Tucker Carlson Interviews Gregory K. Bovino (Transcript)

It’s the basis of our country. It’s engraved on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. “Give us your tired and poor and people yearning to be free,” etc. “That’s the guy who does my lawn.”

Only Trump could change that. Or more to the point, only Trump did change that. And so in case you’ve forgotten, here is the last 10 years encapsulated in 4 or 5 soundbites of Donald Trump on immigration. Now, the first clip you’re about to see is exactly 10 years old. It was August 31st, 2016, exactly 10 years ago. Here’s Donald Trump.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

DONALD TRUMP: The fundamental problem with the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists, and powerful, powerful politicians. It’s all you can do. Let me tell you, who it does not serve. It does not serve you, the American people. Doesn’t serve you.

DONALD TRUMP: (00:06:32 – 00:06:46) Under my administration, anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country and back to the country from which they came. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation.

DONALD TRUMP: (00:06:53 – 00:06:58) That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise, we don’t have a country. Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone.

DONALD TRUMP: (00:07:18 – 00:07:20) And you can call it deported if you want. The press doesn’t like that term.

DONALD TRUMP: (00:07:22 – 00:07:25) You can call it whatever the hell you want. They’re gone.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:27 – 00:13:37) You know, it’s worth lingering over those words. And you wonder who wrote that. Sounds like a Stephen Miller speech. Much hate towards Stephen Miller, the old Stephen Miller, for writing things like that. We’re just guessing.

But let’s just consider these words. “The fundamental problem with the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists, and powerful politicians. Let me tell you who it does not serve. It does not serve the American people. It doesn’t serve you.” So how is that not true? Everything about that paragraph is true.

The immigration system was not designed to benefit the public. And if it was, tell me how it’s worked. There’s no net economic benefit to the way the United States has done immigration over the last 25 years. And if there is, what was it? How could a country that transitions from manufacturing to a knowledge economy and now to high tech, to an economy that doesn’t even really need labor — that’s the promise of AI — how does it need 100 million new low-skilled workers who don’t speak English? Tell me what need that serves. Tell me how the United States benefits from that. Ordinary people. Of course, there’s no sense in which the public benefits from that.

And you know that that’s true because the people who designed that system and have defended that system haven’t actually defended it. They’ve merely attacked anyone who questions that system. “You’re a racist. You just don’t like them because they’re not white.” Meanwhile, often in the same speech, they will say immigration is turning America nonwhite, and that’s great. And anyone who notices that is a believer in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which is anti-Semitic. Huh?

It’s not an argument in favor of immigration. It’s a control tactic designed to crush opposition to a program that on its face hurts the majority of the country and is certainly being enacted against the will of the majority of the country. And so way back 10 years ago, in August of 2016, Trump said that out loud. And that maybe more than anything, perhaps his opposition to the Iraq War retroactively. But let’s just say probably more than anything, his critique of the American immigration system and particularly his point, his true, impossible-to-refute point that it serves only the people who designed it and not the public. That’s why they opposed him.

And that itself is revealing because, in fact, Trump is making a kind of traditionally left-wing critique, a pro-labor critique. In fact, he’s making a species of exactly the same argument that organized labor made throughout the teens and ’20s. And that’s why after the First World War, in about 1924, at the behest of the labor unions, the United States essentially shut down immigration into the country. To keep the labor market tight, to keep wages up for the working and middle class. And that’s one of the main reasons that this country from then until 2015 under Barack Obama had a majority in the middle class.

That is no longer true. And the primary reason it’s no longer true is because labor markets were watered down by more people. It’s a supply and demand question. More willing workers, lower wages. And then the secondary effect, which is the total destruction of the native workforce. People born in this country, raised with a certain expectation of standard of living, drop out of the workforce entirely. They give up. And that has happened and it’s measurable. In fact, it’s one of the defining facts of the moment we’re living in, though it’s almost never noted. People born in this country, people who had conceivably relatives who fought in the Civil War, are dropping out of the workforce in record numbers. That’s one of the reasons we still have a tight labor market. It’s one of the reasons it’s hard to find help, because people born here are not working, and they’re certainly not working at the lower end of the scale.

So everything about Trump’s critique was not just right, it was spot on. And he rode that critique to victory in 2016, along with a couple of very specific promises. And you heard a couple of them right there. And we’ll add another, and that is build a wall. The 2016 campaign could be boiled down to one slogan: “build a wall.”

Well, of course, Trump didn’t build a wall, didn’t even make really a good faith effort to build a wall. And his supporters and defenders mostly ignored that. Me included, because most of them felt he probably wanted to. It’s just hard. And he got distracted and there was Russiagate. Most people who voted for Trump all 3 times and even the last time believed — in fact, I’ve never met anyone who voted for Trump who didn’t believe that he really did understand that mass migration is terrible for the United States, as it has been terrible for Europe. As it was terrible for Central Asia under the Mongols. It’s always terrible. It’s too much change too fast. And it destroys the preexisting culture every single time.

So we know that it’s not racism, that’s nature. And Trump knew that and he said it. And most people, people who hated him and loved him, thought he meant it as he said it. Why did they think that? Because he kept saying it. This is one feature of Trump’s program that remained consistent from 2015 all the way up until election night 2024. Here is Trump that year, that campaign, on stage with Kamala Harris in the now famous moment where he accused the Haitians of the Midwest of eating the dogs and cats. Watch.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

DONALD TRUMP: What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk.

DONALD TRUMP: (00:13:39 – 00:13:48) It’s not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.

DONALD TRUMP: They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:13:50 – 00:23:14) Really one of the great moments in political history. And of course, it worked on a couple of different levels. On a political level, this is what the kids call trolling. Trump says something knowing it will provoke outrage, blind outrage, in fact, blind rage, and that every liberal on social media will be spouting, just fuming, sputtering, spitting, huffing. And that anger will provoke them, his opponents, to take positions that are totally out of line with where the rest of the public is. In other words, by making them mad, he makes them more extreme, and that extremism sinks their ship in the end. It’s smart. It may be corrosive. It may be damaging long term. But as a political tactic, that works. And no one did it better. No one does it better to this day than Donald Trump. So on that level, it was a success.

But on a deeper level, it worked because there’s a lot of truth in that. Were the Haitians eating the dogs and cats in Springfield? I don’t know. They certainly could have been. Has mass migration, third world mass migration, made small towns in America better? Only people who’ve never been to those towns could claim it has. Anyone who’s actually been to those towns or lives in one or has gotten in a car and driven through lightly populated parts of the country in the last 15 years — what does it look like? It looks awful. It’s dying.

And the solution in state after state and town after town, city after city, beginning with Chicago, long our second biggest city, now our third, but in all kinds of cities, has been: the tax base is gone. You’ve got a lot of empty apartments. We’re going to fill them up with immigrants. And they’ve done that. And the effect has been devastating to the country.

It’s not an attack on those immigrants. Most of them are looking for a better life, whether or not they care about the United States. In many cases, they don’t. Many of them don’t even seek citizenship. They don’t care. They’re here to make money for their families back home. That doesn’t make them evil. Most of them aren’t evil. Some of them are criminals, but most of them aren’t. In fact, a lot of them are very hard workers.

So it’s not an attack on them to say that it has been utterly devastating to the communities in which they’ve moved or been moved because everything changes instantly. And what does that mean for the people who live in those communities, who grew up there, who had no role at all in this policy, who wouldn’t sign off on it if they’d had the chance, but of course were never given the chance? They weren’t even asked. It happened to them. People who live far away, who have more power than they do, impose this on them for reasons that had nothing to do with their well-being or thriving. It was a kind of punishment imposed from afar. That’s how they experience it, because that’s what it is. And they’re resentful about that.

That doesn’t make them racist. Most of them aren’t racist, whatever that means. By the way, the people throwing around the term racist never define it. But they’re not bad people. They’re not evil. They don’t hate others because of their skin color. They just don’t want their neighborhood to change overnight and become a foreign experience. Who would want that? And by the way, the people making these decisions never impose these decisions on their own neighborhoods. And if you don’t believe it, drive through their neighborhoods. Look up the 15 richest zip codes in the United States, and they’re also the most stable zip codes because they are not subjected to mass migration. So that kind of tells you the whole story right there.

Martha’s Vineyard looks a lot like it did 50 years ago. So does Nantucket. So does Brookline, Massachusetts. So does Aspen. If it’s so great, then why don’t they have 10,000 Haitians living in Martha’s Vineyard? Because it’s not great. That’s why. It’s not an attack on the Haitians. It’s the nature of mass migration, taking people from a completely different culture with no education, limited skills, and no money and dropping them into what was formerly a pretty prosperous, stable community. Who benefits? Not the formerly prosperous community. If you think that’s racist, then go away, because that’s absurd. It’s not. It’s real.

And Trump made that point. He was brave enough to do that, and God bless him for doing it. So because he said that and many things like that, normal people who don’t just dismiss all challenges to their worldview as racism or antisemitism, but try to critically assess what others are saying — those people said to themselves, you know, he’s onto something here. Like, what are we doing to Springfield, Ohio? Why aren’t we doing that to Bethesda, Maryland? Well, we’re not doing it to Bethesda, Maryland, because Bethesda, Maryland is rich and members of Congress live there. That’s why. And Springfield, Ohio, where is that? Who cares? That’s like post-industrial hell. We can do whatever we want to them.

And if we want to construct artificially a new voting base in the middle of Ohio, if we want to change it from red to blue or whatever our plan is, we just want to weaken America and divide it so it can’t oppose us collectively, which may be part of the plan. But whatever our aim is, we can do it in Springfield, Ohio, because who’s going to stop us? They don’t have a lobby in D.C. Mary Maitland doesn’t care what happens in Springfield, Ohio.

