USBP Chief Patrol Agent of the El Centro sector, Greg Bovino, stands on a street corner with federal agents after patrolling several tourist districts in the downtown area, after US President Donald Trump ordered increased federal law enforcement presence to assist in crime prevention, in Chicago, Illinois, US September 28, 2025. (Reuters)
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- Trump has called the expansion of federal immigration agents and National Guard troops into American cities necessary
CHICAGO: The sight of armed, camouflaged and masked Border Patrol agents making arrests near famous downtown Chicago landmarks has amplified concerns about the Trump administration’s growing federal intervention across US cities.
As Illinois leaders warned Monday of a National Guard deployment, residents in the nation’s third-largest city met a brazen weekend escalation of immigration enforcement tactics with anger, fear and fresh claims of discrimination.
“It looks un-American,” said Chicago Alderman Brandon Reilly, who represents downtown on the City Council. He deemed the Sunday display a “photo opp” for President Donald Trump, echoing other leaders.
Memphis, Tennessee, and Portland, Oregon, also braced for a federal law enforcement surge. Meanwhile, Louisiana’s governor asked for a National Guard deployment to New Orleans and other cities.
Trump has called the expansion of federal immigration agents and National Guard troops into American cities necessary, blasting Democrats for crime and lax immigration policies. Following a crime crackdown in the District of Columbia and immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, he’s referred to Portland as “war-ravaged” and threatened apocalyptic force in Chicago.
“Whether it takes place here in the city or the suburbs, it’s all the same to us,” Border Patrol agent Gregory Bovino said in Chicago.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has issued a memo that also directs component agencies within the Justice Department, including the FBI, to help protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, including in Chicago and Portland.
Here’s a snapshot of where things stand with federal law enforcement activity in Chicago, Portland, Memphis and New Orleans.
Chicago raises alarm about racial profiling
Many Chicagoans were already uneasy after an immigration crackdown began earlier this month. Agents have targeted immigrant-heavy and largely Latino areas.
Trump has waffled on sending the military, but Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said Monday it appeared the federal government would deploy 100 troops. Pritzker said the Illinois National Guard received word that the Department of Homeland Security sent a memo to the Defense Department requesting troops to protect ICE personnel and facilities.
An immigration processing center outside Chicago has been the site of frequent protests and aggressive tactics by federal agents.
The enforcement recently escalated, with agents using boats on the Chicago River and marching Sunday on Michigan Avenue and in upscale neighborhoods.
Activists and elected leaders are concerned about discriminatory stops, particularly after the US Supreme Court lifted restrictions on roving patrols in LA. The court cleared the way for immigration agents to stop people based on race, language, job or location.
“ICE is running around the Loop, harassing people for not being white,” Pritzker said, describing the city’s core business district.
Activists said a Latino family of four was led away by federal agents Sunday near the popular “Cloud Gate” sculpture, commonly called “The Bean.” Construction workers and bicyclists were also targeted.
“The downtown operation of being racially profiled and kidnapped by immigration in broad daylight represents a major escalation by the Trump administration,” said Veronica Castro with Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Bovino told The Associated Press that agents will go after “anyone who is here illegally,” an approach that fell under immigration authority, known as Title 8. He told the Chicago Sun-Times that a person’s appearance goes into the calculation.
“It would be agent experience, intelligence that indicates there’s illegal aliens in a particular place or location,” he told the newspaper. “Then, obviously, the particular characteristics of an individual, how they look.”
DHS did not return messages Monday.
Chicagoans trail Border Patrol
As Border Patrol agents marched near downtown, a few onlookers nodded in approval and shouted praise while a trail of activists and others urged agents to leave.
Shirley Zuniga was celebrating her 24th birthday when she saw agents. Still wearing a pink birthday sash, she left brunch to follow them.
Zuniga, among the first in her family of Honduran immigrants to be born in the United States, said she forgot all about her birthday plans as she yelled at the agents to go home.
