American Gestapo: Gregory Bovino’s Border Patrol
This week we go into the dark heart of American Gestapo: Gregory Bovino’s Border Patrol, which pushes ICE to become even more aggressive in his fascist feverdream.
Here to help us make sense of this hellscape is Nick Schwellenbach, a Senior Investigator at the Project on Government Oversight and former Communications Director at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel–a government agency set up after Watergate, meant to protect us from the next Nixon–more on that in this week’s bonus show out Thursday.
Bovino grew up a Border Patrol fanboy idolizing fascist fiction and now stalks American cities in a Nazi-style trench coat with a taxpayer-funded film crew glamorizing his violent raids. Like Trump is a showman, Bovino is cruelty as a recruitment tool to consolidate power. Under his un-checked leadership, his border patrol army operates deep inside the U.S., smashing car windows, kidnapping U.S. citizens, and rounding up tens of thousands of people, including veterans and children, into detention centers where deaths are spiking at unprecedented rates.
With the help of questions submitted by a Gaslit Nation listener (thank you, Isabel!) we go into all the pressing questions about Bovino’s Border Patrol and also ICE, including what happened to the children who disappeared under Trump’s first term and what can be done to protect vulnerable immigrants today? As you listen to this episode, which opens with a clip of Bovino justifying shooting protesters with pepper balls, keep in mind Republicans gave ICE, which works closely with Bovino’s Border Patrol, $75 billion over the next four years. They’re also operating under aggressive weekly quotas. But is their war chest also for general population control?
For our bonus episode this week, we look at the safeguards that could have prevented Trump’s return and why they didn’t. To listen to the bonus, subscribe to our Patreon at the Truth-Teller level ($5/month) or higher. We are extremely grateful to our listeners who are keeping us afloat during a very difficult economic time. Every bit of support helps give us the freedom to be independent and tell the truth, so thank you again for making Gaslit Nation possible! If America climbs out of this black hole, it will be because people like you, our Gaslit Nation listeners, refused to look away.
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Show Notes:
Where ICE Has Taken The Most People | On The Grid | WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD9ETC80HDA
NPR report: This year was the deadliest since 2005 for people in ICE custody https://www.expressnews.com/news/border-mexico/article/ice-deadliest-year-npr-21119815.php
Big Budget Act Creates a “Deportation-Industrial Complex”: The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine that will be hard to dismantle. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/big-budget-act-creates-deportation-industrial-complex
Man arrested by Ice dies in jail cell in Long Island, New York: This article is more than 1 month old Officials in Nassau county confirmed death of 42-year-old man to Newsday but declined to share details https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/19/ice-death-long-island-ny
Trump officials launch ICE effort to deport unaccompanied migrant children https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-directs-ice-agents-find-deport-unaccompanied-migrant-2025-02-23/
Federal judge says border patrol chief admitted he lied, in ruling limiting federal agents’ use of force in Chicago https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/gregory-bovino-deposition-chicago-immigration
Greg Bovino’s Border Patrol Agents Use Disproportionate Force, Data Shows https://www.pogo.org/investigations/greg-bovinos-border-patrol-agents-use-disproportionate-force-data-shows
Fighting for a government that serves the people. https://www.pogo.org/
8-year-old girl dies in Border Patrol custody in Texas, as agency struggles with overcrowding https://apnews.com/article/border-patrol-child-custody-death-harlingen-2e2b27eeb3da669ee17241b8b3ee9ee2
Detainee Death Reporting https://www.ice.gov/detain/detainee-death-reporting
CBP Fatal Encounters Tracker https://www.aclutx.org/en/cbp-fatal-encounters-tracker
FACT FOCUS: Claims that more than 300,000 migrant children are missing lack context https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-misinformation-migrant-children-missing-7ab0cea2fd2238346197429e952baa8b
How they did it: The New York Times exposes migrant child labor exploitation across 50 states https://journalistsresource.org/media/migrant-children-labor-abuse-goldmith/
Homeland Security agents rescue migrant teen sisters from sex traffickers — after they arrived in US as unaccompanied minors https://nypost.com/2025/04/29/us-news/hsi-agents-rescue-teen-migrant-sisters-from-sex-traffickers/
Gaps in Sponsor Screening and Followup Raise Safety Concerns for Unaccompanied Children https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2024/gaps-in-sponsor-screening-and-followup-raise-safety-concerns-for-unaccompanied-children/
Trump’s False Claim of Missing Immigrant Children https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/16/trump-false-claim-missing-immigrant-children
Under Joe Biden, Have 85,000 Undocumented Children Gone ‘Missing’? https://www.newsweek.com/under-joe-biden-undocumented-children-missing-1812728
Democratic Women’s Caucus Open Letter https://juliabrownley.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/dwc-letter-to-dhs-on-ice-impersonators-and-women-s-safety.pdf
How ICE Raids Are Making It Easier for Civilian Men to Assault Immigrant Women: Kylie Cheung argues in this op-ed that a rash of cases of men dressing as plainclothes ICE agents and assaulting immigrant women is possible because ICE agents operate with impunity. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/men-dressed-as-ice-agents-to-assault-immigrant-women-horrifying-trend
Houston man pretended to be ICE agent to rob driver, charging docs allege https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/article/houston-ice-agent-robbery-20395157.php
North Dakota man accused of impersonating an ICE officer when jail staff released an inmate to him https://apnews.com/article/north-dakota-immigration-williston-ice-agent-f89f0f070e5c39cd763a5018017ff332
US sees spate of arrests of civilians impersonating Ice officers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/civilians-impersonating-ice-officers
ICE Annual Report Fiscal Year 2022 https://www.ice.gov/doclib/eoy/iceAnnualReportFY2022.pdf
Border agent charged with child sex trafficking, fraud in Cochise County https://tucson.com/news/local/border/article_5e596767-4575-485b-88e8-0a6265e5bb41.html
The Green Monster: How the Border Patrol became America’s most out-of-control law enforcement agency. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/border-patrol-the-green-monster-112220/
FBI Warns of Criminals Posing as ICE, Urges Agents to ID Themselves: In a bulletin to law enforcement agencies, the FBI said criminal impersonators are exploiting ICE’s image and urged nationwide coordination to distinguish real operations from fakes. https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-warns-of-criminals-posing-as-ice-urges-agents-to-id-themselves/
How a tragic family secret turned Greg Bovino from a quiet country boy into the force of Trump's unflinching border patrol crackdown https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15288355/greg-bovino-border-patrol-family-secret-donald-trump-immigration.html
Revealed: Trump administration retreats on combating human trafficking and child exploitation https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/17/trump-human-trafficking-programs-cut
Trump administration takes hundreds of migrant children out of their homes, into government custody https://archive.ph/qc65g#selection-2109.7-2109.106
Oversight Agency Says 32,000 Unaccompanied Children Are Missing. But Are They? https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/are-32000-unaccompanied-children-missing/
Judge rules against Department of Homeland Security:
"Given the inconsistencies between the BWC footage and the use of force reports, with the BWC footage undermining what agents put in their reports, the Court cannot rely on Parra’s [who is Bovino's deputy] broad generalizations of protesters’ actions or Defendants’ responses to those actions.