So that’s what happened. And everybody knows that. And let’s stop lying about it. And Trump was one of the only people not to lie about it. And of course, he expressed it in an artless, kind of retarded way, but it doesn’t make it less true. So it was on the basis of that and his opposition to foreign wars that got him elected in 2024.

So what happened then? Well, a lot happened then. On the other hand, not much happened then, as you’re about to learn as we talk to the recently departed head of Border Patrol, Greg Bovino, who spent 30 years in the Border Patrol and was hired early on to get our immigration system under control.

One of the things that happened is that there was turnover in who ran our immigration system. Now, it’s mostly run from Washington, of course, and ICE and the Border Patrol are the 2 main instruments. Take a look at the new head of the entire immigration enforcement operation. This is a former senator from Oklahoma called Markwayne Mullin, and he’s taken over in the last year. This is the guy Trump hired to deport over 100 million illegals. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

MARKWAYNE MULLIN: We have naturalization ceremonies every single day. In the United States that we’re in, that is, you know, federal government’s open. We have hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, over — we’re real close to 900,000 individuals that have been naturalized in the last 12 months. There’s a legal system to go through.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:23:14 – 00:28:20) Wait a second. This is the guy who runs Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, who was hired by Trump to deport all these illegals who came into the country over the last 20 years, but particularly over the 4 years under Joe Biden. 50 million, they told us. And here he is this month. That was August 4th of this month, sitting before the National Governors Association, bragging about how many of these people have become citizens. Almost 1.9 million. What was that? The promise? Did Trump run less than 2 years ago on the promise to give citizenship to people who came here illegally? Wasn’t it the opposite of that?

And if it was the opposite of that, why did he hire one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, one of the most pro-illegal immigration Republicans in the entire Senate? And that’s saying a lot. Markwayne Mullin to run deportation. This is starting to feel like a betrayal. Oh, but it gets worse. Here’s what Markwayne Mullin went on to say to the governors on August 4th of this year.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

MARKWAYNE MULLIN: I’m — what I’m saying is, let me work with you on this stuff. I’m not handling things like maybe the past secretary had. I’m just saying, let’s work to get the worst of the worst off the streets. And then you won’t see me in your cities and states like you do as much because my presence won’t be as big. In fact, you probably won’t even see us at all.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, we’re going to stop enforcing immigration law. We’re going to go after the worst of the worst, the criminals who, by the way, presumably could be rounded up by local or state law enforcement. Isn’t that their job? This is the head of federal immigration enforcement, the guy whose job was literally paid to enforce immigration law, laws that were passed by the Congress. These aren’t regulations that came out of the agencies. These are laws passed by the democratic process. In other words, you vote for someone so he can make a law that reflects your views and your values. That’s what democracy is. And he does.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:23:15 – 00:28:20) And then this guy is hired to make sure those laws are enforced. And here he is telling the 50 governors that actually, I’m not going to enforce those laws.

Now, if he worked for Joe Biden, this would be a scandal, would be on every Fox News show all day long. Here’s the head of the Department of Homeland Security saying he’s not going to enforce immigration law. Oh my gosh, they’re open borders people, which they were. This is Trump’s guy, Markwayne Mullin, making the same claim.

And so the point is really simple. The true betrayal of the second Trump term may not be foreign policy. That’s the most damaging thing Trump or any American president has ever done, beginning a fruitless war with Iran and thereby destroying our empire and probably our dollar. But in terms of a political betrayal, what Trump has not done in immigration is more profound because you probably won’t find a single Trump voter who disagreed with Trump’s views on immigration. And once again, this is why Trump was able to move from the private sector as a branding guy to the White House as an American president — was on the basis of his promises on immigration. So for him to betray those promises is profound.

And it’s understandable that most people who voted for him can’t metabolize this, don’t want to deal with it, want to believe we’ve sealed the border and everything’s fine. But at a certain point, it’s important to know exactly where we are. Not just speculate about it or cite some study from Yale on what’s the state of illegal immigration in the United States, but talk to the guy who ran it, Greg Bovino, who ran Border Patrol, who has the actual numbers on this question.

How many illegal aliens are in the United States? These are people who are foreign nationals who are living here illegally, who have broken the law to get here and are breaking the law in every single case, every single day, by using fake documents to work and collect benefits and send their kids to public school and to use the emergency room at public expense, etc., etc., etc. And these are not minor laws. These are core laws that if you broke, you would be punished for breaking.

So how many of those are there? How many were in this country the day Trump was inaugurated, January 20th, 2025? And how many are here now? What are the real numbers? No one has pointed this out. Democrats have no incentive to point it out. Of course, ICE shot a couple of protesters last year. And so the emphasis has been on that. They’re murderous thugs. Okay, we can debate that. Obviously, shooting unarmed people is bad. Never defend it. But that’s not the whole story. The whole story is that immigration enforcement in the United States has stopped, has stopped. And this fact, which is a central fact which will define what our country is like going forward, or even if it exists as a coherent country, is being completely ignored.

An Interview with Greg Bovino

TUCKER CARLSON: So without further delay, this is Greg Bovino, who just left the Trump administration, ran Border Patrol, has the actual numbers on this stuff, was there while it was happening. We believe he is telling the truth. You should listen carefully to this interview and you should pay special and very close attention to his description of what the administration is now trying to do to him. It’s shocking.

Greg Bovino. Greg Bovino, thank you very much for doing this. So just to kind of set it in context, what is the state of illegal immigration in the United States today, to the extent that we know — like how many illegal immigrants live in the United States, how many have been deported since Trump got elected, etc.? Like, where are we?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:28:21 – 00:28:22) Tucker, thanks for having me.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:22 – 00:28:23) Good discussion. Of course.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:28:23 – 00:28:38) State of illegal immigration, one word comes to mind, that’s catastrophe right now in the United States. I’ve got the number at 107 million illegal aliens currently residing with impunity, I might add, in the United States today.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:38 – 00:28:39) 107 million?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:28:39 – 00:29:04) 107 million. One quarter of the population. We’ve got 330,000 — approximately American citizens. Add another 107 million onto that. I think you can look around in any state, any region, or any city in the United States if you’re just a regular American citizen and say, well, you know what, there’s an awful lot of illegal aliens and foreigners in our country.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:29:05 – 00:29:30) Yeah, I mean, it’s a completely different country because it’s got a completely different population, and you’re discouraged from saying that for some reason. People are bullied into silence on the question. But I mean, it’s not the same country. It’s not even close. And better in some ways, worse in a lot of ways, but it’s totally different. And I assume that was mostly because of legal immigration, but 107 million illegal. Illegal.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:29:30 – 00:29:39) The ones that came right across that border. And not only over the past few years under the Biden administration, but look at what’s happened over the past 40 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:29:39 – 00:29:51) Why are we fighting a war with Iran? Sorry. Well, it makes me mad. Why are we using our $1.5 trillion military to fight a war across the world when we have 107 million illegal aliens in our country?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:29:51 – 00:30:28) We’ve said it many times in the Border Patrol: the war is on American soil. The war, the effort, that true effort is on American soil. So I agree with you on that 100%, Tucker, is the war’s on American soil. And it’s not a war to simply deport those 107 million illegal aliens. This is survival of the species, ladies and gentlemen. We are at that precipice of, are we going to remain the United States, the country of our values, traditions, and beliefs, or are we going to devolve into something completely different if we don’t do something quick and fight that war here on American soil? We’re there.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:30:29 – 00:31:07) But I mean, that was the whole point of getting Trump elected twice, was to stop illegal immigration. Build a wall, which he didn’t do. And then, okay, we’ll give another chance. 2024, hire Greg Bovino to run Border Patrol. Tom Homan, tough on immigration or whatever, like Stephen Miller. He means it. And the one thing you knew about Trump was we were going to deport people who are here illegally because they have no right to be here. They’re breaking the law. I go to jail if I break the law. But if you’re from a foreign country, you get subsidies to come here if you break the law. It doesn’t make any sense. But that hasn’t happened, has it?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:31:08 – 00:31:44) It happened for that very short period of time in the interior when the Border Patrol, the U.S. Border Patrol, was in the interior. And then with the surrender in Minnesota, it stopped. The 77 million voters that voted for mass deportations — I guess it, they didn’t matter anymore. But it does matter. It matters to you. It matters to me. It matters to the 77 million people. It matters to those 22,000 Border Patrol agents who put their life on the line in those cities to have that rug jerked out from under them by those Homans and those Commissioner Rodney Scotts.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:31:45 – 00:32:07) Okay. So now without getting — you know, the federal government is its own field of study. Okay? You could get a PhD in it and still not understand it. It’s the largest human organization in history. It spends $7 trillion a year. So it’s hard to understand what it is, but in terms that non-experts can understand, what is the difference between the Border Patrol and ICE?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:32:08 – 00:32:22) A vast difference. The U.S. Border Patrol is the uniformed branch of Department of Homeland Security. CBP and the U.S. Border Patrol, they wear uniforms. They wear a uniform just like a police officer you might see in a city.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:32:22 – 00:32:22) Right.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:32:23 – 00:33:16) They wear uniforms. They are the immigration police, the uniformed immigration police. Then we’ve got ICE. Border Patrol, and they’ve been around forever, right? Been here 102 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: And they’ve had that interior border mission for all 102 years. It was the U.S. Border Patrol, the Marine Corps, federal law enforcement, that expeditionary force that would go into the United States over those 102 years. And there are many examples of that, to deport up to millions of illegal aliens. It’s always been their mission. And right now that uniformed immigration force is standing shoulder to shoulder on the border, staring south, twiddling their thumbs. Largest Border Patrol in history, now taken off the table. The most highly trained immigration police that you have, taken right out of the game. Why would you take your pro squad or your varsity squad out of the game?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:33:17 – 00:33:45) I’m totally confused. So okay, so there are 2 parts of this question. There’s the border, the line between the United States and Mexico and Canada. And then there’s the question of illegal — the 107 million illegal aliens living in the country. So you often hear people say, well, we sealed the borders, so Trump succeeded. I don’t think that’s correct. I don’t think that’s what success is. But have the borders been sealed?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:33:46 – 00:35:37) The borders are under control more than they ever have been in my lifetime. However, when you don’t have that interior immigration enforcement, that mass deportation, what does that do to your border? What does that do to the cartels and the transnational criminal organizations that are going to push people across that border? No defense in history has ever been 100%. None will ever be 100%. What does that do? Well, you know, if I make it past those Border Patrol agents who are standing on the line facing south, I’ve got a freebie, Tucker. I got a freebie. I got a freebie because if I get into the interior, there are no mass deportations occurring. There is the worst of the worst and the targeted criminal enforcement that sounds so great. What illegal alien crossing the border is going to say, “well, gosh, I’m the worst of the worst, I better not cross”? None of them think that.

