This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The Trump administration is removing Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino from Minnesota, after federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old VA ICU nurse, Saturday morning. Bovino has been the face of Trump’s roving paramilitary-style immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and other Democratic-led cities. Shortly after Pretti was killed, Bovino had claimed Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement,” a statement unsubstantiated by video and witness testimony from the scene. According to The Atlantic magazine, Bovino will return to his previous post in El Centro, California, is expected to retire soon.
This is President Trump speaking on Fox News.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You know, Bovino is very good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy. And in some cases that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here. But you have to understand, when I watch some of the people that I’ve been watching over the last few weeks, these are paid insurrectionists. These are paid agitators. These people aren’t normal, like, oh gee, that, you know, they’re incensed about anything.
AMY GOODMAN: The Border Patrol has taken on an outsized role in Trump’s crackdown in the interior of the country — operations historically handled by ICE alone. Border Patrol has a history of aggressive tactics and little transparency or scrutiny in the remote areas and border towns where they normally operate. The agency also has more authority to operate far from the border than is commonly understood.
To talk more about the role and history of the agency, we’re joined now by two guests. Jenn Budd is a former Border Patrol agent turned immigrant rights activist. She was a senior patrol agent in San Diego and an intelligence agent at San Diego sector headquarters from ’95 to 2001, when she resigned. Her work is featured in the recently released film Critical Incident: Death at the Border on HBO Max. And Todd Miller is with us, an award-winning independent journalist who’s reported on border security and immigration for over a decade. His most recent book is Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. He’s the editor of the independent journalist project The Border Chronicle.
And as we speak to you, Todd, as we booked you yesterday, yet another shooting by border police, this one on the border in your town, in Tucson. If you can talk about what’s happening and the country’s awareness, especially in the interior, hundreds away — miles away from the border, of what Border Patrol is doing, something you’ve been looking at for years, especially right on the border?
TODD MILLER: Thank you, Amy. Yes, yes. Yeah, in fact, yesterday, when we were doing the — when I was talking to the producers yesterday, that’s when I found out the news, too, that another shooting had happened by U.S. Border Patrol of a person in Arivaca, Arizona. And this is right as we’re contemplating these — Alex Pretti, you know, in Minneapolis, and how — and how he was basically executed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
And I can’t help to think, you know, that what we’re seeing with these different operations across the country, like the Operation Metro Surge, the operation in Minneapolis, or Midway Blitz in Chicago, is this extension of what we’ve been seeing, the sort of policies and practices that we’ve been seeing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands now for decades, and these policies and practices that — where we have to say that impunity is very much entrenched, that abuse is very much rampant, that — where different things are actually experimented on, like surveillance techniques and tactics and different surveillance technologies, and then is transported, extended into different parts of the interior.
It’s almost as if the border itself is imposed in these operations in places like Minneapolis, and it becomes what — a place where you have these counter — because you have to think of the DHS forces, when they first — as a counterterror, because it came right out of 9/11 — right? — a counterterror kind of domestic army, as one person has put it, that is now in — putting a sort of border landscape in our cities. And that’s the kind of connection I’m making myself from doing these — from decades of reporting on this and looking at what’s going on with these operations.
AMY GOODMAN: What has surprised you most in what’s happening now? And Greg Bovino being the one who is focused on, who is now being forced out, with Tom Homan’s coming in, who was there under Obama, well known for addressing white supremacist groups, who was one of the architects of the family separation policy in Trump’s first term in office, what this will mean?
TODD MILLER: Yeah, the switch from Bovino to Thomas Homan is really not much of a switch. I mean, looking at the only — the difference may be that Homan comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Bovino is definitely from Border Patrol. But in a sense, they’re both from the DHS apparatus, and it’s just like almost changing one image for another image with the same exact — I can only imagine that there will be similar tactics.
And one thing that I’ve — that’s really sort of surprised me, like, looking at these different operations across the country, I think back to, actually, the 1990s, when there was different Border Patrol operations, like Operation Gatekeeper or Operation Hold the Line or Operation Safeguard, and how that transposed the border policy to this massive undertaking of building up walls and surveillance and hiring tons of agents to be on the border to implement a prevention-through-deterrence strategy, that really has been a killing strategy, if you think about it, like deadly encounters. Besides deadly encounters, like fatal shootings. There’s been at least 10,000 people who have died crossing the border due to these strategies.