Turning to Bovino, the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing “cute” responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying."
"To the extent that agents use ChatGPT to create their use of force reports, this further undermines their credibility and may explain the inaccuracy of these reports when viewed in light of the BWC footage."
Stephen Colbert (00:00):
He released four albums this year and is nominated for four Grammy Awards. Performing "Join Ice," ladies and gentlemen, Jesse Welles.
Jesse Welles (01:36):
Well, if you're lookin' for purpose in the current circus. If you're seekin' respect and attention. If you're in need of a gig that'll make you feel big. Come with me and put some folks in detention. Just last week was kind of tough, I put a kid in cuffsI zip tied a lady to a van. We can sneak around town, hunt workin' folks downI hear they got a great benefit plan. Join ICE, boy, ain't it nice?Join ICE, take my advice. If you're lackin' control and authority. Come with me and hunt down minorities. Join ICE. Well, I failed the academy, the cops weren't havin' me. The Army didn't sound that fun. So I found me a paramilitary operation. That was keen to hand me a gun. I got picked on at school, I never felt that cool. There's a hole in my soul that just a-rages. All the ladies turned me down, and I felt like a clown. But will you look at me now, I'm puttin' folks in cages. At ICE, we're respectin' power. Join ICE, I hear they got great hours. There's a sign-on bonus of 50 grand. They're in need of you, needin' to feel like a man. Join ICE. Look at him go!
CBS News Reporter (01:36):
Aiming above the waist is within policy?
Gregory Bovino (01:47):
It can be. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that's on them. Don't protest and don't trespass.
Andrea Chalupa (02:02):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, the film that the Kremlin doesn't want you to see because it's about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine and genocide continuing today under Putin. So be sure to watch it.
(02:26):
And this week we are confronting the American Gestapo, otherwise known as Greg Bovino's Border Patrol, which is increasingly working with ICE to terrorize and kidnap people and to help us understand this level of violence and lawlessness is the perfect person. And that is Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight and a former communications director at the US Office of Special Counsel, which was set up following Nixon and Watergate to try to protect our government from being ransacked by corruption, including from, especially from, the President of United States.
(03:13):
So a lot to cover here. Now, Nick, in your research, the reason why I was so thrilled to have you on the show, we have a longtime Gaslit Nation listener by the, her name is Isabelle. She's an angel on earth, and she said to me at a recent Gaslit Nation salon where we hang out and come together and try to make sense of everything happening in the world. Isabelle asked me specifically for an episode that answered a number of questions for us to look at the data, to really make sense of the numbers, the numbers to see how ICE and border patrol, how their actions are damaging lives and what are happening to those lives and what reforms are possible. So I have her questions here. I've sent them to you in advance and we'll try to make sense of them because for my own research, there's not a lot of transparency intentionally coming from these agencies that have so much power and they got something like a $75 billion war chest from Trump's '"big ugly bill." So a lot to dig into with you. But first, how are you feeling, especially when it comes to all this, because I know you've been in the trenches researching it for some time.
Nick Schwellenbach (04:28):
Well, I've been very busy. There's no shortage of work these days in my field, but it can feel overwhelming. I think for anyone who's paying a lot of attention or who's being affected directly or indirectly by a lot of the things happening. I think you do have to try to take care of yourself also, which is hard to do because it's hard not to pay attention at the same time.
Andrea Chalupa (04:52):
Now, tell us about Greg Bovino, who is the head of Border Patrol, has been for some time. What is his background? What circle of hell did he crawl out of?
Nick Schwellenbach (05:05):
Well, Greg Bovino, he hails from North Carolina. I live in Virginia, so he's not from far away from where I live. Joined the border patrol very early in his career. He served as a local police officer in North Carolina for three years and then he joined the Border Patrol. It was a childhood dream of his to join the Border Patrol. There's a great profile of him in the Daily Mail that was published a few days ago. He read a lot of stories, glamorizing the border patrol back when he was a kid. He watched the early 80s film called "The Border" starring Jack Nicholson as a corrupt border patrol agent. And apparently Greg Bovino, according to his sister, was very upset when there was a reveal in the film that Jack Nicholson was actually a bad guy. So he joined the Border Patrol in 1996. He was first an agent in the El Centro sector in California, which is, it stretches from about a 70 mile stretch of the California border, the eastern California border, more in the desert area through the Central Valley all the way up to the border with Oregon.