So what that does to your border is that makes your border less secure, and you will see that. Over a period of time that they are going to try and come across that border, and they will. They’ll succeed because all they have to do is make it into the interior. And once they make it into the interior, they’re up against ICE. You ask what the difference between ICE and Border Patrol is? ICE, fantastic. There’s some patriots there. I love the ICE agents. I worked with them for that year. Tough individuals. They got a tough mission. But remember, that is your non-uniformed immigration officers, the ones that go into jails and arrest known criminals, long-term investigations. They’re your plainclothes detectives.

Tucker, would you send New York City police detectives into the most violent situation that New York has ever faced and said, well, you’re going to go tackle violent street crime now and our uniformed police officers are going to stand by and do something else? No, absolutely not. Well, that’s what’s happening right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:35:37 – 00:35:42) So when did Border Patrol stop policing the interior of the country for illegal immigration?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:35:43 – 00:36:25) Well, most recently it was our surrender in Minnesota. But before that, you have to remember the U.S. Border Patrol had interior Border Patrol stations.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Places like Little Rock, Arkansas, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Amarillo, Texas, Dallas, Texas, all over the interior. It was because they were that interior immigration force when needed to go in and pacify a region, an area, or a city so that then those plainclothes detectives who do a great job could then take a pacified area and keep it pacified. That’s the way that whole thing has worked for 102 years. That’s been upended. That doesn’t happen now. Why is that?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:26 – 00:36:29) Well, you tell me, why is that? When did that stop?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:36:29 – 00:36:44) Minnesota. You know, the great — I call it the great surrender, the great surrender in Minnesota when Commissioner Rodney Scott and Tom Homan decided to come in. And who are they? That’s Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Rodney Scott.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:45 – 00:36:45) And what’s his background?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:36:46 – 00:36:48) Border Patrol. Career Border Patrol.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:48 – 00:36:48) Okay.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:36:48 – 00:36:49) Career Border Patrol.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:49 – 00:36:49) Should know.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:36:50 – 00:36:51) Should know what the Border Patrol is to be used for.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:52 – 00:36:54) And Tom Homan is who?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:36:54 – 00:37:53) He’s our border czar, a prior ICE official, spent his whole year with ICE. I believe he was a Border Patrol agent for about a year and then jumped on over to the plainclothes division there. So you’ve got those 2 individuals that — remember, they were silent, completely silent, for that year when those Border Patrol agents were battling it out in a 2-front war in those cities. A 2-front war. What’s the 2-front war? Battling the bad people and bad things, the cartels and the illegal aliens and the criminals. And then battling the Pritzkers, the Newsoms, the Mayor Basses, and the politicians. Where were they during that year? But then Minnesota, all of a sudden they show up and say, “hey, we’re here to save the day in Minnesota.” What was saving the day? Surrendering interior enforcement. They surrendered. That was saving the day. So your interior enforcement stopped the day the Border Patrol was sent out of Minnesota.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:37:53 – 00:37:55) And that was a decision that the president made.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:37:56 – 00:38:04) And I can’t say that was his decision because he didn’t — the president didn’t consult with me on that. I understood that it was —

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:38:04 – 00:38:05) He announced it anyway.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:38:06 – 00:38:37) Well, he announced they were coming to Minnesota. You know, I think it’s the president’s team that has that conspiracy not to conduct interior enforcement. It’s that team. I think he gets some bad information. He’s got some hellacious gatekeepers. I don’t give him much credit for doing anything immigration related because they’re doing nothing. But talking about a gatekeeper, in other words, someone that can control that information flow to the big man, they do one hell of a job.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:38:37 – 00:38:42) They’re doing nothing really for immigration enforcement inside the United States.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:38:42 – 00:39:24) No, it’s some targeted enforcement. You hear an operation here, an operation there. There was one in Maryland. I think they had 1,200 arrests last week, something like that. What that is, is we’re going to do an operation, spread that, splash that across the headlines, and gaslight America into thinking that’s what we do every single day all across the United States, when nothing could be further from the truth. Walk out on the street and look. Walk out on the street. Walk to a Home Depot. And take a look at what’s in the parking lot at Home Depot. Does it look like there’s mass deportations and interior enforcement occurring? Absolutely not. Because let me tell you, the illegal aliens sure aren’t scared right now. Not at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:25 – 00:41:10) So this has got to be the greatest betrayal in American political history because the whole Trump campaign of 2016 and 2024 were about immigration and about reducing the number of illegal aliens in the country. That was the whole campaign. So how many — just let’s bottom line it if we can. I mean, again, to the extent that we can know these numbers, how many illegal aliens were residing in the United States the day Trump was sworn in, would you say?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:41:12 – 00:41:15) For the second term, I would say 107 million then.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:41:15 – 00:41:17) And how many now would you say there are in the country?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:41:18 – 00:41:31) 105 million, because Kristi Noem and the U.S. Border Patrol did cause those self-deportations to occur during that year. Lines at the airport going south like you wouldn’t believe. That’s not happening now.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:41:31 – 00:41:35) You think there are about 1.5 million self-deportations?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:41:36 – 00:41:37) Approximately, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:41:37 – 00:41:39) How many deportations by force?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:41:40 – 00:41:43) 500,000 to 600,000, maybe.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:41:43 – 00:41:54) Maybe. Okay. So you think that after all of that and all the drama that ensued, that there are still 105 million illegal aliens in the United States right now?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:41:55 – 00:42:00) Absolutely. Absolutely. You bet. 105 solid. Could be more than that, even.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:00 – 00:42:15) Does anyone else know this? You know, because if you’ve got a population of 330, 340 million and 105 million illegal aliens, I mean, that’s like the craziest number I’ve ever heard. You really think that’s the real number?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:42:15 – 00:42:16) Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:16 – 00:42:19) And, you know, I guess you would know, right? Because you ran Border Patrol. Yeah.

Measuring the Numbers

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:42:19 – 00:44:09) And one, seeing what’s coming across the border and then juxtaposing that with what we saw in the cities and regions we were in. And then even taking a look at some of the numbers, something as simple as a traffic pattern. Charlotte, North Carolina’s got a fantastic example. Take a look at commuters going to work. Commuters going to work in Charlotte, when we arrived for that 5-day operation, Operation Charlotte’s Web, the commute went from terrible to exceptional.

So we started doing some studies. I had the staff — hey, do a study on the traffic. Let’s extrapolate some numbers. What does it take to have an exceptional commute to work? To do that, you need to remove about 30, approximately 30-35% of the commuters. And they took a look at the number of commuters going — I think it was, yeah, I want to say around 200,000. I can’t remember the exact number now, but 30%, what does that 30% equal? It starts equaling that 107 million, which is a similar percentage of the American population. What is that? You know, 25% of the American population.

So we looked at the commuters, and then we looked at absentee rates from Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. 30% of students didn’t show up in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. What does that start looking like? It starts looking like the 107 million is a pretty accurate figure. We saw the same thing in Chicago, the same thing in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, that commute went from terrible to better than exceptional. How many commuters did we take out of the equation in Los Angeles to make that drive in America’s worst, worst traffic — Trafficgeddon — to make it really good? And they’re like, wow, man, this commute’s really good.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:09 – 00:44:16) Think about what that took. So we have a crowded, poor country, which we do, because of illegal immigration is what you’re saying.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:44:16 – 00:44:54) I am saying that 100%. I think that a majority of our problems are downstream of immigration, whether it’s something as simple as a commute to work, but something more insidious and more important, such as affordability for housing for our young people. 107 million people in our country. What does that do to housing? What does that do to welfare, jails, schools, hospitals? What does that do to any service that an American citizen should think they have access to? It occludes it, occludes it to the point where they don’t have it. Take a look at our natural resources. I’m a big natural resource guy. I’m a conservationist.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:54 – 00:44:55) Well, I am too.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:44:56 – 00:45:52) Look at what’s happening to our natural resources. We had Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and they started that conservation movement along with Americans. That conservation movement’s over 100 years old now. It’s been destroyed in many areas of the country in 10 years. 100 years of conservation destroyed in 10 years. Entire ecosystems wiped out by illegal aliens.

