Minneapolis sees off Gregory Bovino, the face of Trump’s repression, with a protest

About 100 people — among those who protest daily against the deployment of 3,000 immigration enforcement agents by Donald Trump in Minneapolis — gathered Monday in the desolate parking lot of a hotel on I-94, on the outskirts of the city, to spoil the departure of Gregory Bovino, “commander at large” of the U.S. Border Patrol and, until now, the officer in charge of operations on the ground in the Midwestern city.

It is not a send-off with honors. The U.S. president announced on Monday that he was sending Tom Homan, the White House’s border czar, to replace him at the head of the largest operation against immigration launched by Trump since his return to power. Bovino leaves the scene just two days after one of his men shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old American nurse, in the back as he lay on the ground.

The protesters gathered at 8:00 p.m. at the hotel where Bovino was said to be spending his last night in Minneapolis. Under a light snowfall, they made their presence felt with pots and pans, paint cans, megaphones, loudspeakers blasting hard rock, and even a small drum kit. A cordon of about 30 police officers guarded the hotel entrance and repeatedly charged the crowd, who chanted slogans like, “Bovino, they’re waiting for you in hell!”

No one could confirm whether Bovino was actually inside, although the burly men watching the scene from one of the windows looked like federal agents, perhaps from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the protesters insulted them as such. “If he wasn’t in there, there wouldn’t be so much police presence,” said a man who declined to give his name and was wearing a homemade sweatshirt with a map of Minnesota and a message playing on the stereotype that its residents are naturally nice, and the acronym ICE.

Around 9:30 p.m., a police officer announced that the protest was now considered an “illegal assembly,” and recited the articles of the law under which those arrested would be charged. Half a dozen people suffered that fate when the officers began pushing back the crowd, trying to gain space in the vast, empty area where the entire event had taken place.

Bovino, who said shortly after Pretti’s death that Pretti was prepared to cause a “massacre” when he was killed — a claim contradicted by videos of the tragic incident — is not departing alone. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, after a lengthy phone conversation with Trump on Tuesday, said he expected other federal agents deployed in the city for nearly two months to leave with him. Also disappearing from view is the image Bovino has chosen to project to the world in recent weeks: a uniform and a demeanor with paramilitary overtones. His rise was directly proportional to the U.S. president’s impatience with the results of what he promised during his campaign would be the “largest deportation in history.”

Homan, with a more political profile, is scheduled to meet with the mayor on Tuesday, a day after Trump also spoke with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, the vice-presidential candidate in the 2024 election alongside Kamala Harris. The Republican president changed his tone when speaking about one of his former favorite targets. “Governor Tim Walz called me with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump wrote on his social media account, Truth.

Later, Trump, who throughout the day gave signs of personally intervening to address a crisis of optics in a country that largely rejects ICE tactics, met for two hours in the Oval Office with Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, and Corey Lewandowski, her top advisor, according to The New York Times, which reported the meeting was requested by Noem. Noem also rushed on Saturday, shortly after Pretti’s death, to accuse him of being a “domestic terrorist” and to lie by saying that he approached the agents who killed him “brandishing a weapon.”

According to the Times, Trump did not imply at the meeting that Noem’s or Lewandowski’s positions were in jeopardy, according to sources. Like Bovino, the Secretary of Homeland Security is one of the faces of Trump’s anti-immigrant policy, which, after the deaths of two Americans in the streets of Minneapolis — in addition to Pretti, the poet Renee Good, a mother of three — appears to be changing.

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