(06:12):
The main focus of the border patrol in this sector is that border area within a hundred miles of the border specifically, and that's where he cut his teeth as an agent. Now he returned to the El Centro sector to run the El Centro sector in the last year of Trump's first term, in the spring of 2020. And he's been there since, but he's also received this new job within the Border Patrol this year, and the Department of Homeland Security has started to call him not only the chief of the El Centro sector, but the Commander At Large of the border patrol. And he's been running the border patrols, very aggressive operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and now in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is a bit of a homecoming for him. And all of these operations have been marked by incident after incident of aggressive tactics by agents snatching people's out of cars, smashing windows.
(07:14):
There was one incident that still I think about a lot to this day in LA where border patrol agents sort of blew open the front door of someone's home with two young children inside the target of the operation who was a US citizen who wasn't even there. It was because there was a fender bender with that person in LA back in June. There was an ongoing lawsuit in Chicago, a federal lawsuit where a federal judge just two weeks ago said, the actions of these agents in that city "shock the conscience." And those are some pretty sharp words and commentary from a federal judge. They usually don't say things like that, but Bovino is running the show at the Border Patrol and there's been reporting in recent weeks that this administration is increasingly swapping out top officials at ICE with top Border Patrol staff because they want ICE to get more aggressive and mirror the tactics used by the Border Patrol.
(08:12):
So I started looking at Bovino really closely because of all of this, and one of Bovino's main defenses for the use of force by his agents is they're responding to assaults. So I decided to look at the data and the track record of agents under his command in El Centro, and what I found is that his agents use force off the charts compared to the rest of the agency. The Border Patrol does not have a great reputation when it comes to use of force, but what's been happening in El Centro in recent years shows that they use force far more in proportion to assaults than any other part of the agency. This is using the agency's own data. So it's not based on anecdotes or complaints. This is data based on the reporting by agents themselves.
Andrea Chalupa (08:59):
Let me ask you this, just to confirm, Greg Bovino, he is that Nazi cosplay guy who we saw strutting around in Chicago in some long black trench coat and sort of this Nazi-esque shaved phallic-like haircut. That's the Greg Bovino we're talking about. Everyone's like, look at this Nazi.
Nick Schwellenbach (09:25):
It's the same person. He certainly wears a trench coat reminiscent of Nazi officers from World War II. I've seen those photos and he is very bombastic. He has a film crew of government employees who follow him around and they issue these propaganda-style videos that glamorize their militaristic actions happening in our cities.
Andrea Chalupa (09:51):
So like Trump, he's a showman in his own right and he got seduced into this by a film and he's living out his childhood dream of basically being a Nazi essentially.
Nick Schwellenbach (10:05):
He has a very interesting background. He is certainly not a immigration hawk just because of Trump. This goes back to his youth. One thing that I was struck by reading that Daily Mail piece, which I'll share with you, it just came out a couple of days ago and hasn't received a lot of attention, is a book Bovino's sister says that Greg Bovino rereads every single year. It's apparently its favorite book is Starship Troopers. I don't know if you're familiar with the book, you may have seen the film from the 90s , but when the film is a bit of a parody of a critique of fascism, but the book itself definitely portrays a sort of fascist military militaristic society fighting off external bug invaders from another planet. And that passage in the story was just, I mean really eye-popping. It's like this guy rereads this book every year and it's his favorite book and this is his sister who's a fan of his.
(11:05):
So, but looking at the data, I'll dig into that a little bit more. So across the border patrol for the last four years, agents use force about twice as often as they face assaults. But in Bovino's sector, the El Centro sector, they use force about 3.6 times for every incident of assault they face. Now again, this is the government's data. There are a lot of anecdotal cases where the government has claimed an assault has occurred, where when you look at the details, it's really questionable. I mean a great case in point is the sandwich guy prosecution out of Washington DC. This is a person, the Justice Department tried to charge with a felony for assault.
Andrea Chalupa (11:54):
Oh, the DOJ employee or former DOJ employee?
Nick Schwellenbach (11:58):
He was a former DOJ employee. He threw a Subway sandwich and hit a customs and border protection officer and then they...
Andrea Chalupa (12:06):
And he ran, he ran and they couldn't keep up with him and he became an internet hero, the sandwich guy.
Nick Schwellenbach (12:12):
And so there are so many things that happened then in the wake of that, the Justice Department tried to prosecute him with a felony charge of assault. A grand jury did not agree with that, and that's quite extraordinary. Grand juries usually agree and indict when a federal prosecutor leads them down that path. So they reject two grand juries, rejected felony charges. So then the Justice Department brought a misdemeanor charge of assault against him and then a jury acquitted him, found him not guilty. By the way, they also, after the night of the incident in question where he threw the sandwich about 20 CBP agents raided this guy's apartment to arrest him a second time, even though he had said, I will appear in court the next morning, and there was no sign that he was going to flee the country or evade his court appointment.
(13:05):
So they really threw a lot of government resources into that case and came up with bupkis. So that was one assault charge. There was another assault case in LA where the government charged someone with assaulting a Border Patrol agent in LA over the summer. The claim was that a protestor hit a Border Patrol agent. There was no video and there were lots of video clips of this incident, no video showing that. Bovino was the only Border Patrol witness to testify that this actually happened and this person was found not guilty of those charges as well.
