens in a post-Trump world if we make it there.
Erin Ryan: This isn’t to discourage anybody. Like, fuck Greg Bovino. And I’m glad he’s not in Minneapolis anymore. But he’s NOT the brain power behind the terror the administration has inflicted on the Twin Cities or Los Angeles or Chicago or Charlotte. The carnage is continuing under a different mascot. They didn’t end the ball game, they just hired a new Mr. Met. Greg Bovino was not special, he was replaceable.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Let’s wrap things up with some Hopecore, Erin. One thing that Bovino does have in common with a Hollywood that would collectively rather put piss in their own Cheerios than offer him any praise, he runs on announcements and severely lacks follow through.
Erin Ryan: He frequently takes credit for actions that he hasn’t yet taken, harvesting the fear of populations that he can threaten. But then he never does the thing he claims he’s going to do.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: For example, when it came to ICE’s presence in Los Angeles during the summer of 2025, the AP quoted him as saying,
Erin Ryan: “We’re not going to hit one location. We’re gonna hit as many as we can, all over, all over the Los Angeles region. We’re going to turn and burn to that next target and the next and the the next to the next. And we’re not gonna stop. We’re now gonna stop until there’s not a problem here.”
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He made a similar empty promise about Chicago. Here’s what he tweeted after he and many immigration agents left Chicago in mid-November.
Erin Ryan: “If you think we’re done with Chicago, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself. Don’t call it a comeback, we’re gonna be here for years.” Why, LL Cool J isn’t even from Chicago, what is this reference?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: No.
Erin Ryan: What is this, like, wait, and there’s two things, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself, plus don’t call it a comeback. Like, his tweets all have this, like, abusive stepdad energy. Like, illiterate stepdad energy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And here’s what he promised about Minneapolis shortly before being sent home to a barren stretch of California border. A reporter asked him how many people he was going to deport before the surge was over. There is a number, he said. And it’s called all of them, dipshit.
Erin Ryan: Dumbass.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Does Greg Bovino have a family?
Erin Ryan: Yes, Alyssa, some idiot married him. When WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times reporters approached his house in Southern California, Mrs. Bovino refused to speak to them, and CBP agents stationed in vehicles near the home got out and requested ID. Turns out, agents from the El Centro Border Patrol Station have been guarding Bovino’s home for months due to threats.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Who is paying for that? We are.
Erin Ryan: We are, Bovino has kept information about his family pretty locked down. His face is out there, but we don’t know anything about his family. We don’t know about his children, I’ve seen conflicting reports about whether he has four or three or zero, but if he does have kids, one of them will eventually dox themselves. One of them’ll write a book, or want a punditry career, or get drunk and kill a woman, and then we’ll all know. And if there’s any poetic justice in this story, one day Greg Bovino’s family will realize that their patriarch chose terrorizing strangers over spending time with them. Bovino wanted to be a good guy action star in a modern retelling of the film The Border. But all he’s done is a cheap ripoff of Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw in the film One Battle After Another. No spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet. Greg Bovino, like his father, abandoned his family, just like Mike Bovino fucking off to New Mexico with a pool table, leaving his son in North Carolina to chase snakes and suck at wrestling. That about does it for Greg Bovino, at least until he runs for governor of the California sector of the American Republic of Trump in 2028. Alyssa, how would you rank him on our matrix of fucking guys?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay so he’s definitely a reckless dumbass. Like, but I don’t, I guess an opportunist, right? Yeah, reckless dumb ass, and opportunist. What do you think?
Erin Ryan: I’m in the same camp. I think he’s an opportunist, but I think that like what drives him, he’s a true believing zealot in his own main character syndrome. He really wants to be the thing that he thinks he is, but he’s not. And that’s like kind of what’s pathetic and funny. That’s what’s funny about him, right? When like a kitten looks in the mirror and is like, I’m a lion, like I’m big, I’m so big, you know, it’s like, that’s funny. It’s not so funny when he’s, you know, ruining people’s lives. Lying about state violence against people, but yeah.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Presiding over chaos.
Erin Ryan: Absolutely a reckless dumbass, perhaps the most reckless dumb ass we have ever talked about on this show.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Well, that’s that’s a wrap on this episode of This F*cking Guy. If you like what you’ve seen, hit subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you got an idea for a future F*cking Guy we should spotlight.
Erin Ryan: This episode was written by me with an assist from Alyssa Mastromonaco. All the rest of the credits, as well as links to our sources, like the WBEZ and Chicago Sun Times work documenting Bovino’s sad little life, can be found in our show notes. Take care, be well, wear a hat outdoors if you have an ugly haircut.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And fuck that guy.
Erin Ryan: Fuck that guy.
