Border Patrol chief offered misleading details on Kern County raid

Sergeant Gregory Bovino during an interview at El Centro Edge Patrol headquarters on Feb Kevin Clancy CalMatters and Evident Media It was quiet on the confines A Frontier Patrol agent named James Lee was parked in the shade next to a -foot fence in Calexico The windows of his SUV were rolled up the engine making that noise when it s idle for a long time while the air conditioning is running We haven t had any traveling in the last inadequate days Lee disclosed At the height of illegal margin crossings in Perimeter Patrol encountered million people But now the southern edge is desolate Lee is one of around agents in the El Centro sector which has seen a decrease in encounters compared to the same month last year The decline in crossings that began during the Biden administration has accelerated in the first scant months of the Trump administration When we visited in late February not a single person had been recorded trying to cross for more than half the week The man in charge of the El Centro sector Gregory Bovino once stated congressional investigators I ve invariably determined that idle hands do the devil s work On Jan the day after Congress certified Trump s referendum supremacy Bovino sent of his agents into Kern County six hours north of the territory line to conduct a raid that has shaken immigrant communities and agricultural businesses across the state and has set the stage for a legal battle over how the executive carries out mass deportations Limit Patrol mentioned it arrested people in what it called Operation Return to Sender but provided inadequate details The majority 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 lbs of marijuana in the trunk of a car He wrote Here in the PremierSector we go the extra mile or of them to protect our nation and communities from bad people and bad things On the day of the raids Casey Creamer CEO of California Citrus Mutual an association of citrus growers around Bakersfield heard that the Perimeter Patrol was targeting criminal activity He thought that might explain why the agents had come so far north But the next day he began to doubt the official narrative It does not seem to be a targeted criminal activity just based on what growers are seeing and observing he disclosed Creamer learned that agents detained people outside of a Home Depot and a convenience store frequented by farm workers in the morning on their way to the fields They pulled over drivers on roads running between farms I know for a fact they were stationed on growers property Not society property but actual growers property Creamer commented Bovino declared that his agents had a predetermined list of targets various of whom had criminal records before they set off for Kern County We did our homework he revealed But a CalMatters analysis in partnership with Evident and Bellingcat determined that Frontier Patrol functionaries misrepresented the very basics of their high-profile large-scale immigration raid Facts obtained from U S Customs and Territory line Protection reveal that Demarcation Patrol had no prior knowledge of criminal or immigration history for of the people arrested In a spreadsheet provided by the agency under Criminal History all but one entry contains the following passage Criminal and or immigration history was not known prior to the encounter Bovino sat down with CalMatters in February to talk about the Kern County operation A handful of armed agents stood as audience for the entire hour They stayed quiet listening to their boss tell a reporter what s what Bovino stands out among the Perimeter Patrol chiefs The El Centro sector s Facebook pagefeatures staged photos of him in uniform including including a closeup with an AR- and one on a white horse in the desert cradling a shotgun He has given his sector a brand the premier sector It s similar to the way states have mottos on license plates that aren t necessarily used by anybody else to describe that state Twenty sectors in the U S Edge Patrol and we do call ourselves the premiere sector he revealed with a smile So please let those other chiefs know we explained that This area of the demarcation is remote But Bovino s powers stretch far beyond the confines Our area goes up through Central California all the way to the Oregon perimeter he explained A view of the U S and Mexico edge wall near Jacumba Wilderness Area on Feb Photo by Kevin Clancy CalMatters and Evident Media U S Customs and Territory line Protection has the authority to search vehicles and vessels without a warrant within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the U S including the entire coastline The federal cabinet defines this distance as miles Roughly two-thirds of the U S population about million people live within this zone Federal authority does not just reside at that line in the sand as selected people like to look at it on the perimeter Bovino revealed A lot of bad things and bad people that come across that dividing line And it doesn t just stay at the limit What comes across that territory line goes into Anytown USA and into Ma and Pa America Nationwide there are roughly four times more Dividing line Patrol than ICE agents In El Centro there are five Frontier Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos Their latest project is a series of fictionalized videos portraying settlers transiting the margin as menaces with a bloodlust to commit crimes Bovino shared the first video on social media with the caption Any town Any neighborhood Any family When heartless criminals sex offenders and human traffickers illegally enter the United States and get away they prey on our children the the bulk vulnerable members of our communities In the video two agents sit in their bus at night listening to a news broadcast about an undocumented migrant charged with the rape and murder of a -year-old woman in Santa Maria The news clip is from a real CBS summary from years ago An agent shakes his head in disgust and turns off the radio saying Man that s the second one in less than a week Things are getting out of hand At that moment dispatch comes over the radio and tells the agents