Andrea Chalupa (13:44):
So he lied. He lied under oath.
Nick Schwellenbach (13:48):
Bovino would probably claim that he believed everything he said. I think if you look, and I've watched over an hour of Bovino being deposed in the Chicago lawsuit case. He may not say he's lying, but he has said a lot of things that I think certainly pushed the limits of what a reasonable person would say is accurate. And that federal judge in Chicago, Sara Ellis, she said in court that she couldn't believe his statements. She found his accounts not credible. And so he is the person who's running these operations and he's certainly willing to at a minimum stretch the truth. And I think that's been demonstrated several times now.
Andrea Chalupa (14:31):
How was he appointed or how did he come to power? Was it under Trump's first term or Biden's?
Nick Schwellenbach (14:37):
Bovino is a career official at the Border Patrol. He's been there since 1996. He worked there under Obama, actually served in a high level border patrol role in the last year of the Obama administration in 2016. He returned to El Centro under Trump. He worked at El Centro for the entirety of the Biden administration. So he is not a political appointee. He was briefly relieved of his command In 2023 for several weeks or a month, he came under investigation for several bombastic social media posts for using as his official photo in his then Twitter account now X account, a photo of him with an M4 semi-automatic rifle, unlike all the other sector chiefs at the Border patrol. But then he was returned to duty after some house Republicans raised a fuss about that. There was a very interesting interview he gave to congressional staff in 2023.
(15:42):
So in 2023, the house Republicans were trying to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, who was then the Homeland Security secretary, and they interviewed Bovino and several other people in the Border Patrol to help build an impeachment case against Mayorkas. But it's an interview I've read several times, the transcript's online. A lot of people don't seem to know about it who follow Bovino, but it is very revealing in terms of Bovino's expansive view of border security. Basically he sees everything in our society as related to border security. And so he sees it as sort of this expansive jurisdiction for the Border Patrol as opposed to he doesn't see Border Patrol as just being limited to the border. And while there's some truth to that, there's economic factors, for instance, why people might want to come to the United States. It's just if you look at this issue through his eyes, it's somewhat dark and disturbing and it really raises, in my opinion, some deep concerns about civil liberties in America.
Andrea Chalupa (16:48):
Why do you think he was allowed to stay in power so long under Obama and Biden?
Nick Schwellenbach (16:57):
So the Border Patrol Union is very powerful and I think that's part of the factor when it comes to the lack of accountability at the Border Patrol. So in 2016, 2020 and 2024, the Border Patrol Union, the National Border Patrol Council endorsed Trump back in 2016, it was the first time they ever endorsed a presidential candidate. And you had National Border Patrol Council officials like Brandon Judge, Hector Garza. They were going on a campaign trail supporting Trump, meeting with Trump. Trump is referred to these people by name and speeches. So the Border Patrol is sort of one of Trump's favorite agencies. Now on the democratic side, there's a fear of being seen as weak on border security. I think they have chronically been on the defensive and Republicans have attacked democratic administrations quite aggressively. And so I think you have this almost fear of pissing off the Border Patrol and the Border Patrol Union when Democrats are in charge.
(18:04):
There's also a weird dynamic that I think a lot of people don't realize also about the Border Patrol is they under the first Trump administration sort of got designated essentially as a national security agency. It's not just the EPA or the Interior Department or the FDA. They are part of our national security apparatus in this government like the Pentagon or the US military at the US military, uniforms, members of the armed services, they can't join a union. They're not allowed to join a union because they're a national security component. But at the Border Patrol, they can have it both ways. They're national security and they get protected transparency protections because of that. They can be more secretive because of that, but they also are in a union. So it's harder to discipline people for misconduct and also to put things in perspective under this administration, federal sector unions are almost entirely under attack. This White House hates federal sector unions except at a few places -- the Border Patrol and at ICE.
Andrea Chalupa (19:14):
So gosh, okay, so.
Nick Schwellenbach (19:18):
There's a lot there. Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (19:18):
There's a lot to process. And I'm also thinking about the massive war chest that was given to Border Patrol and ICE from Trump's big ugly bill, a massive, massive something like $75 billion in that ballpark. And I'm looking at that and I'm thinking we don't even have, how do I say this? In Trump's lie campaign lie where they claimed, he said two things. He said, we're going to deport everybody. We're going to do mass deportations. And then when pushed, he would say, we're just going after the criminals. And it's very clear that he was telling the truth when it came to mass deportations and the rapid rate that they're going, because we can go through some of these numbers eventually they're going to run out of people that fall into any sort of, I mean they're breaking the law, they're rounding up US citizens. They're denying people due process.
(20:21):
It's very Nazi-esque. So you're looking at this and you're thinking you're running out of, you pretty much probably ran out of people at this point. What do you need that remaining 75 or whatever billion for? Who is that for to expand camps? Who are you going to fill those camps with? So at a certain point, you've been at this for a very long time working inside government, outside government focused on government accountability and checks and balances. It really seems to me that this massive war chest is more for general population control for all of us. What are your thoughts on that?
Nick Schwellenbach (21:00):
It's hard to say. I think what sort of their broader agenda is here, but I think there's a lot of things to sort of dive into more deeply. So I want to pull back for a second. A lot of people will say, what about Obama? He was the deporter in chief. And you hear this a lot in recent months. Biden was deporting more people then Trump is at least up until recently. So one big difference between let's say the Biden administration versus now is a lot of those numbers of people who were deported were people who were apprehended right at the border, especially the border with Mexico and then sort of returned or sent out of the US fairly quickly. Some of them were allowed to claim asylum and stay, some were allowed to stay for some other reasons. But if you look at the statistics, and there's a group at Syracuse University called the Transactional Record Access Clearing House, which does not roll off the tongue or TRACH, but TRACH has been keeping this data collected.