“This is much more important to me,” she said as she grew emotional. “I’m celebrating my people.”
Portland goes to court
In Oregon, Democratic Attorney General Dan Rayfield filed a motion in federal court Monday seeking to temporarily block the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard.
The motion is part of a lawsuit Rayfield filed Sunday, after state leaders received a Defense Department memo that said 200 members of the state’s National Guard will be placed under federal control for 60 days to “protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur.”
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek are among local leaders who object to the deployment.
“Putting our own military on our streets is an abuse of power and a disservice to our communities and our service members,” Rayfield said in a statement Monday.
The ICE building outside of Portland’s downtown has been the site of nightly protests that peaked in June, with smaller clashes occurring since then.
A larger crowd demonstrated at the building Sunday. Two people were arrested for assault, according to authorities. That followed a peaceful march earlier in the day that drew thousands to the city’s downtown and saw no arrests, police said.
Some residents are already frustrated.
The building manager of the affordable housing complex adjacent to the ICE building said “the impacts of violent tactics, including tear gas and late-night altercations, are traumatizing for residents,” including the veterans who live there.
“Sending federal troops will only escalate the situation. The last thing we need is an escalation,” Reach Community Development said in statement.
Meanwhile, federal agents on Monday searched a home associated with someone who allegedly aimed a laser at a US Customs and Border Protection helicopter as it flew over Portland on Saturday evening, the FBI said. Four people, who were found to be in the country illegally, were detained and placed under the custody of ICE, according to the FBI, which did not specify the charges they face.
Memphis residents worry
Memphis was in wait-and-see mode Monday, the first day of a planned federal law enforcement surge ordered by Trump to fight crime. There were no immediate reports of large-scale federal law enforcement operations.
Still some residents, including Latinos, expressed concerns that immigration agents will detain people regardless of immigration status.
“We know the presence of the National Guard will lead to our neighbors being afraid to seek help when they need medical care, need to report crimes, or require social services, because of this military presence,” said Sandra Pita, a community organizer.
The city has experienced high numbers of violent crimes such as carjackings and homicides in recent years, but both Democratic and Republican officials have noted that the majority-Black city is seeing decreases this year in some categories.
Louisiana’s governor asks for National Guard
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry on Monday asked for a National Guard deployment to New Orleans and other cities to help his state fight crime.
In a letter sent to to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Landry also praised the president’s decision to send troops to Washington and Memphis.
Landry said there has been “elevated violent crime rates” in Shreveport, Baton Rouge and New Orleans as well as shortages in local law enforcement.
But crime in some of the state’s biggest cities has actually decreased recently, with New Orleans, seeing a particularly steep drop in 2025 that has put it on pace to have its lowest number of killings in more than five decades.
Topics: Trump Returns US immigration Crackdown
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‘Keep dreaming’: NATO chief says Europe can’t defend itself without US
BRUSSELS: NATO chief Mark Rutte warned Monday Europe cannot defend itself without the United States, in the face of calls for the continent to stand on its own feet after tensions over Greenland.
US President Donald Trump roiled the transatlantic alliance by threatening to seize the autonomous Danish territory — before backing off after talks with Rutte last week.
The diplomatic crisis sparked gave fresh momentum to those advocating for Europe to take a tougher line against Trump and break its military reliance on Washington.
“If anyone thinks here again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US — keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told lawmakers at the European Parliament.
He said that EU countries would have to double defense spending from the five percent NATO target agreed last year to 10 percent and spend “billions and billions” on building nuclear arms.
“You would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella,” Rutte said. “So hey, good luck.”
The former Dutch prime minister insisted that US commitment to NATO’s Article Five mutual defense clause remained “total,” but that the United States expected European countries to keep spending more on their militaries.
“They need a secure Euro-Atlantic, and they also need a secure Europe. So the US has every interest in NATO,” he said.