Look at the ginseng harvest in our eastern forests. Many of those poor mountain families from where I’m from there in the Appalachian Mountains harvested ginseng for hundreds of years, since Daniel Boone all the way to the mid-1990s. They can’t do that anymore. Why? It’s been stripped. That ginseng has been stripped from those mountains by illegal aliens. “Hey, you know what? Let’s drop off 15 illegal aliens. We’ll scour the entire mountainside, take every single bit of it in a non-sustainable harvest and take it off.” But that’s everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:45:52 – 00:45:53) I’m getting too upset.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:45:53 – 00:46:05) Hey, Tucker, that’s not just ginseng. That’s everything. So I did a research paper on that back in 2012. They wouldn’t let me publish it in the Border Patrol. It was destruction of our nation’s natural resources by illegal aliens.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:06 – 00:46:07) Wouldn’t let me publish it. Why?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:46:08 – 00:46:10) They said it was too controversial. I told the truth.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:11 – 00:46:18) So it was too controversial for a Border Patrol agent to note that illegal immigration was destroying our natural resources?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:46:18 – 00:46:21) Imagine that. Yes. I tried several times.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:21 – 00:46:23) That’s just national suicide. That’s obviously — yeah, you bet.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:46:24 – 00:47:40) So every facet of our natural resources is under attack. You know, look, we’re having water problems out west. They’re telling us we’re running out of water. We’re running out of water. They’re telling us we may have rolling blackouts because we don’t have enough electricity. Everything is downstream of immigration, no pun intended. But the water problem out west, we can fix that. Oh, in about 2 years, deport 107 million of those illegal aliens taking your and my water and my resources. Problem solved.

Where’s Sierra Club? Hey, where’s all the environmental groups? They don’t seem to really care now all of a sudden. You know, I guess that’s okay. You know, if it’s illegal aliens, you’re not — not a problem. If Tucker Carlson or Greg Bovino drops a little bit of oil out of your car on the pavement, my God, hell’s to pay. It’s called the DSP, the double standard phenomenon, which is also rife in America. The double standard phenomenon. Illegal aliens get a pass. You don’t, because you’re one of those dastardly American citizens who is apparently the devil to the world, but an illegal alien that actually uses those resources and hurts your culture, your species — that’s okay. See it every day. And I think you do too.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:42 – 00:49:01) I couldn’t agree more. And that’s one of the reasons that I campaigned for Trump, that and no new foreign wars.

I just can’t get past the betrayal of all of this. There are still 105 million. And I think if you were to poll Trump voters and ask, I think a lot of them would say, I’m disappointed by this or that. But the one upside is immigration enforcement. I think if you told them that there are 105 million illegal aliens — not green card holders, illegal aliens have no right to be here — living here in violation of the law and living in almost all cases on public support, I mean whether it’s schools, roads, hospitals, or direct support from the states, I think they wouldn’t even believe you. I think Trump voters really think that the administration has done a great job on immigration because Fox News has told them that.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:49:46 – 00:49:48) Yeah, the gaslighting masterclass.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:49:49 – 00:49:49) Really?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:49:49 – 00:49:50) Masterclass.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:49:50 – 00:49:51) Give me an example.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:49:52 – 00:51:17) Well, again, the operations that they conduct. “Hey, you know what? Largest amount of illegal aliens or largest amount of aliens deported in the past 50 years just took place last week.” Hey, what are the numbers? I can’t seem to get the numbers. Your social media influencers can’t seem to get the numbers, but they’re sure touting the numbers out there. And what are the numbers? I haven’t seen the numbers.

If this is really happening, then how is it that 250 Border Patrol agents on those interior operations pretty much shut down large sections of the country where we didn’t see an illegal alien? They weren’t going to hospitals, jails, schools, or anything else because they were either self-deporting or buttoning up. That’s not happening now. So if what you say is really taking place, you would see the effects. Every American citizen would see the effects like they saw it over that past year during Operation Large, Operation Midway Blitz, Charlotte’s Web, Operation Catahoula Crunch, and then the surrender in Minnesota. You would see that. You would see it with your own eyes. It’s not some ethereal concept, Tucker. You can see that kind of thing with your own eyes. And American citizens that came up to us on the streets, come up to me on the streets now, they say, “gosh, it sure was a different story when you guys were out, when the Mean Green Team was out there on the streets taking it to them.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:17 – 00:51:17) Wow.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:51:17 – 00:52:58) Everything was different. We finally had hope. You’re not getting that now from people that are actually up against illegal immigration, most especially. And this is key here — our young people, those young conservatives. Now, there are a bunch of individuals that are seeing this. I get more comments and more rhetoric from them than anybody I have ever seen. They are not happy. Their future, they understand, is being taken away. It has been taken away.

And you know, Tucker, something very powerful here. One of those young conservatives came up to me and said, “you know, we’ve only heard stories of America.” I’m like, what do you mean the story of America? “We are America.” There’s no story. He goes, “we don’t know what America is. People like you tell us what America — people like Tucker say this is what America used to be like. We’ve only heard the story of America.” That was the most powerful thing I’ve ever heard, being a Border Patrol agent — is this young person that doesn’t even know what real America is because it’s been taken from them, a lot of it through illegal immigration.

And you know, they better wake up. Some of these people that have betrayed us, some of those gatekeepers that I just talked about, better wake up because there’s a lot of pissed-off people out there, especially the young. They did a big part in ensuring that there was somebody in office that would take care of immigration. Very unhappy campers right now. And I don’t blame them a bit. They should be unhappy. And they are sharpening spears, dancing around the campfire right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:59 – 00:54:06) They have every reason to. One measure of border security is the presence of narcotics that are manufactured outside the country. And cocaine is one that’s a pretty good measure because we don’t grow coca here. So all cocaine, at least the base cocaine, comes from outside the country, comes from the Andes.

So in 1985, the average cost of a gram of highly impure cocaine, majority baby laxative cocaine, was $100 a gram. And you had to drive to some sketchy area and roll down your window and buy it and risk your life. The price now in many American cities, particularly in Texas, is $50 a gram for almost totally pure cocaine you can have delivered to your house within like 10 minutes, no risk. So that tells me that we don’t have secure borders if the price of cocaine — and that’s not adjusted for inflation, those are just the straight numbers — $100 in 1985, $50 now. So that’s like, I don’t even know what the inflation adjustment would be, but that’s like $5 a gram in 1985 dollars. Clearly we’re not keeping drugs out, right?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:54:06 – 00:55:18) Exactly, exactly. And that’s where those mass deportations are so very important. That 107, 105 million is so very important. We saw that in those cities. Look at the double-digit drops in crime in those cities when those cocaine traffickers, when those human traffickers, whatever traffickers, couldn’t traffic anymore. Double-digit drops in crime when you take a — we’re not taking away the people that use it. A lot of those are American citizens dumb enough to do that kind of thing. But we’re just going to remove everyone that traffics it, that knows it’s being trafficked, has anything to do with it being trafficked. We’re just going to do away with them.

I think he did start out really good. He was blowing some drug boats up. The fentanyl kills a lot of people. That’s terrible stuff, just like cocaine and anything else. Hey, that was good. That was taking place simultaneously with us in those cities taking it to the illegal aliens. Hey, that gave me hope. I was like, wow, they’re actually bombing boats in the water. Well, if you’re going to take away Border Patrol from the interior, are you really going to be that serious? Are you going to bomb a boat and do what Rodney Scott and Tom Homan do? Do it one time, splash it across the headlines and say, “yeah, we’re really taking it to ’em.” And you did it one time.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:55:19 – 00:55:42) So I’m a little bit confused. So Homan, who I’ve interviewed several times, says he’s very against illegal immigration and has a pistol in an ankle holster and kind of seems like a rough and ready, no BS kind of guy who’s dedicated his life to fighting illegal immigration. You worked with him. Tell us, is that an accurate picture?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:55:43 – 00:57:12) You know, I’ll tell you, when you’re going to lead an effort to do something like that, inevitably, and it’s a must-do, you better have your ass out there on the front lines with your people, bleeding next to them, especially in the most violent law enforcement, domestic law enforcement mission that’s faced the U.S. in its history the most. And I’m even including Prohibition in this one now. Where were these individuals during that year of pure, unadulterated violence? I didn’t see him. Where was Commissioner Rodney Scott? Missing in action. Where was Tom Homan? Nice guy. Fun guy to talk to. Probably a great guy to have a whiskey with. Where was he? Ankle holster and all. Where were they? You better get your butt out there with your people, bleed, and be ready to make that ultimate sacrifice next to them. You’re not too good. None of you are. You better get out there and do that.

So I would pose that question back to you as my answer is, well, where were they? I never saw them. Not saw them, not once. Never even heard from them. Never had a conversation. Nothing. Silence. But they’re not silent now. Still not out there, but not silent. More of a — we’re going to take a soft approach. I guess maybe that’s the —

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:57:12 – 00:57:14) What does that mean, a soft approach?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:57:15 – 00:58:49) A soft approach means we’re not going to be out there doing those general immigration raids. We’re not going to conduct total spectrum immigration enforcement, which is what you have to do if you’re going to win this battle. Total spectrum immigration — that means everything brought to bear against that enemy. In other words, we’re talking about the war being fought on American soil. It’s going to take an effort like that, a total warfare. What they’re talking about is a limited form of enforcement. Sort of like World War II versus Vietnam. What’d we do in Vietnam? Well, you know, we’re going to do some precision limited strikes here and we’re not going to go total warfare and we’re going to lose. Whereas World War II, total spectrum warfare, whatever it takes, we do.