(22:08):
It gets the data straight from the government and it's got a great website. And I encourage people who follow these issues to check out that website, but they have a great table and it's like every couple of weeks they have new data that they upload to this table and it shows you the arresting authority, how many people were arrested under that authority. And if you look at the Biden administration, people were arrested almost completely under customs and border protection slash border patrol arresting authority. Those are people arrested at the border. It was like up to 80% of people for immigration related offenses were arrested under those authorities under Biden. Those ratios have flipped under Trump. What does that mean? That means that instead of focusing on arresting people who are just crossed the border without documentation or legal authorization, they're mostly going after people in the interior of the country.
(23:03):
And this is called interior enforcement and these are ICE operations, even if they are staffed by Border Patrol agents, but they're under ICE authorities. And so that's what you're having now. And so instead of a person who just crossed the border getting arrested, now we're arresting people who may have lived in the United States for years, decades, working and living in the United States often. You have deeply embedded in their communities. Virtually none of them have any criminal records unless military veterans who just haven't become US citizens for whatever reason. Sometimes there's bureaucratic or paperwork snafus where life happens and they just kind of forgot to do it. And so that's why there's such a different character to this than the Biden administration. So when you see these top line numbers from the Obama administration or the Biden administration versus Trump, there's sort of a different character character to it.
(24:01):
Also, one of the things that the Trump administration did, and they did this in the first term, and they did it during this term, is they got rid of this sort of prioritization of truly violent criminals who happened to be undocumented immigrants. So Obama, especially in the second Obama term and under the Biden administration, they wanted to really prioritize using ICE resources in interior enforcement against the really bad people, the real people who've been convicted of crimes. And they got rid of that prioritization because they just want to hit sort of arbitrary arrest goals of 3000 arrests a week. And that really high arbitrary goal of 3000 arrests a week is why we're getting so many indiscriminate arrests of people who have no criminal records, people who are US citizens and why they're just being so aggressive at grabbing so many people that they can't.
(25:02):
You have the arrest phase of this, and this is a lot of what we've been talking about, smashing windows, grabbing people, including US citizens, including people with no criminal records. And Greg Bovino is taking over ICE sort of with those tactics and having other agents use those tactics as well. A lot of those people are being detained. And there's a whole detention complex that is run under ICE's auspices. You have big places like the Adelanto detention center in Southern California, but there are also local jails and prisons where people are detained usually in a more shorter term basis. And they're trying to then deport these people often with flights, sometimes to countries that aren't even these individuals home countries where they have no ties. And so the Trump administration just a few weeks ago said that they had deported 527,000 people. So over a half million people since Trump has returned to office, probably most of those people were detained at some point before being deported.
(26:14):
The detention complex in recent months is routinely at 60,000 people or above. Some of those people are detained for short periods of time. Some people are detained for months if not a year or longer. And we're starting to see an increasing death toll of people in ICE detention. There were 23 people in fiscal year 2025. Most of those since Trump came back into office. Just for sort of context or comparison sake, for four years, we only had 24 people. In the prior four calendar years, only 24 people died in ICE detention. And in the most recent fiscal year, it was 23, we had three more people die last month. And if those numbers kind of hold for the rest of the next fiscal year, we're going to blow out the last number. Then that last record number of people who died in ICE detention, which was in 2004, it was 29 people.
(27:12):
If the rate holds that we saw last month, we might hit 60 people dying in ICE detention. And given all the ways this administration has sort of cut back oversight inside of the government, they got rid or gutted an office called the Office of Civil Rights, Civil Liberties at DHS. They have done a lot to sort of hamstring other oversight entities cut back on the personnel running these offices. Between that, the spiking number of people in ICE detention and their embrace of harsh detention conditions, I'm thinking of places like Alligator Alcatraz. It does not look pretty for anyone who ends up in immigration detention. And we know from some of these other cases, people are just being rounded up, maybe even for their political views. Some of these people who are not US citizens have been arrested and detained for months on end because they've written pieces sort of critical of US foreign policy.
(28:14):
Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has said, if you're critical of the US and you're not a US citizen, even if you're here on a student visa and you're here illegally, they might come after you. They might get rid of your visa, you might end up getting arrested by ICE or border patrol agents and thrown in detention. We had the Supreme Court just a few months ago in the Noem v. Perdomo case refused to enjoin the government from using racial profiling and arresting people. There were a number of people who were US citizens who were arrested by ICE and Border Patrol in LA. They claimed that they were arrested solely because they were out of Home Depot. And because they were Hispanic, some of them were even like we are US citizens, we have documentation. They still nonetheless were detained. And the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
(29:06):
The plaintiffs were asking to enjoin these kind of practices or block these kind of practices, at least temporarily. The Supreme Court refused to do that. Brett Kavanaugh had some explanation that basically endorsed racial profiling and said that, yeah, we can use someone's race as a factor in determining whether or not we can arrest or detain people. And there was a blistering dissent from the three liberal justices. It's not pretty, I don't know how expansive they will ultimately be, but the way they've set these sort of goals, gotten rid of the guardrails and have embraced people like Greg Bovino's aggressive tactics, these trend lines are going to get worse and they have the money to keep doing this stuff for years on end.
