Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino Tells It To The Judge

Every day for a week, until he and his agents quit gassing half of Chicago!

As we were finishing up our ICE roundup yesterday, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino — top of the command chain for ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz” war against the residents of Chicago — was sitting in federal court, attempting to explain to Illinois District Judge Sara Ellis why ICE has been ignoring her orders and his masked goons have continued to launch tear gas at journalists, unarmed protestors, students, and even children going to a Halloween parade, attempting to disperse citizens from places they have every legal right to be. And Judge Ellis demanded to know why ICE agents have turned off their body cameras, against her very clear and specific orders.

Let us set the scene with Bovino walking to court, he’s the shorty in the Travis Bickle hairdo, getting screamed at while surrounded by a pack of beefy minions. Tough guy!

How often do you think that 57-year-old Bovino has to refresh that dark-brown dye on the top of his head? At least weekly, surely. But looksmaxxing is very important in this regime, where everything is a beauty pageant to daddy.

Anyway, once in the hot seat, it didn’t go great for Bovino. Though it could have gone worse! As with a petulant child, the judge went over the Temporary Restraining Order that she’d issued, line by line, in case Bovino was “either unclear, it wasn’t read, or it was read and ignored.” And “given the fact that you and I took essentially the same oath, I know option three is not something — that just wouldn’t happen.” Uh huh.

Then Bovino sat quietly while Judge Ellis ran down her order. Details from Jon Seidel of the Chicago Sun-Times:

“Section 1A means, essentially, that you’ve got to leave journalists alone. If they’re doing their job, they need to be left alone to do their job. Kids dressed in Halloween costumes, walking to a parade, do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer. They just don’t.”

ICYMI:

The judge continued, “I also know I’m not there. I’m not out in the street. I’m here. But I am getting videos. […] It is difficult for me to see that the force being used is necessary to stop an immediate and serious threat of physical harm to a person. There was a woman in Little Village who was pulled to the ground and arrested, that she had someone sitting on top of her with his knee in her back. And the video … did not appear to show that she was posing an immediate threat.”

There are so many horrible incidents of ICE abusing people who are clearly not posing a threat in Little Village and all over Chicago and its suburbs, it’s not clear exactly which one the judge means.

There were the kids on their way to school, people minding their business in laundromats and stores, and students protesting ICE, at whom Bovino personally threw a tear gas canister, the manager of a comedy club who was wrestled to the pavement… take your pick!

But Judge Ellis did not get specific, and instead moved on to the requirement that ICE give warnings before they deploy tear gas. “This has been a consistent theme through all of the plaintiffs’ filings, that there was no warning given. They must tell people what they are going to do before they do it. So that people have the opportunity to comply.”

Bovino continued to sit quietly.

In the end, the judge did not ban Border Patrol from using tear gas entirely, but dangled it above their heads like an unruly teenager’s iPhone, saying if they decided to gas people, “they’d better be able to back it up.” And she added, “And if they can’t, then they will lose that as something they can use.”

Then Judge Ellis got to querying as to why ICE agents were not displaying any identification, where are they supposed to be putting their ID numbers? She asked Bovino to agree then and there on a place for an identifier to appear on agents’ uniforms, but Bovino griped he wanted options.

JUDGE ELLIS: “Why don’t we say that the identifier needs to be in a conspicuous location, at least two places, is that fair?”

BOVINO: “Can we have ‘in a conspicuous location’?”

Where is Bovino wanting to put it, in their armpits? Judge Ellis said whatever, as long as she can figure out who she’s looking at should there be a violation of her order.

And why weren’t agents wearing body cameras, like she had ordered them to do? Bovino said, “99 percent do, there are a few that don’t have them issued to them yet.” She notably did not ask, and are they turned on?

And surprise, surprise, guess who one of the one percent who doesn’t have a camera is, why it’s Gregory Bovino himself! Why the fuck not? “I do not ma’am, no. I’ve not yet received a body-worn camera or the training.” The training, really? You need a Master’s Degree to turn it the fuck on?

As faithful Wonkette readers know, ICE ordering agents to turn off their cameras was one of the very first things the regime did, back in February, volunteering an insane made-up excuse about “the potential for bad actors to possibly rig bombs to explode when those cameras get too close.” But Bovino sure as shit was not going to try to run that fever dream up a flagpole in court!

Judge Ellis suggested, “how about by Friday, you get a camera?”

And Judge Ellis asked, would Bovino agree that the allegations against agents, on their face, suggest they’ve violated her order? Bovino played dumb some more. “Well, your honor, I believe that each situation is dependent on the situation. And, you know, I’d like to know more about what happened.” Said the guy who is ON CAMERA violating her order his very own self!

Maybe it was the devil?

And Judge Ellis berated Bovino some more about how his goons had ruined a bunch of gassed kids’ Halloween. “These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered on Saturday. And it’s gonna take a long time for that to come back, if ever. It should have been a really happy day. Kids love Halloween. It’s a day where all the rules go out the window. You can eat as much candy as you want.” Bovino sat silently, probably fantasizing about poking razor blades into packets of Pulparindo for a trunk or treat.

Bovino and his underlings are pigs in shit. They have been dreaming of the day they can rough up and/or disappear every protestor, journalist, or teenager darker than a paper bag walking to school, and they’re so bitter they can’t use actual bullets. Though they’ve been keeping sniper rifles trained on protestors from rooftops, waiting for that happy occasion! And ICE has detained more than 170 US citizens by now, sometimes for days. They’ve been combing through everybody’s social media, surveilling around the clock in search of dissenters whose free speech they want to target. But it is a judge’s duty to begin from a place of assuming everyone is acting in good faith!

Finally, Judge Ellis prodded Bovino to affirm that they were on the same page, and he grumbled that they were. And she told him she wanted to see him, personally, every day at 6 p.m., prepared to report any uses of force to her, with the related body camera footage, until the preliminary injunction hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday, November 5.

Then Bovino skittered out of there. See if you can find him beyond all that handholding and in between all of those heavily armed beefcakes! Then he waved on his troops, fascistly, and sped away.

To be back again soon!

He’s a very freaky ghoul, the kind you don’t take home to madre.

And will Chicago’s winds blow tear-gas free this week? We’ll see!

[TRO]

Follow me on Bluesky!