So that’s what the soft approach is — we’re going to do a precision strike. Hey, a precision strike, Tucker — precision strikes never won a war, by the way. It won’t. “Let’s do a precision strike there in Maryland.” They did that last week, made some good apprehensions. Those ICE agents are the greatest, love them. They’re like Border Patrol agents, patriots. But that’ll never win against 105 million illegal aliens. You have to do something else. You’re not going to put handcuffs on 105 million people. We’ve only got 2 years left to do that, by the way. You need to encourage and mandate those self-deportations and those large-scale efforts that it’s going to take. It won’t be neat, clean, and easy. Of course it’s not. We never said it would be. That’s what you have to do. A soft approach is the opposite of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:58:49 – 00:59:41) Why not just enforce ID laws? Like, we have AI, so how does anybody have a fake Social Security card or a fake driver’s license? And yet millions, tens of millions of people do. I don’t think I could get away with that. How were they allowed to get away with DSP?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:59:41 – 00:59:48) Double standard phenomenon. It is alive and well in this country. It’s one of those unenforced laws.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:59:48 – 00:59:57) But if you had a fake Social Security card and tried to open a bank account, I think you’d risk jail for that, right?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (00:59:58 – 01:00:03) No, absolutely. Absolutely. You bet. But who’s going to go after an illegal alien for that when —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:00:03 – 01:00:08) I don’t know, the Trump administration? Wasn’t he just elected to do this? Didn’t he get the majority of the popular vote to do this?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:00:08 – 01:00:10) Yes, absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:00:10 – 01:00:34) That’s not violent. You’re not shooting anybody. You can’t use fake federal documents. I’m not allowed to use fake federal — no, I’m serious. Like, why is that? How can you get on an airplane if you’re here illegally? I mean, they have facial recognition at the freaking airport. We’re all totally monitored at all times. So if you’ve got 105 million illegal aliens in your country, someone wants them there. Someone in power, like Donald Trump or whomever, is making these decisions. Like, what is this?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:00:34 – 01:00:36) What is this? It’s a farce.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:00:36 – 01:00:37) It is a farce.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:00:37 – 01:00:46) It’s a farce. It’s a slap in the face. And you know, it’s — but we can still win it. Here’s the thing, though. We can still win this.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:00:47 – 01:01:04) Well, you’ve got 2 years because the second — I mean, Democrats are about to take power in 2 months. And at that point, the chances that — and, you know, you think Republicans are going to win in 2028? I mean, after this war in Iran? No. So they’re all going to be legalized. That’s it. And then it’s just a totally different country forever.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:01:04 – 01:01:07) Done. If that happens, done. Every American —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:01:07 – 01:01:08) But how is that not going to happen?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:01:09 – 01:01:43) Well, we can still do it. We can still do it. Look, we’ve proof-concepted how to do this in the interior, with the U.S. Border Patrol leading efforts — the proof concept’s there. It’s just on a much larger scale. It’s also bringing Ma and Pa America into the fight, bringing the taxpayer into the fight. Remember, that was something in our strategy that was well in motion. You’ve got to bring them into the fight. Everyday citizens, like a Victory Garden in World War II. We’re going to do our part.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:01:43 – 01:01:54) But they think they’ve already won. They’ve been told by the administration and Fox News that this is the upside of Trump. All the downsides is the upside. You got what you wanted in immigration.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:01:54 – 01:02:32) Yeah, well, I’m here to say sorely mistaken and absolutely not. You’ve scratched the surface. But look around you. Look around and see what that’s like out on the streets. Look at what our African Americans are facing in those cities. I get so many calls from conservative Blacks saying, “you did the — please come back to Chicago or LA or wherever,” because that was the only first and only time that our community has really, truly had any assistance from anybody.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:32 – 01:02:34) They’re like, no one in charge cares about Black people.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:02:34 – 01:02:35) They don’t. Oh, absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:35 – 01:02:39) Their schools have been destroyed. The murder rate’s out of control. They’re being replaced by illegal aliens.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:02:39 – 01:02:40) And literally nobody cares.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:40 – 01:02:40) Nobody.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:02:41 – 01:02:42) Nobody cares.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:42 – 01:02:45) And their families have been here for 350 years and nobody cares.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:02:45 – 01:02:52) Nobody gives a damn. Nobody gives a damn about that. But you know what? I tell you, Pritzker, Governor Pritzker there in Illinois, he had a —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:52 – 01:02:52) He —

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:02:53 – 01:03:31) Once we started in Fourth Ward and some of those wards and the Black folks came out and were supporting us, you could tell they were getting a little edgy. They were like, “uh-oh, hey, they’re onto something,” you know? And what a great — what a great story for a Homan or a Rodney Scott, if they’re going to sit back in a safe seat in D.C., to talk about silence — silence, your own citizens coming out in force to support the U.S. Border Patrol, of all people, of all people. And what a story. What a miss. What a miss by that bunch of gate guards. Unbelievable.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:03:31 – 01:03:32) Who are the gate guards?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:03:33 – 01:04:48) 2 of them there I’ve mentioned. Yeah, 2 fantastic ones there. Like, they’re fantastic at guarding the gate, guarding that information. You bet.

I think if Trump knew what you and I were talking about — you know, I think if you or I could sit across from him and say, “hey, here’s the real deal that you haven’t been getting” — I think he might, you know what, I think he would actually reverse course. And the reason I say this is, look at what we did that first year. Once we started, hey, we got calls from Trump. He called the Border Patrol. He called us, man, “you guys are doing great. Kick their ass. We’ve got your back. Kick butt. We’re going to take this thing.” He said that. Gate guards come in, you know. So I think Caesar was probably up against that there many thousands of years ago. Same thing. You can see the jackals and the hyenas. They always come in, nip at the tendons. And I think that’s what happened. I think that if he was to hear what was really going on here, what Americans are thinking and saying, hearing these young people out there and then hearing some of the conspiracies that have actually taken place under his watch by those individuals, he’d be like, “wow, wait a second.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:04:48 – 01:04:49) Like what?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:04:49 – 01:05:14) Well, you know, surrender in Minnesota. You know, people say, “hey, Bovino, you retired.” I did. I retired. That neat, clean, and easy. I was just a little tired and decided to retire. Hey, Tucker, I got some gas in the tank. There’s no retirement there. If they want you gone, if those gate guards want you gone, you better watch out. They’ll come for you. They will come for you. Come for your retirement. They’ll come for everything.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:05:15 – 01:05:16) And did that happen to you?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:05:17 – 01:05:36) Absolutely. Every bit of the way. Every bit of the way. You know, when you play a hard game, you can expect hard treatments. I get that. But not a 2-front war. Hard treatment should be me and the criminals, not the 2-front war with me and the folks that are supposedly your friends. You know, the minute I get —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:05:36 – 01:05:36) The minute I —

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:05:36 – 01:06:10) The minute I left, security detail gets pulled. I’m one of the highest, if not the highest, threat in DHS. Death threats. I mean, you name it, man, they’re coming. “Hey, take that guy on a security detail. We’re going to shut that guy up.” Stroke of midnight came. Those Border Patrol agents refused to leave my house, and I had to direct order — hey, no, you’re leaving, because I’m not in the Border Patrol anymore. And you know what? I knew this. I didn’t say that to them. They’ll come for you also. They’ll come for you also.

Threats, Doxxing, and Retaliation

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:11 – 01:06:13) So the administration — yeah, absolutely.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:06:13 – 01:06:14) Yes, you bet.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:15 – 01:06:39) But Anthony Fauci still has federal security. We’re paying Anthony Fauci’s security detail. He doesn’t work for the government anymore. He spent his whole life on the federal teat and he still has Secret Service protection. Anthony Fauci, who committed crimes, but you don’t, because the administration didn’t want you to have security? Why?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:06:40 – 01:06:41) I think to silence me. Because —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:41 – 01:06:43) Silence you, like get you killed? Because that’s what it sounds like.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:06:43 – 01:07:01) Do I think they want me dead at this point? Yes. I’m in a running battle every time I go out. I mean, every time. The citizens of my own community are like, “what is going on with you?” These people come up — there’s some crazies out there, you know. You know this, Tucker. And you bet, do I think they want me killed? Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:02 – 01:07:03) You mean the administration?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:07:04 – 01:07:20) Yeah, absolutely. Or, or more of the gate guards. I don’t think Trump would. I think if Trump knew what they had done and what they would do to Border Patrol agents or ICE officers or anyone that disagrees with them, I think he would have an absolute panic attack or a heart attack over something like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:20 – 01:07:21) But you think Homan wants you dead?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:07:22 – 01:07:26) I think Rodney Scott — he’s the one that took my security detail away, with Homan there. Yeah, absolutely. You bet.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:27 – 01:07:34) Why? You know, that’s a pretty heavy thing to say. And if I wasn’t from Washington, I probably wouldn’t believe you. But I do believe you since I am.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:07:36 – 01:07:49) Sure. Well, you know, I wouldn’t have believed it either. But with what was coming at me the minute I retired, I thought, well, yeah, I’ll probably get some security there. You know, they’re coming after other family members as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:49 – 01:07:50) Your family members?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:07:50 – 01:08:22) Absolutely. Through the mail. There was one point where the FBI had to intercept every single piece of mail because there were some bad things coming in the mail, that kind of thing. And just the vast amount of death threats. I got doxxed yesterday by WBTV Channel 3 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

TUCKER CARLSON: And in what way?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Trying to name home addresses.