Andrea Chalupa (29:56):
A massive, massive, astronomical amount of money, which is a major red flag, five alarm fire that their intentions are obviously malicious towards Americans, broadly speaking and are obviously the rule of law in this country. So I don't think we should underestimate them, especially given Greg Bovino his profile, what he looks up to, which is fascist culture. His own sister's bragging about that, proud of her brother. And I want to point out the whole sort of following around this, in February of this year, 2025, Trump gets inaugurated and at that inauguration, Elon Musk does two Nazi salutes, very clearly Nazi salutes, and they get to work right away. And that was with DOGE mass purging our government, and of course ICE coming in and Greg Bovino becoming a celebrity. So in February, 2025, ICE jackets become bestsellers on Amazon. And so there's also this culture of cheerleading, what's happening in addition to the citizens obviously taking great risks to stand up to this. But I want to ask you specifically, and this is one of our listeners, Isabel's questions, how many people have been caught impersonating ICE? Because from what I can tell, there's at least 12 confirmed cases if not more. And these cases range from a funny story of a man dressing up as an ICE officer, Border Patrol officer and going to a jail and insisting that he needs an inmate and then walking out with that inmate to free his friend. So that's a funny sort of...
Nick Schwellenbach (31:43):
More innocuous instance. Yeah.
Andrea Chalupa (31:45):
Yes. But the majority of the cases are these fan boys playing Rambo, doing traffic stops, hunting down immigrants, especially preying upon women, threatening them with rape. This has happened in North Carolina, Maryland, many other places, and I'll link to the reporting in the show notes. What have you seen there in your research?
Nick Schwellenbach (32:08):
Yeah, I mean we don't have any definitive numbers, but what I've seen is sort in that same ballpark of at least a dozen. There was a reporter in July who had reported that at that point in time it was about a half dozen, and there have been cases since then as well. That North Carolina case, I think that was just a week after Trump's inauguration where he was either threatening the woman in question with deportation if she did not comply with his sexual advances. There have been cases of, it's not clear to me if this is necessarily people being a fanboy, but who are engaged in robberies claiming to be ICE agents. It's gotten to the point where even the Federal Bureau of Investigation a few weeks ago warned ICE and other agencies that they need to have their agents clearly identify themselves. And the FBI recounted an instance in New York in August, and I don't know if there had been prior reporting about this, but there were three men claiming to be ice agents first into a restaurant, but bound one employee, put a bag over his head, kicked the crap out of another employee, tied that employee up, and then robbed an ATM that was in the restaurant.
(33:25):
So it's got sort of multiple layers to this, and the public is at risk, especially because we have ICE agents masking up or patrol agents masking up, and it's enabling people to impersonate these agents because you just don't know, is this masked person really an agent or is this person going to commit a crime or it's hard to tell the difference, at least on its fate, on its face, you can't even see their faces. So, the practices of ICE and border patrol are enabling these kinds of actions. A lot of focus has been rightfully on the use of masks, but the aggressive tactics they use as well sort of feed into this. If you have border patrol and ICE agents who are quick to break windows, who's to say this person who's impersonating an ICE agent or Border Patrol agent is wrong to break a window too.
(34:21):
I mean, normally we see people out in society including people in law enforcement as generally sort of obeying social norms. We don't beat the crap out of people normally. Even police are supposed to escalate violence sort of in proportion to the circumstances. They're not supposed to just go from zero to a hundred miles per hour without some sort of escalation. But with a lot of these agents, their use of force according to so many people, just crazy and out of proportion and excessive and it just comes. So I think also this administration has really sort of embraced that, but it's not completely unprecedented. I mean, we've seen a lot of abuses involving Border Patrol and ICE agents over many years and sort of the agency company line has been, these are bad apples, but they're bad apples. We hold people accountable when appropriate. My reporting and that of a lot of people over many years has shown that accountability has been in very short supply at these agencies for many years. But we are in a situation where that stuff is embraced by the administration vocally and apparently, and we're sort of in a very different place where the lid has been taken off, what little lid there was seems to be removed. And I think the onus is very much on the administration to show that they're holding people accountable. But to date, they seem to be going in the opposite direction entirely. They're promoting people like Greg Bovino giving him more power. They're not restraining him at all.
Andrea Chalupa (36:09):
And it shows and how he struts his stuff, he knows. So in my years of studying authoritarianism, it's always been the dictator being a sadist, a psychopath, unleashing this cruelty. And that is the dictator's way of consolidating power because his base, the people he collects around him are attracted to that cruelty. They want to unleash cruelty. And so what Trump does is how he built this cult following is he's basically telling his followers, you too can be cruel. You too can insult people. You too can be violent. It's all justified. You too can live above the law. I saw a group of Trump supporters at a 4th of July event in Virginia wearing t-shirts that said, you're not a traitor if you get away with it. That's an obvious January 6th t-shirt. And so I want to talk about accountability because when you look at ICE and border patrol agents that have been investigated or charged with crimes, the numbers just looking at 2022 for comparison.
(37:19):
So in 2022 under Biden ICE reported over 2000 criminal indictments and over 2000 criminal convictions, for its personnel. And if you jump to what we have available for 2025 so far, there's 388 ICE personnel who were convicted and 386 facing pending charges for assault. But this is what's just being reported, what's being acted upon. And of course, these agencies have been staffing up because they have money flowing in and people are running to join. So what do you see as, are those numbers in line from what you've see, sort of like a drop in any sort of accountability?
Nick Schwellenbach (38:00):
Well, so those arrest numbers and conviction numbers, that's not just by the federal government. There are occasional cases where the US Justice Department will charge agents at ICE or Border Patrol with federal crimes, but they're also held accountable at the local level. There was a case in LA over the summer where a border patrol agent who had been accused of excessive force against someone who was just filming that person then off duty, he was drunk, he assaulted someone, and he was charged for his off-duty conduct. So the local prosecutor in LA was leading that. And so a lot of these cases involve domestic violence, involve drunk driving, but there are a number of cases where there's bribery by drug cartels or these people are just assaulting people outside of the context of domestic violence. And this has been happening even during the period where you've had under the Biden administration, for instance, where they were trying to ramp up oversight and hold people accountable.
