Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who became the public face of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation operations before he was pushed out this year, is now telling a conservative audience that the crackdown Americans have watched unfold is largely a performance, and pairing that argument with a claim about the size of the undocumented population that is far outside anything supported by research.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson released the morning of August 27, Bovino argued that interior immigration enforcement effectively collapsed after a deadly operation in Minnesota, and that the public has been misled about the scale of removals.
Promoting the interview on X, he wrote that Americans are “being gaslighted” into believing mass deportations are happening. “They’re not. It’s theater,” he wrote, urging viewers to watch and “decide which movie you’re in.”, according to Prime Timer.
Asked by Carlson to describe the current state of illegal immigration, Bovino answered with one word: “catastrophe”, and then asserted that 107 million people are in the country unlawfully, which he described as a quarter of the U.S. population.
That figure does not withstand scrutiny, as Prime Timer noted.
The Pew Research Center, whose estimates are among the most widely cited, put the unauthorized immigrant population at a record 14 million in 2023, and analysts tracking the trend believe the number has since declined to roughly 11 to 13 million by 2026.
The Center for Migration Studies estimated 12.2 million for 2023. Even the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that favors sharp restrictions and uses a methodology that produces higher counts, estimated about 18.6 million in early 2025—still less than a fifth of what Bovino claimed.
His number is also internally inconsistent. The U.S. population is roughly 342 million; 107 million would be closer to a third of it than a quarter, and even the highest credible estimate of the undocumented population amounts to about 5 percent. In other words, the figure Bovino offered is off from the mainstream research consensus by a factor of roughly eight to ten.
Bovino’s assertion that mass deportations are not really happening comes, notably, from the hardline right, a complaint that the administration is not going far enough, rather than too far. His specific claim is that interior enforcement was curtailed after Minnesota, allowing what he called cartels and transnational criminal organizations to push more people across a border he otherwise described as “under control more than they ever have been in my lifetime.”
Yet the administration’s own numbers describe an aggressive campaign, not a dormant one.
The Department of Homeland Security has claimed roughly 2.5 million total departures during 2025, counting both formal removals and self-deportations, and independent tracking has verified hundreds of thousands of formal removals.
ICE’s detention population, meanwhile, rose from about 40,000 at the start of 2025 to well over 60,000 by the end of the year. Whatever one makes of Bovino’s grievance, the premise that little is happening runs against both the government’s public boasts and the documented figures.
Bovino spent nearly three decades in the Border Patrol, joining in 1996 and rising to sector chief in El Centro, California.
In 2025, he became the operational face of the administration’s interior crackdown, leading high-profile operations in Los Angeles, which sparked citywide protests, then Chicago, and finally Minneapolis, where he took command of a major operation in December 2025. He was named commander-at-large of the Border Patrol that October.
The “surrender in Minnesota” that Bovino now blames for halting enforcement refers to the aftermath of that operation. Federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during the Minneapolis enforcement push, according to reporting by CNN and others, and the killings drew condemnation and forced a change in course.
Bovino was removed from leading the operation in January 2026, and border czar Tom Homan was dispatched to take over as the federal presence was scaled back.
Bovino returned to El Centro and announced his retirement weeks later. Separately, a federal judge in Chicago found that Bovino had lied about why he threw a tear-gas canister into a crowd during the operations there, CBS News reported.
The Carlson interview was most widely covered for a different assertion: that senior administration figures want him dead. Bovino said that after his exit, his security detail was pulled, which he characterized as an effort to “silence” him amid what he described as death threats, according to reporting by The Washington Times and The Daily Beast.
He blamed Homan and what he called “gate guards”, bureaucrats, for his ouster, framing his approach as too aggressive for a “status quo” establishment.
https://ctninfo.com/ousted-border-pa…theater-not-real/
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Source: Prime Timer