TUCKER CARLSON: They got that actually?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Oh, yes. Yes, you bet. Now, I’ve got a different address with my girlfriend out at a different place. But they did do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:22 – 01:08:26) And when that happens over and over and over — what can you name the channel again?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:08:26 – 01:08:28) WBTV Channel 3.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:29 – 01:08:35) Why would it be part of the news gathering process to put your home address on a TV channel?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:08:37 – 01:09:08) You know, I think that’s something that we saw in those cities with an absolute out-of-control, so-called news media. They’re not a news media when they do things like that — they’re not a news media, they’re a propaganda arm. They’re an enforcement arm at that point. An intimidation arm. Yeah, you bet. But the only problem is I’m not intimidated, or I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Hey, they tried to take my legal representation away, or probably already have.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who did?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: That was Homan and the gate guards.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:09:09 – 01:09:20) Your legal representation? In other words, if you’re sued for actions taken in your official capacity at Border Patrol, you don’t get legal representation?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:09:21 – 01:09:32) You’re supposed to, absolutely, if it was under the performance of your duties, under the color of law. And you weren’t doing something illegal, right? Yeah, then absolutely, every minute of the day. But apparently others don’t see it that way.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:09:33 – 01:09:33) How do you know that?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:09:34 – 01:09:43) You know, I got a call from another Border Patrol chief, a retired chief, who got a call from them saying, “hey, if you don’t stop, we’re taking it away.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:09:43 – 01:09:49) Stop what? Stop coming on Tucker Carlson and pointing out that there’s still 105 million illegal aliens in the country?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:09:50 – 01:09:58) You bet. And, uh, Homan did that? His people. Yeah, I can’t say he did. His people, yes, you bet.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:00 – 01:10:04) Well, again, I’ve interviewed the guy a number of times. I hope he’ll come back. I’d love to ask him about this.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:10:04 – 01:10:09) Absolutely. Yeah, maybe that would — hell, I’d like to ask him about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:09 – 01:10:26) Have you talked to him since you left?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I’d love to put a finer point — I mean, first of all, what you said is shocking. Everything you’ve said is shocking, and really, really distressing and dark. If you think Homan and this other guy want you dead, I mean, that’s like, it’s unbelievable.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:10:26 – 01:10:27) No, proof’s in the pudding.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:28 – 01:10:28) I think it’s fair.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:10:29 – 01:10:30) But why?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:30 – 01:10:33) I’d love to know a little more precisely why they’re so mad at you.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:10:35 – 01:10:40) I think when we have big labor — or, I’m sorry, cheap labor — politicians.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:41 – 01:10:41) Yeah.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:10:41 – 01:11:03) Who are a very powerful force. I didn’t realize they were this powerful. Very powerful force. That puts a lot of pressure on some individuals, and some individuals may — maybe they want the lucrative contracts also. I don’t know. I can’t say that for sure. But there’s something there behind the scenes that causes that to happen. It doesn’t just happen just for the hell of it. “Hey, let’s have Bovino dead.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:11:03 – 01:11:31) But not because voters want it. Voters wanted to get back to the sort of pre-lunatic American population. They don’t want to live in a crowded, poor country. Who wants that? Nobody wants to live in Bangladesh. So this is nuts. And that’s what voters wanted. That’s why they elected Trump. That and no new foreign wars. And then the donors convinced Trump to fight a foreign war that voters did not want. And it sounds like — don’t donors also push Trump to stop immigration enforcement?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:11:31 – 01:11:31) Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:11:32 – 01:11:33) You think that’s true?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: I do.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:11:33 – 01:11:48) Absolutely. You bet. I mean, look at some of the politicians that came out against me or Kristi Noem specifically after the surrender in Minnesota. The Kennedys out of Louisiana, or McCaul, Representative McCaul out of Texas.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:11:49 – 01:11:49) Mike McCaul?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:11:50 – 01:11:52) Yes. Why would they say those things?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:11:52 – 01:11:54) Like, what did McCaul say?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:11:54 – 01:12:00) I believe he said that we were out of control and too aggressive, something like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:12:00 – 01:12:26) Do you find it interesting? So McCaul is a tool of the intel agencies, I happen to know. And I mean that. And I hope he’ll come on and explain how I’m wrong, but he knows I’m not wrong because I’ve talked to him about it directly. But I have noticed a connection between the people who are not very loyal to the United States and very into fighting wars on behalf of other nations. They’re also very against immigration enforcement. I’ve noticed that. Have you noticed that?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:12:27 – 01:12:41) I have. And some of the people — and I’ve noticed that over my career, some people that I would think, “oh, they’re going to be good on immigration” — the worst. I remember when Bush was elected, we were rejoicing in the patrol. We thought, oh man, this is going to be great. He was just as bad as Billary Clinton, or worse.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:12:42 – 01:12:42) Of course.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:12:42 – 01:12:50) Worse. Again, the two-front war, stabbing you in the back while you’re out fighting bad guys. Same thing now, except worse. Even worse than —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:12:50 – 01:13:10) But Bush was very much like this administration. You know, spent all of its time, all of its — our money, all of their energy fighting a war in the Middle East, and then they’re for changing the American population with illegal immigration at the same time. It’s so weird. I don’t understand the connection. All of it is bad for America. Maybe that’s the connection.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:13:11 – 01:14:58) Tucker, this is, in my opinion, of course, the greatest issue and greatest threat that our nation has faced since its founding. Of course. And I’m including the Civil War in that. I think the Civil War is child’s play compared to what we’re facing now, because this ends it all. 105 million illegal aliens get amnesty and start voting, which it appears that the Thom Tillises, the McCauls, and the rest of that gang want. When they start voting, everything’s gone. If you think your Second Amendment’s good, it’s gone. That Second Amendment’s gone. Everything’s gone. Everything that you hold dear, your culture, your values, traditions, everything — they don’t care.

You know, Tucker, they don’t care about your history nor American history, because — that which is — Robert Heinlein said it best. He wrote Starship Troopers. “That which is given has no value.” That which is given has no value. We just gave them citizenship. They will hate you for that. They’ll abhor you for that. They do abhor us for that. You can already see it. The entitlement mentality. It’s not entitlement. They just hate Americans because we’re stupid enough to do it. And when you give someone something like that, they don’t care if your granddad died at Iwo Jima or your great-great-great-grandad at Gettysburg, or maybe you had an ancestor that was a founding father. They could give a damn about that. They don’t care.

When that ceases to be a reality here in our country — and you’re in my country — you’re done. Right now, we’re at the precipice of either solving or bowing down to the greatest threat that we have ever faced since the founding.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:14:59 – 01:15:40) I strongly agree with that. It seems very obvious, and that’s why there’s so little national cohesion. The upside, however, for the people in charge, is an immigrant population is much easier to control. They don’t believe that the Bill of Rights is real or applies to them. They don’t have natural rights. No one’s told them what that is. So you can kind of do whatever you want to them and call yourself the hero of the story. And you see it with rich people and their housekeepers, who all secretly hate them, but they’re totally convinced that, you know, “Catalina loves me, I’m the hero to her.” There is a kind of psychology, the rich white lady psychology, around this question.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:15:41 – 01:15:51) The Democratic plantation owners, the new plantation owners. And that’s the way they even act — like, these elitists, these fringe left liberal socialists, act like plantation owners.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:51 – 01:15:52) Oh, I know.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:15:52 – 01:15:57) It’s absolutely amazing the way — what they do. And you talk about racist.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:57 – 01:15:58) Holy cow.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:15:58 – 01:15:59) No, they’re the worst.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:16:00 – 01:16:39) Yep. Yeah. No, I’ve seen it so much. So how did — when Kristi Noem left, was forced out, and then replaced by one of the slowest, famously one of the slowest, but certainly one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate, Markwayne Mullin, which he is, he’s extremely liberal, and because he’s from Oklahoma, nobody seems to get that, but he is, particularly on immigration and foreign policy. I mean, it’s like giving it to Lindsey Graham. How did that happen? Why would you put Markwayne Mullin, a liberal, a Kamala Harris liberal, in that role?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:16:40 – 01:17:12) Well, exactly. I think when we talk about those donors, that donor class — yeah, getting someone confirmed, why would you not put a liberal in? You’re going to get enough votes from the crazy Democrats, and then you’re going to get the support from the big labor RINOs, just like they did with Commissioner Rodney Scott. He sailed through the confirmation. Folks, you know what? He’s bringing back Biden-era individuals into CBP right now as we speak. The ones that let the 30 million in, actually.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:17:13 – 01:17:14) Does the White House know this?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:17:14 – 01:17:19) You know, I don’t think — again, I think the gate guards keep it so guarded. I don’t think they know.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:17:19 – 01:17:21) Where’s Stephen Miller? I thought he was this big immigration hawk.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:17:21 – 01:17:25) I don’t know. Hey, Stevie, you bet you got some work to do there, buddy. Got some work to do there, Stevie.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:17:25 – 01:17:32) But I’m just confused because wasn’t this the issue that defined them?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Yes, yes, it was.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:17:33 – 01:17:55) So that’s how someone like a Mullin is put into a position like that. There are a certain class of people that love a Mullin. Hey, you know, Mullin, what is he listening to? He’s listening to Tom Homan, Rodney Scott — worst of the worst in targeting. That’s really all he can regurgitate.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:17:55 – 01:18:01) And so for people who haven’t heard that talking point, that means we’re going after the really bad ones.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:18:01 – 01:18:10) The really bad ones. Worse — the criminal aliens, the terrorists, child molesters, folks that have committed murder, whatever. The worst of the worst.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:18:10 – 01:18:17) People who have criticized Israel, stuff like that. Really, the ones who deserve the death penalty. That’s —