of a nearby motorcycle that s loaded with transients The agents are able to catch three of the men but one gets away and sneaks into Anytown USA where he savagely murders an American citizen taking the man s cell phone and fleeing The screen goes dark with the message Every apprehension matters Do you know who got away Bovino is proud of the videos and rejected the idea that the fictional portrayals are in fact fictional Those fictionalized accounts that you re talking about are really not fictionalized accounts Let s get that straight Because thousands of American citizens every year die and or are maimed killed or raped he mentioned Less than of the people Edge Patrol agents encounter have a criminal conviction of any kind according to agency figures By comparison around of Americans have a felony conviction according to one assessment Bovino likes to praise President Dwight Eisenhower who led the largest deportation in American history rounding up million Mexicans and Mexican Americans in The first buses deporting asylum seekers in what was called Operation Wetback rolled out of El Centro over years ago In January Bovino launched his own operation as a proof of concept he has explained to show how Dividing line Patrol could be used for mass deportations in the interior The El Centro sector denied requests for details on the people arrested during Operation Return to Sender CalMatters made the same request to Customs and Limit Protection headquarters in Washington D C which provided the statistics It evidenced the Boundary Patrol had a record of criminal or immigration history on only one person That person s record presented that they had been ordered to be deported a year earlier The records directly contradict what Bovino advised us in the interview He maintained his agents went after specific targets multiple of which were prior deports already had immigration history criminal history We received the information after our interview with Bovino We attempted to ask the Perimeter Patrol follow-up questions but the agency declined citing ongoing litigation Last month the ACLU sued Dividing line Patrol on behalf of United Farm Workers arguing that the agency detained people who looked Latino or like farm workers without reasonable suspicion they were doing anything unlawful and then deprived them of due process by forcing them to sign self-deportation paperwork In our interview Bovino also offered an expansive definition of who he considers criminals Every single one of the that we arrested were criminals Eight U S C illegal entry into the United States he stated citing federal code for what is a misdemeanor offense If the Limit Patrol did have a targeted list of people with criminal records they didn t arrest them Regardless Bovino didn t see a difference between going after undocumented field workers or drug dealers If you re an illegal alien you re getting it A fentanyl dealer you get it Creamer who represents the citrus growers explained he has a different definition of criminal activity He stated the people who work in their operations have been there as long as years hard-working people that don t deserve to be harassed If they re targeting a rural operation like this people that are getting up early in the morning to work those aren t drug dealers he commented A worker picks oranges on a farm outside of Bakersfield Feb Photo by Kevin Clancy CalMatters and Evident Media First Oranges at a packaging facility outside of Bakersfield on Feb Last A worker at an orange packaging facility outside of Bakersfield on Feb Photos by Kevin Clancy CalMatters and Evident Media Creamer warned that the United States won t have a food supply if agriculture doesn t have a workforce in California and beyond The USDA Economic Research services says that of agricultural workers are undocumented Lawmakers in Florida which is the other major citrus provider not long ago introduced measure to loosen child labor laws to replace field workers following an immigration crackdown Ninety percent of the nation s fresh citrus comes from California according to Citrus Mutual Zac Green a citrus farmer in Kern County noted that in the days after the raid percent of his workers stayed home out of fear We have to have that reliable workforce he commented We re feeding people Our people can go back to their communities and put their kids in school They can buy homes they can buy vehicles he stated We re here to work and provide for our families and that s what we re trying to do Bree Bernwanger a senior staff attorney with the ACLU mentioned she s not surprised that Perimeter Patrol had prior records on only one of the people arrested Demarcation Patrol went on a fishing expedition in the Central Valley They swarmed the highways and stopped people in agricultural areas she declared People who are just driving down the road because they were brown or because they looked like farm workers The ACLU has requested for a restraining order to stop the agency from conducting similar raids within California while the lawsuit is being heard The organization argues that Territory line Patrol must have reasonable suspicion a person is doing something unlawful We re asking a court to order them not to stop people whether they re driving down the road or whether they re in a parking lot not to stop them unless they have a reason Bernwanger commented And someone looking Latino looking like a farm worker looking like a day laborer those are not legal reasons Workers pick oranges on a farm outside of Bakersfield Feb Photo by Kevin Clancy CalMatters and Evident Media For his part Bovino wants to use the Kern operation as a model for immigration enforcement across California It s encounter on anywhere he revealed It could be Fresno could be Sacramento could be Stockton You never know We re going to go where that threat is and where we can do the largest part damage to bad people and bad things that we possibly can That s what we re in the business of doing CalMatters is a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization bringing Californians stories that probe explain and explore solutions to quality of life issues while holding our leaders accountable