From California to Chicago, the Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino is seen making race-based arrests
On the morning of Jan. 7, Jesús Ramírez and other day laborers huddled in a Home Depot parking lot in Bakersfield, California, hoping for work.
Suddenly, they were surrounded by U.S. Homeland Security vehicles.
One agent demanded Ramírez show his papers. When he pulled out his wallet, the agent “snatched” it and took his ID without asking questions, Ramírez said.
“It was clear to me the agents did not know who I was,” Ramírez, 64, said in a court filing translated from Spanish. “They did not show me any document or have a warrant for me.”
He was among 78 people arrested during an immigration enforcement mission, “Operation Return to Sender,” carried out less than two weeks before Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Its leader? U.S. Border Patrol veteran Gregory Bovino, who’s using the same playbook to head a Trump administration deportation blitz that’s now spreading tension and fear across the Chicago area.
In January, Border Patrol agents traveled about 300 miles from a sleepy area near the border with Mexico to California’s Central Valley, where they arrested Ramírez and other laborers and farmworkers during traffic stops and outside the Home Depot. Nearly all were Latino.
Ramírez was placed on a bus with dozens of people and driven six hours south to a detention center close to the border. He remained there for weeks, even though he’d explained to agents he was a widower with two kids. A nonprofit group bailed him out, and his case remains pending.
A federal lawsuit filed in February claimed the border patrol mission was tainted by race-based stops and warrantless arrests, prompting a judge’s order temporarily barring border agents from unlawfully detaining and arresting people in the Eastern District of California.
The government appealed last month, arguing the order is unnecessary because the Border Patrol issued directives about making lawful stops and arrests and committed to training 900 employees on constitutional enforcement.
By then, Bovino was long gone.
On Sept. 16, after raids in Los Angeles and Sacramento, Bovino took to social media to trumpet his arrival in Chicago — where civil rights attorneys say in a court filing his agents are “taking an equally aggressive, cavalier and unlawful approach to enforcement.” [Continue reading…]