So, I’ve looked at these different strategies across the country and the lead — and the leaders of these strategies, like Bovino, and now Homan, and I can’t — I wonder, right? Is this another massive shift in these sort of policies that we’ve seen, that were — that was a massive shift in the ’90s, because we still have those now? Is this going to be the gateway into a new sort of border policy where the border is the entire country?
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Jenn Budd into the conversation. There have been 12 DHS shootings since September. Amazingly, since Renee Good was killed on January 7th, there were two more in between her being killed and — three more between her being killed and Alex Pretti being killed. If you can talk about your Border Patrol experience, albeit years ago? And particularly talk about what happened in 2010 with the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas and your observation of what’s happening right now.
JENN BUDD: Well, my time in the Border Patrol from 1995 to shortly before 2011 is exactly what I’m seeing right now. You just didn’t see it, the rest of America didn’t see it, because it was happening down here on the southern border.
And I would like to say that when people say that this isn’t the training or that they’re untrained, no, this is the training. This is what we’ve been doing for decades upon decades. The ramming of the vehicles, the injuring people, the shooting people and then lying about it is what happened prior to 9/11, and then really got a lot of juice after 9/11. So, you have to understand that the management of the Border Patrol has been corrupt for many generations, and then after 9/11 we just gave them money with little accountability and let them design their own accountability systems, which we then filled with our own agents. So, we make sure that when things are investigated, our own agents are actually the ones doing the investigations.
To fast-forward to 2010 when Anastasio Hernández Rojas was beaten and tased and killed by Border Patrol, CBP and ICE agents, the Border Patrol does not have the legal authority given to them by Congress to investigate their own use-of-force incidents. But the Critical Incident Teams were designed in the Border Patrol in 1987 to start being the ones that report at least first to the scene. And when you’re the first to report to the scene, then you can control the evidence. They literally will manipulate the evidence. They will get rid of witnesses, as we see what’s going on in the Good case and in the Pretti case.
So, when I look at these cases happening today, it’s the exact same thing as what we see in the HBO movie about Anastasio’s murder. And the sad thing about all this, too, is that in 2010, the chief of the Border Patrol who ran the cover-up of Anastasio’s killing was Rodney Scott, and now he is the head of CBP. And he, once again, controls these cover-up teams, which were rolled from Border Patrol into CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility. So, these teams are the same ones now doing the cover-ups for all of CBP.
AMY GOODMAN: And I want to end by asking you about this culture of death within Border Patrol. Over 10,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Talk about this high mortality rate, as we wrap up.
JENN BUDD: Well, I will say, Amy, that, that stat, that statistic, is from the federal government, and that is not true. It is not my experience. That number is way too low. The experience of people who find the bodies down here and people in Mexico with missing loved ones is — we think it’s about 80,000 since October of 1994. If deterrence worked, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about all of this. And so, essentially, our immigration policies have created a mass grave down here on the southern border, which, unfortunately, most of the media has ignored, and most of our congressmembers don’t seem to care. That is what our immigration system is. It is an obstacle of death for most people. And we do not allow people to present themselves legally. When people say, “Do it the right way,” there is no right way to do it, and there hasn’t been for quite some time.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Todd Miller, your final thoughts, with this massive influx of tens of millions of dollars into the recruitment campaigns and, overall, the immigration agencies, ICE and CBP?
TODD MILLER: Yeah, this year, the combined budgets of ICE and CBP are $33.5 billion, and that’s the largest it’s ever been. At first, it just barely ascended $30 billion, and when Trump — to give context, when Donald Trump — during his first administration, he started at $20 billion. So, you can see how much it’s grown over the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, ’til now. And it’s $33.5 billion. It’s supposed to be, in — this year, it’s going to be another, I think, about $34.5 billion. Now there’s this $170 billion influx into the budgets from the Big Beautiful Bill Act — I always get that wrong. It’s $170 billion. So, that, all this money, is going to go into more of what we’ve been seeing. And I’m afraid that the money itself is like going to the crystal ball to see what we have before us. So, with those sorts of — those are the challenges we have in front of us.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, we’re going to talk to a congressmember who’s making a decision about whether the funding should continue for ICE and CBP. Todd Miller, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning independent journalist, reported on border security and immigration for over a decade, and Jenn Budd, former Border Patrol agent turned immigrant rights activist. She was a senior patrol agent in San Diego.