(39:09):
Now, to put a little bit of this in historic context, there was, and there's some parallels to today, by the way, under the George W. Bush administration, they did a huge surge in hiring a border patrol agents. There was a fantastic Politico Magazine article about this by Garrett Graff over 10 years ago called The Green Machine. And basically they brought thousands of people on at the Border Patrol who were poorly vetted. A lot of these people ended up engaging in misconduct, either on or off duty, including sexual assault, child trafficking, corruption charges, and Congress passed a law in 2010 that required people get polygraphed when they were applicants to for jobs at the Border Patrol. They didn't really put that into place for a couple of years from the people inside the agency I've talked to, those polygraphs do routinely identify a lot of people who pose a big concern and people don't get hired for that reason. Nonetheless, a lot of people still slip through the cracks.
(40:16):
One of the persons who was hired during that big surge was arrested a few months ago in Arizona for child sex trafficking charges. Another Border Patrol agent was arrested earlier this year in Arizona for, I wrote this down, charged with 15 felonies including 14 counts of sexual conduct with a 16-year-old. In December, 2024 in April, 2025, count of sexual exploitation of a minor such as filming or photographing the encounter. These are people who have extraordinary power, especially in remote places on the border. And I don't want to say everyone who's ever been an ICE agent or a border patrol agent is a criminal, but there are significant number of people who've been at these agencies who've had these jobs for a long time and only years after the fact as it emerged that they are like serial criminals engaged in very serious crimes. And we probably only know the tip of the iceberg because it can take months, years to investigate these crimes.
(41:23):
A lot of times the leads go cold. The first person I mentioned in Arizona, there had been rape accusations against this person a decade ago, and CBP never investigated those accusations a decade ago. I mean, I don't know if they were true, but the recent charges suggest there may have been more to it and that person should have been examined a long time ago and perhaps kept out of these roles of extraordinary power. So there's kind of like what's going on with this administration? And then there's sort of this history of an agency that has had a lot of problems where accountability really has been rare, and there are kind of different kinds of accountability. I mean, I think if you want to use sort of World War II and the Nuremberg as sort of a model here.
Andrea Chalupa (42:17):
And I do.
Nick Schwellenbach (42:19):
Yeah, there's sort of like the line agent level of accountability, but then there's sort of accountability of people at the higher levels of people who set the broad directions of these agencies, the people who set the sort of organizational tone from the top, what people feel should happen. And that's where I think Bovino is sort of so troubling is he's a high level commander of these forces going into cities. It's troubling. And I mentioned there's a parallel with that surge of hiring under George W. Bush, which also led over a little bit into the early Obama administration is we are just seeing the beginning of a surge of hiring particularly at ICE, but there will also be a surge of hiring at the Border Patrol as well, and will they maintain those polygraphs of applicants? There's already been reporting that they're trying to water down the requirements for applicants water down the training requirements.
(43:21):
And so even with those higher requirements, we still have a lot of people who end up in these positions who abuse their power. If we water down those requirements, we may be opening the floodgates. And I think another thing that maybe is worth consideration is there's sort of a growing political economy built around these agencies. You have a lot of people making money, not only the government employees and the ever expanding ranks of ice agents, border patrol agents, but there are contractors, companies, people who work at those companies that are making a lot of money because billions of dollars are going into those agencies. And so they are getting sort of a bigger, more entrenched vested stake in these policies and in the state of affairs, they may not themselves be setting those policies, but they may be supporting them because they make money, have a middle to upper class to wealthy lifestyle based on these policies. And so it's not just about these few people at the top, but it's this broader network of people that are doing well because of all these policy decisions,
Andrea Chalupa (44:37):
And they're going to have a lot more money to pump into these elections to get the candidates they want elected to keep this gravy train of fascism going. I want to ask you about the children obviously. There were reports under Trump that thousands of children disappeared in US custody and then reports under Biden that tens of thousands of children across all 50 states were found being exploited, working dangerous jobs like roofing, food packaging in factories where they could lose limbs, fall to their deaths, and a percentage of these kids were being sexually trafficked. So if you want to know where Jeffrey Epstein's network is flourishing, it's flourishing in this crisis. And so I wanted to ask you, how many children have died in US custody? The research I found from the ACLU, which is tracking Border Patrol deaths in the past 15 years, they say that they've been 77 children have died in custody since July of this year, starting the count 15 years ago. That number has increased in recent years. And again, the numbers aren't clear because of the lack of transparency. And so what have you found in regards to that?
Nick Schwellenbach (45:52):
So that number is what I've seen. So just sort of to explain things a little bit, there's ICE detention and that tends to be longer term detention. Then there's Border Patrol or CBP detention. That tends to be shorter term. Generally speaking, people aren't supposed to be held by CBP for more than 72 hours before they're supposed to be transferred to a ICE detention or a place that's more of a longer term detention center. That 72 hour limit is routinely violated. And a lot of those cases of children who've died in CBP custody are people who have been traveling for a long time who've just crossed the border, often in really remote desert environments in the southwest border. A lot of them are sick, dehydrated, have illnesses. There have been pregnant women who've died. There have been a lot of people who arrived in really rough shape.