The NATO head reiterated his repeated praise for Trump for pressuring reluctant European allies to step up defense spending.
He also appeared to knock back a suggestion floated by the EU’s defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius earlier this month for a possible European defense force that could replace US troops on the continent.
“It will make things more complicated. I think Putin will love it. So think again,” Rutte said.
On Greenland, Rutte said he had agreed with Trump that NATO would “take more responsibility for the defense of the Arctic,” but it was up to Greenlandic and Danish authorities to negotiate over US presence on the island.
“I have no mandate to negotiate on behalf of Denmark, so I didn’t, and I will not,” he said.
Rutte reiterated that he had stressed to Trump the cost paid by NATO allies in Afghanistan after the US leader caused outrage by playing down their contribution.
“For every two American soldiers who paid the ultimate price, one soldier of an ally or a partner, a NATO ally or a partner country, did not return home,” he said.
“I know that America greatly appreciates all the efforts.”
Who is Greg Bovino, the official spearheading Trump’s immigration crackdown?
This article is more than 4 months old
How Bovino went from an unheralded border agent to a key figure leading Trump’s Chicago and LA takeovers
Robert TaitSun 14 Sep 2025 12.00 BSTShare
Gregory Bovino is indisputably a man of the political times, perfectly in harmony with the signature theme of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
A previously unheralded regional border patrol agent, Bovino, 55, has risen to prominence in recent weeks as the publicity-hungry spearhead of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented people in Los Angeles.
Amid howls of disapproval from elected Democratic officials, Bovino and squads of Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents have embarked on aggressive, gun-toting patrols that have netted thousands of arrests, often carried out with little more justification than that detainees are Spanish-speakers or appear to be Latino.
Masked agents have smashed car windows, blown open a door to a house and staged an intimidating horseback patrol in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park in the service of detaining those suspected of being in the US without documentation.
Bovino, a 29-year CBP veteran who formally heads the border patrol’s El Centro sector in southern California, has trumpeted the operations in a series of videos posted on social media and depicting his team’s work in scenes resembling action films. Put together by a team of agents employed specially for the purpose, the productions seems tailor-made to appeal to the president’s renowned taste for visual imagery.
Now his attention-grabbing approach is set to draw further scrutiny after he arrived in Chicago this past week to lead an offensive targeting immigrants in a city Trump has labelled “the most dangerous in the world”.
Bovino, distinguished by his spiky hairstyle that he keeps closely cropped at the sides, has also been tapped to lead a similar expected drive in Boston as part of the White House’s assault on Democratic-run so-called sanctuary cities, where officials decline to cooperate with Trump’s mass deportations.
Situated about 2,000 miles (3,200km) from the headquarters of Bovino’s El Centro bailiwick, the Chicago mission represents – like Los Angeles – a drastically different urban landscape from the rural setting he and his agents are used to, posing potentially high risks, experienced law enforcement officers say.
“Border patrol is trained and at their most effective on the border or within 25 miles of the border,” said Gil Kerlikowske, who was the CBP commissioner during Barack Obama’s presidency and a former chief of police in Seattle.
“They are not trained in policing a city like Chicago or Los Angeles or Boston [and] they are clearly in the wrong venue. To police an urban environment takes really special skills. They work with senior officers to understand the community they serve.
“They don’t get parachuted in to Los Angeles or other cities marching to some type of rock music.”
That was a reference to some of Bovino’s self-promotional videos, portraying his unit on maneuvers in Los Angeles to a soundtrack of heavy metal music.
Another video depicts El Centro with a Star Wars theme, with Darth Vader slaying a list of foes that are popular Trump targets, including “fentanyl”, “invasion”, “fake news” and “sanctuary cities”.
Those themes, critics say, are out of character for border patrol chiefs, who generally adopt a neutral tone, and suggest that Bovino is signaling to Trump.
In a recent interview with a local California television station, Bovino declared himself “apolitical”. His actions and statements suggest otherwise.