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:18:17 – 01:19:20) And I will say that that is the opposite of what we should be doing. That is not a threat to your nation. Let me say this again. A lot of people think I’m crazy. That’s not the threat to your nation — the worst of the worst. The threat to your nation is your run-of-the-mill illegal alien that we’ve just said, the 105 million that don’t share your cultures, your values, that don’t care about anything related to America, that have been given — that want to be given citizenship. That’s far more of a threat. Hey, we can get those criminal aliens anytime. That record’s not going away. We can get them anytime. Anytime. Right now we’ve got that window to get that regular run-of-the-mill illegal alien, maybe a landscaper, maybe he doesn’t have a criminal record in the U.S., even though he’s still a criminal because he crossed the border illegally. They’re all criminals. He probably does have a criminal record in a foreign country that we won’t know about. But that is far more of a threat to you, me, and our values than an MS-13 gang.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:20 – 01:19:58) Well, it’s certainly a threat to our justice system because I’m like, why should I obey the law? Why am I going — why do I have a seatbelt alarm in my car? Constantly getting lectured about everything all the time from everybody in authority. $18 a pack cigarettes, just like an unaffordable life. And a legal code that you have to hire a lawyer to understand whether you’re in compliance, and you better know whether you’re in compliance because you go to jail or get fined if you’re not. And then 105 million people get to just give the finger to the U.S. code and nobody does anything about it. It’s like, why am I obeying the law? What? Why does that make sense?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:19:59 – 01:20:39) Not a lick of sense. But what it is, is it’s a litmus test. The litmus test took place over this past year with that interior enforcement campaign. “Hey, you know what? We don’t agree with that law. We don’t agree with the immigration laws that are enshrined in the INA, the Immigration and Nationality Act. And those court decisions and the Constitution and everything. We don’t agree with that, sir. We’re going to riot and we’re going to martyr, whatever we’ve got to do, because we don’t agree with that law.” That’s a litmus test. Because if you don’t agree with an immigration law and do away with it, do away with the Border Patrol, surrender — you can do that with anything. You can do that with any law. It’s not just that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:39 – 01:20:40) It’s just mob rules.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:20:40 – 01:20:41) Mob rules. Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:41 – 01:20:43) The most violent group gets to do whatever it wants.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:20:43 – 01:21:20) It does. You and me will pay the price if we do something right now. You’re right. They’ll be on us in an instant. But the 105 million, not so much. Back to the natural resources — I’ve interviewed many game wardens throughout the 50 states, and they said, you know, a lot of times we won’t even write up an illegal alien because, one, we don’t know who he is. Or if we do, he beats us out of court. He walks out of the courtroom before we even do. Nothing happens. I’m not going to waste my time doing that. Now, you or me, we do something wrong, you’re done. You’re done. And —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:21:20 – 01:21:23) Oh — oh, yeah.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:21:23 – 01:21:24) You’re done. And —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:21:24 – 01:21:33) Try shooting a ruffed grouse on a Sunday in the state of Maine, as a legal resident.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. No, I know.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:21:33 – 01:21:44) But gillnet 100 fish as an illegal alien — that’s what they’re doing now. Because they see our natural resources as something for them, not something to conserve, preserve.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:21:44 – 01:21:45) Gillnet.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:21:45 – 01:21:56) Gillnet. They’ll just throw a gillnet in the water. You know, during this, when I was writing this research paper, I was appalled at actually what was happening. They’ll gillnet fish, catch 50 of them, when you actually gillnet fish.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:21:56 – 01:21:57) Yes.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:21:57 – 01:22:01) And you or me, our limit may be 2 or 3, or whatever the limit is.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:01 – 01:22:11) I don’t kill any fish, and I think I might shoot someone for gillnetting. Like, that’s — I mean, that’s immoral, and I’m not for shooting anybody, but I would be tempted to shoot someone for gillnetting. That is so outrageous.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:22:11 – 01:22:13) It is. Happens all the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:13 – 01:22:14) Seriously?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:22:14 – 01:22:19) Yes. Yes. You know, I wish I’d brought my paper. I’ll send you a copy of my paper.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:19 – 01:22:21) I don’t want to read it. And I’m so upset just hearing it.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:22:21 – 01:22:27) All facets of our conservation effort are under siege. All facets.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:27 – 01:22:30) Like destroying God’s creation in our country.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:22:30 – 01:22:40) Yes. And destroying our sustainable resource. You know, we’re sportsmen, sportswomen, because we have a sustainable system of producing this. But you know what?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:40 – 01:22:40) Tell me about it.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:22:40 – 01:22:49) Do you think that the third world gives a crap about that? No. Because they don’t do it in their countries. So they come here, see ours. They don’t have to obviously pay attention to our laws.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:49 – 01:22:53) What’s the Trump administration doing to fix the problem you’re describing right now?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:22:54 – 01:23:15) They’re letting illegal aliens go during operations. They let 20 go in North Carolina 3 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago last Sunday, on one of our Wild and Scenic Rivers. I think they apprehended 10. They allowed 20 to walk in one of those Wild and Scenic areas in which resources were being destroyed.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:16 – 01:23:16) Are you serious?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:23:16 – 01:23:36) Yes, absolutely. I tweeted about it, or X’d about it, or whatever that is. And they said their systems were down, their computer systems were down. Probably these individuals were not single male adults and would have been a little harder to remove, or they would have had to put females in detention. And apparently, you know, you can’t do that if you’re an illegal alien female.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:36 – 01:23:40) Why do people go to detention? Why don’t they just bring them to the border of Mexico where they all came from?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:23:41 – 01:23:48) Exactly. Or fly them right from the spot. Exactly, I agree. Or put them on a big container ship and drive them across the ocean. Whatever you need to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:48 – 01:23:48) Yes.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:23:49 – 01:23:53) But they allowed 20 to walk. They won’t answer that question. I posed that question, put it up on my X.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:54 – 01:23:55) No wonder they want to kill you.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:23:55 – 01:24:04) Yeah, probably so. Yep. I think that if they could — or not them, but if it happened, I don’t think they’d be too sad.

How Bovino Left the Border Patrol

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:04 – 01:24:08) So how exactly — you said you didn’t retire, you got fired. How did that work?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:24:09 – 01:24:20) You know, after Minnesota, I returned to my sector, and that was the El Centro sector. We call that the premier sector in the U.S. Border Patrol. Got to give a plug to those folks out there. Premier sector.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:20 – 01:24:20) El Centro, California.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:24:20 – 01:24:23) Yes. That was the sector under Biden.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:23 – 01:24:24) So that’s east of San Diego.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:24:24 – 01:24:26) Between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:26 – 01:24:29) Yep. It’s a tough, tough place.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:24:29 – 01:25:14) Rough place, but hotter the fire, harder the metal. That was your interior staff out of the El Centro sector. Those folks controlled our part of the border under Biden. We didn’t prescribe to throughput and decompression. That was push as many in as you can. Well, we didn’t disobey orders, Tucker. It was through pit and decompression the other way, back into Mexico. And guess what happened? Nobody wanted to cross the border in El Centro. We smashed them, including the Red Chinese and anybody else that came across the border.

So anyway, I get back to El Centro right after Minnesota, and the investigations begin. And I’m thinking, what are you people doing?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:14 – 01:25:16) Investigations of what?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:25:16 – 01:26:38) The first one that came down the pike was — you might remember, the Chicago judge said that I lied in a courtroom. That’s death for a law enforcement officer to lie. That’s — you’re done. That’s lack of candor. Yeah, they’ll get you every time on that, as they should. You shouldn’t lie. Well, I didn’t lie in a courtroom, by the way. I’ll set the record straight on that one. Told the truth every minute. But simply because a federal judge said that, even though her entire decision was vacated by the higher court — they said what your whole ruling is, is ludicrous, and you’re actually constitutionally suspect, by the way, which should be death for a crazy judge — but the investigation, hey, you know what, we’re going to investigate you for lack of candor, lying. And I’m like, huh, wow, that whole thing was vacated. What are you talking about? Doesn’t matter, you’re getting investigated.

So they sent that case to something called a DRB, Disciplinary Review Board. DRB says, you know what, that’s a panel of leadership within Customs and Border Protection that takes a look at disciplinary cases. Highly unusual for the commissioner to send that case straight to a DRB with no investigation. The DRB, that review board, looks at it and says, you know what, there’s nothing here. We see absolutely nothing here.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:26:39 – 01:26:40) Send it back.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:26:40 – 01:27:13) Case should be closed. Well, that commissioner says, well, you know what, let’s take another shot at him. I’m going to weaponize Internal Affairs on this one. “Hey, Internal Affairs, this guy lied. Open an investigation on him.” When it gets to that point and they start coming after you like that, I’ve been in the federal government long enough to know what they’re — they’re coming after your retirement. They’re not just coming to fire you. They’re going to take your retirement, your pension, everything. So I get a lawyer and he says, you know, I’ve never seen anything like this before. You better get your ass out of the federal government real quick.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:13 – 01:27:14) Seriously?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:27:15 – 01:27:33) Yes. But I don’t run too easy. And I said, you know, I think I’m going to fight this one. Because, hey, it’s cut and dried. He goes, “don’t you put a period on a piece of paper and they’re going to say you lied.” And then the second investigation came down. You may have remembered — they accused me of antisemitism.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:34 – 01:27:35) I don’t remember that.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:27:35 – 01:27:36) That was out of —