(46:48):
And these short-term CBP facilities, this is regardless of administration, they have just been woefully inadequate when it comes to providing people with high quality medical care, aside from the very basics. In fact, CBP several years ago has been trying to ramp up its medical capacities, open a new office called the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, but there have been a lot of problems with CBPs Medical Services. They rely a lot on a contractor called Loyal Source. And there was a big report put out, believe December or January, which was a terrible time for a hard hitting congressional report to come out that talked about all these problems with CBP medical services, and they relied a lot on whistleblowers inside of CBP. And so a lot of those deaths of children have been, especially at CBP facilities, not as many in ICE facilities. Most of the deaths in ICE facilities are of adults, and the population in ICE facilities tends to skew heavily towards adults. They used to have sort of family residential centers, which sound like nice and cozy places to retire, but they were basically family detention. They got rid of that under Biden. Under Biden when Trump was reelected last fall. Tom Homan, who's the White House border czar, said, we're going to bring those back. So that may be something to watch.
Andrea Chalupa (48:14):
He also said, we're going to bring back bribing. He took something like a massive, massive cash bribe.
Nick Schwellenbach (48:20):
Yeah, no. One of my favorite Halloween costumes this year with someone dressed as a Cabo bag. So it's something to watch, but most of the deaths of children have been in those short term CBP facilities and the number of people crossing the border has dropped dramatically this year. And so you're not seeing as much of that, but it's sort of a space to watch as they radically ramp up ice detention and are trying to shove as many people into ice detention centers as possible. The numbers have shot up to 60,000 or above in recent months, up from around 39,000 at the end of the Biden administration. So it's something to watch. The other issue it's related that you were asking about is a lot of, especially unaccompanied children. Well, let me get to that. So we've had unaccompanied children come during Obama, during Trump, during Biden.
(49:13):
So there always been issues with unaccompanied children, but there were big surges of unaccompanied children who came under, especially Obama and Biden. A lot of those children unaccompanied meant they did not have an adult with them. They did not have a parent or other adult. And so they ended up largely in something called the Centers Run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is an agency at the Department of Health and Human Services. And the Office of Refugee Resettlement does try to link up these children with sponsors. A lot of these sponsors are like extended family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins who might be in the US, but because of this huge surge of unaccompanied children under Biden. And along with that sort of a desire to get people out of these centers, which are not great for those kids, by the way, some of these centers, I mean, they were like, the kids were not like they were overcrowded.
(50:19):
Kids couldn't get education, things weren't great. But the problem is they weren't vetting some of these sponsors nearly well as they should have. So you had a lot of people, a lot of kids end up with sponsors who put them to work in factories, put them to work on farms, and they weren't checking these sponsors as well as they should. Now, this issue has sort of been, I think, somewhat politicized, unfortunately, because congressional Republicans are trying to use this issue to say, look, what happened under Biden was just as bad as family separations under Trump. And so what happened with family separations is you had families crossing the border, and normally that's treated as a civil violation, not a criminal violation, but they wanted to criminalize all those border crossings, split up families to sort of increase the pain those migrant families were facing to increase the consequences.
(51:22):
So because they charged 'em with a crime, they then could take away their children. And so there were thousands of children under the Trump administration, under the family separation policy who were split apart from their parents who they crossed the border with. And they have trouble reuniting a large number of them. I think even to this day. There are some who still have not been reunited with their parents, but that was different than the way unaccompanied children were treated. Where are we with that now? So you had some reviews of what was going on with the Office of Refugee Resettlement situation and the inadequate vetting of sponsors. They've been trying to improve that since they tried to make some improvements under the Biden administration. The Trump administration has really talked about that issue a lot, about how now that a lot of ICE agents are now calling these sponsors, and this kind of gets at this complicated nature of the issue because now you have ICE calling up sponsors.
(52:20):
Some of these sponsors are scared to respond to ICE because they're scared of being arrested by ICE. And so some of these people who are sponsors aren't responding to ICE calls or ICE knocking on their doors. And so that then gets categorized as the child is missing because the sponsor isn't responding to the calls or ice knocking on their doors. So there's just some complexities to these issues, and there's unfortunately some politics about the framing of these issues that are also oversimplifying them. But there's no question there were a lot of children who were trafficked who were abused, and the government under multiple administrations screwed up.
Andrea Chalupa (53:03):
Without question. So I'll link to the reporting on that as well in the show notes. And I wanted to ask you, because Trump ran on promising to release the Epstein files, the Republicans had their whole QAnon weaponized conspiracy theory, calling the Democrats a satanic cabal of pedophiles. And so the question is, well, what is Trump doing to ensure safeguards against child trafficking? If anything? What are the safeguards?
Nick Schwellenbach (53:36):
Well, man, that's a whole universe of issues. I want to point out that ending up in government custody is not in itself a safeguard. There's a lot of sexual abuse that happens in federal prisons at ICE detention centers. A lot of these ICE and Border Patrol agents have been charged, prosecuting, convicted of sexual crimes, including with children. So there are a whole host of laws on the books that give the federal, state and local governments the power to investigate prosecute trafficking crimes, be they sexual in nature or labor trafficking. There are also a number of grant programs to help from the federal government to local and state governments to ramp up these programs. Some of them are not law enforcement necessarily in nature, but to help survivors to help sort of people who are mandatory reporters identify the signs of trafficking. There's a lot of questions about those funds. There's been a lot of questions about whether or not those funds are getting to all those nonprofits and local government entities the way they should be, and The Guardian has done some really good reporting on this. Trafficking is an issue that I think has been around a long time. It is not getting the attention it deserves. Some people are unfortunately using it as sort of this political cudgel, but not then being serious about combating trafficking.
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Andrea Chalupa (55:38):
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