Last month, he and his agents seemed to deliberately court controversy by patrolling outside a rally staged by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who has frequently sparred publicly with Trump on migration and other issues. The event was unconnected with immigration.
These remarks are really unheard of, but he’s playing to an audience of one and we’ve seen that before
Gil Kerlikowske, former CBP commissioner
“We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place, since we don’t have politicians who can do that,” Bovino said at the time.
Newsom branded the appearance “sick and pathetic”, dismissing Bovino’s claim that he did not initially know the governor was inside the building.
Bovino also clashed with Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, over the MacArthur Park patrol in July, an event local officials condemned as triggering unnecessary panic in a popular leisure space.
He justified the patrol by calling the park “the birthplace of MS-13”, an international criminal gang.
“That’s not their park. That’s Ma and Pa America’s Park,” he said.
He has dismissed Democrats’ criticism that the raids are targeting people seeking work to feed their families rather than criminals has likewise been dismissed as “uninformed” and “wishful thinking”.
“Those individuals come in, they may have a criminal history in their home country,” he said. “So, I don’t feel bad.”
He went on: “There’s something here that Bass and and the governor and the other folks haven’t seemed to touch on, [which] is look at the professionalism of DHS [Department of Homeland Security ] entities in our allied law enforcement agencies. Very few, if any, civilians hurt.”
In fact, the New York Times reported, two undocumented people have died trying to flee Bovino’s agents. A Mexican farm worker fell from a greenhouse and a Guatemalan day laborer was hit by a vehicle following a raid at Home Depot.
In another episode, the paper reported, they detained a disabled 15-year-old high school student in a case of mistaken identity after drawing their guns and handcuffing him, leaving unfired bullets on the ground.
The Trump administration appears untroubled by such incidents.
In fact, Bovino appears to have been signaling his readiness to serve Trump’s cause even before he returned to the presidency.
On 7 January, nearly two week’s before Trump’s inauguration, Bovino led a sweep of suspected undocumented people in Kern county, hundreds of miles north of El Centro’s border headquarters.
Bovino said his team had a list of targets, including many with criminal records, before embarking on the operation, codenamed Return to Sender. Over three days, agents detained laborers and farm workers in raids on a Home Depot car park, a convenience store, and along a main road between orchards that employed fruit pickers.
Bovino claimed the 78 people arrested had criminal records. But in an investigation, CalMatters reported that only one of those detained had a prior record with the border patrol agency. In an interview, Bovino made it clear that his definition of criminality included entering the US without proper documentation.
Trump’s incoming administration may have been impressed with the disdain for fine distinctions – and with Bovino’s willingness to target immigrant workplaces.
In May, berating senior Ice officials to intensify their arrest activity, Stephen Miller, Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff – who has spearheaded much of the White House’s immigration policy behind the scenes – urged them to target Home Depot and 7-Eleven convenience stores, in the manner of Bovino’s raid.
Now, bolstered by a US supreme court interim decision that allows immigration operations to continue using what critics say is racial profiling – and which a lower federal court had earlier ruled unconstitutional – Bovino’s star may rise higher still.
Kerlikowske, the former CBP commissioner, said his statements appeared to be fueled by a desire to win Trump’s favour.
“Everyone I’ve ever worked with at federal law enforcement level would pride themselves on working cooperatively with state and local officials, not making statements that local officials aren’t protecting you, or ‘we don’t answer to local officials,’” said Kerlikowske, who added that he would have relieved Bovino of his duties over the MacArthur Park episode.
“These remarks are really unheard of, but he’s playing to an audience of one and we’ve seen that before. He’d very much like to become the chief of the border patrol, and there’s no better way to do that than to get the favor of the president in the United States.”
Responding to an emailed inquiry from the Guardian as to why Bovino had been chosen for missions in cities far removed from his normal purview and what his goals were, a homeland security department spokesperson responded: “Stay tuned.” There was no additional comment.