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:36 – 01:27:39) I think most Americans have been accused of antisemitism.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Yeah, of course.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:27:39 – 01:28:11) You know, another one, they said that I made some antisemitic comments to the U.S. attorney there, in Minnesota.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: Absolutely not. I never talked to him when I made the comments. I was talking to some of his staff who quit the next day and then doxxed me, because they didn’t agree with the way the Border Patrol — that the Border Patrol was even in Minnesota. It’s crazy stuff. You can’t believe this stuff happens. Well, anyway, they said, “hey, antisemitism,” and the New York Times ran with it.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:28:11 – 01:28:13) What did they say you said?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:28:13 – 01:28:36) They said that I said the Jewish people were the chosen ones, but that I said it in a very sarcastic tone. I guess that must be antisemitism, you know. I don’t know, it was straight out of the Bible study from, oh, about 1976 in North Carolina. “Hey, Jews, chosen ones.” I can say that all day long. That’s not antisemitism. I think it’d be the opposite if I said that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:28:36 – 01:28:44) So anyway, we’re in the corner of the Republican version of George Floyd here though, where everyone is accused of some bias crime.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:28:44 – 01:28:44) You bet.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:28:44 – 01:28:50) Except it’s now antisemitism, not racism, because nobody cares about Black people anymore. But it’s the same thing though.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:28:50 – 01:29:08) Absolutely. So I didn’t even know I was under investigation for this until the New York Times informed me. “Hey, since you’re under investigation for antisemitism, would you like to make a comment?” They called me and I was like, what are you talking about? My own agency didn’t even tell me. I found that out through the New York Times reporter that called me.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:08 – 01:29:13) Under investigation for antisemitism? The Trump administration did that to you?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:29:13 – 01:29:15) CBP. Well, Customs. I don’t think Trump knew about it.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:15 – 01:29:16) No, but it’s the federal —

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:29:16 – 01:29:17) The administration.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:17 – 01:29:18) Administration. Yeah.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:29:18 – 01:30:08) So I found that one out, and I’m like, wow, this is interesting. This is interesting. So then, to make a long story short, some special agents show up at my house, say — you know, start knocking, banging on the door. Like, what’s going on? What’s going on here? My security team says, we don’t know what’s going on. What’s going on? I didn’t answer the door. I don’t need to answer the door. They were there for my computer, which I was retiring the next day. They said they wanted it right that minute. I never talked to them. They get the orders from somewhere in D.C. “Well, just go ahead and smash the guy’s door in and make entry.” Luckily, the U.S. Border Patrol was there and said, “hey, it’s not the way that thing works,” and they got sent packing. That was what was happening there. It’s time to retire.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:30:09 – 01:30:24) You know, this is so crazy. I can hardly — and I mean, as far as I know, you didn’t do anything other than believe the campaign promises the rest of us believed in 2024 and thought, okay, here’s a chance to do what voters have asked their government to do.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:30:26 – 01:31:15) Yeah. Hey, you know, when you’re given a mission, you go hard at it and no regrets there with the mission. Regrets with how I handled some of those gate guards and the administration. You know, I would like to — I think I could have taken a more active role in briefing Trump face to face on some of this. I think that had he known and seen our strategy, what the end goal was, how Americans were coalescing behind us, I think he’d have been, “all right, great job.” So I could have done a better job on that.

You know, I think a lot of the individuals around him are non-border security professionals. They have no — they don’t know the difference between Border Patrol and ICE, even. I don’t think a lot of them even know the difference between U.S. Border Patrol and ICE. Think it’s all ICE. “Oh, it’s an ICE mission.” Vastly different.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:31:16 – 01:31:32) What with — I never understood. I mean, you can tell my views on immigration, I think it’s a disaster. It is a disaster. But I never liked the idea of any federal agent wearing some kind of narco mask on the street. What was that?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:31:33 – 01:32:08) That was the doxxing. That was the fact that they would take that agent, that agent’s face, and say, “hey, his mother and father live at such and such an address, he and his daughter live at such and such an address.” And then people start showing up within 24 hours. And the reason we know that — one, me, I didn’t wear a mask, and, man, they were on me quick. There were some other agents that didn’t wear masks, and it happened to them immediately. I mean, within hours.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:08 – 01:32:27) But okay, right. We also had, like, a mafia and all kinds of organized criminal elements in this country over centuries, which we kind of defeated. So if there are organized groups threatening the families of federal employees, we should probably go after those groups. Go after the groups and the folks that fund those groups.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:32:27 – 01:32:28) You bet. Wholesale.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:28 – 01:32:29) I don’t want — why is that hard?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:32:31 – 01:32:32) Why is that a hard concept?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:32 – 01:32:43) No, I’m serious. Because then everything falls apart. That’s not a partisan question. It’s just like the system falls apart if no one can enforce the law because of threats from criminal gangs, right?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:32:44 – 01:32:46) Absolutely. And the anarchists in the streets.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:47 – 01:32:51) Yeah, but there’s never been a systematic effort to fix any of that, and I don’t know why.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:32:51 – 01:34:10) You know, there was the one effort that I saw, was that U.S. attorney out of the Central District in California. His name was Bill Essayli. What a patriot that man was. He actually did go after those individuals in California when we were in Los Angeles. And you know what that did? That really dialed down the violence against our effort in those cities, dialed the riots down, dialed the crazies down, because he was actively going after them and prosecuting them. He got some fantastic prosecutions. That’s been lost in the narrative somehow. What a success that man was.

We had the opposite in the other cities — is, you know what, we’re going to wait till they leave and just not do anything because, you know, my gosh, this is scary, and there’d be an awful lot of prosecutions and my gracious. But Essayli and the FBI there in Central District Los Angeles, they did a fantastic job. They proof-tested that concept. It can be done. They did it. The FBI, along with that U.S. attorney, they kicked butt. But there were a lot of other U.S. attorneys that were patently against us. Some of them actually got fired under the Trump administration.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:10 – 01:35:01) Well, I would hope so. But you should be able to enforce the law. I mean, what’s the point of the system if you can’t do that? And by the way, I do think I get why people want to wear masks. I get why they’re afraid. But I also feel like you cede — you give up some legitimacy when you do that. Like, when you’re enforcing the law as a federal law enforcement officer, you’re standing behind laws that the Congress passed, elected by the people of this country. You are the front line in a system that we all hope is legitimate. If you can’t show your face in public, I don’t know — what message are you sending? “We can’t control our own country. We’re not legitimate enough to defeat domestic insurgencies against us.” What are you saying? It’s such an expression of weakness. I guess it freaks me out. Does that make sense?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:35:01 – 01:35:13) It does. And then again, why do we allow anarchy to take place in the streets in the face of law enforcement and normalize it? Why is that allowed to be normalized?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:13 – 01:35:31) And well, only certain kinds of anarchy are allowed to be normalized, the ones that the donors prefer. But most people are not for that at all. And if you were to have a mass protest against election theft or illegal immigration, it’d be shut down immediately by the same people who allow Black Lives Matter protests to destroy our cities.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:35:32 – 01:35:32) Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:32 – 01:35:42) Right? So it’s like a selective enforcement. And I think it all goes back to the root cause, which is the richest people in the country are trying to destroy the country. But that’s what they do. Or they just —

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:35:42 – 01:35:48) Or they don’t care. They want to get richer, and they’ll do it on the backs of you. They’ll step on the dead bodies of their citizens to get there.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:48 – 01:35:54) 100%. I wish I didn’t think that, but I do think that because the evidence is in.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:35:54 – 01:36:14) Don’t you think it’s getting irrefutable at this point, to have what’s happening in our country take place now? I wouldn’t be speaking if — had you said, “you’re going on Tucker and you’re going to say what I just have said,” I would have said “you’re absolutely crazy.” I was going to put this in the book, but you know, it needs to be said now. It needs to be said now.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:36:14 – 01:36:35) If you told me when I was, you know, speaking on Thursday night at the Republican National Convention introducing Trump, that 2 years later I would be talking to a former federal official about how he betrayed the entire country on immigration, or his administration did, I’d be like, I don’t think that’s possible. I mean, this whole thing is so shocking to me. I can’t believe it’s happening.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:36:36 – 01:37:41) Yeah. Well, you know, I think it shocked a lot of Americans. They thought there was so much hope out there. And that’s probably one of the greatest — they’re one of the most heart-rending messages I get, is there was so much hope with what was happening in those cities. “We watched you guys, the Green Team, every night, and we thought, we’re there. Hey, we’re taking it back.” Even Europe, you know, I’ve been going to Europe quite a bit here lately talking to those folks with the remigration summits and Restore Britain and that type of thing. And they said the same thing. “We’ve got the same problem with the same solution. We watched what was happening starting in Los Angeles. Every night they were glued.” They said, “man, there’s hope. Look at this. This is really going to happen and it’s going to start happening in Europe.” And then all of a sudden, lights out. The light switch was turned off and it all ground to a halt. All that hope ground to a halt. And you know, it’s shocking. You just said you’re shocked. I’m shocked. I would never have thought that would have happened. You know, the momentum was building and then the light switch went out. We went into darkness.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:44 – 01:37:45) What do you think happens next?

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:37:47 – 01:39:12) I have great faith in American exceptionalism. People like Tucker Carlson, people like these young conservatives, those young people — I think you’re going to start seeing a lot of young people in campuses and throughout the United States standing up saying, “wait a second, we’ve had enough. We want the story of America back. We want to make the story of America. We want to know what America’s like. We’re done with this.” And I think there’s going to be a lot of pressure put on the donor class, on President Trump, and many of these — and the feckless bureaucrats that I’ve just talked about, those gate guards, those worthless gate guards.

And you know, I’m always an optimist. I’m always an optimist. Never be a defeatist. We’ve been up against some dark times before in this nation, maybe not this dark, but we have, and we always came through. I think that you or I wouldn’t be talking if we thought it was done. You know, I think that despair is for those who see the end beyond any doubts. I’m not in despair yet, but we’re rapidly — that window’s closing. And I think that as long as we’re talking about this, and that people care, and that there’s still enough Americans here ready to do what it takes, we can right the ship. We can do it. Maybe it takes off tomorrow. That spark has to be lit. Hope you like the spark, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:39:13 – 01:39:16) Greg Bovino, thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate it.

GREGORY K. BOVINO: (01:39:16 – 01:39:17) Pleasure’s been mine, sir.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:39:17 – 01:39:19) Boy, you upset me.

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