Seeking to accelerate the mass deportation operation and attacks on the democratic rights of the working class, the Trump administration is replacing several top directors at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials.
The replacements are reportedly being vetted by Gregory Bovino, chief patrol agent of the El Centro Sector, and special government employee Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump campaign aide who is close to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem.
NBC News reported that at least a dozen ICE field office directors were being “reassigned” and that “at least half of them” would be replaced with CBP officials. The right-wing Washington Examiner, citing “five sources familiar with the plans,” reported that ICE directors in Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Diego were replaced last Friday.
Fox News correspondent and Trump administration propagandist Bill Melugin reported that in addition to the above cities, directors were being replaced in El Paso, Seattle/Portland and New Orleans. There are currently 24 ICE field offices spread throughout the country in major US cities.
The purge at the top of ICE comes as would-be dictator Donald Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act and militarily occupy major cities with active-duty troops a year before the 2026 midterm elections.
Speaking on October 28 in front of thousands of soldiers and sailors on the USS George Washington, currently at the Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, Trump declared that he would be deploying more than the National Guard to US cities. “People don’t care if we send in our military, if we send in our National Guard, if we send in Space Command. They don’t care who the hell it is,” he said.
“We are going to go into our cities and we are going to clean them out,” he said, adding, “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities … whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”
Trump is using the National Guard and federal forces to provoke a confrontation ahead of the elections to be used either as a pretext to cancel the elections outright or conduct them under military occupation.
Obergruppenführer Bovino, who is currently overseeing the Nazi-like occupation of Chicago dubbed “Midway Blitz,” has impressed the Trump administration and Republican Party with his thuggish, partisan and illegal tactics.
Bovino has spent over 30 years in CBP, rising through the ranks under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Following the certification of Trump’s electoral victory on January 7, 2025, Bovino personally led a fascistic immigration kidnapping operation, dubbed “Return to Sender,” in Kern County, California, that led to at least 78 workers being arrested. Residents said the immigration police profiled farmworkers and those who looked like they worked in the fields.
Throughout the spring and summer, Bovino’s forces carried out “roving patrols” and mass raids throughout California, targeting workers based on nothing but their skin color, language and occupation. In July, he helped lead a military-style occupation of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. With Bovino on horseback, heavily militarized CBP agents raided the park alongside National Guard soldiers and Black Hawk helicopters, sending children and nearby residents fleeing.
The following month, Bovino and his heavily armed immigration thugs menaced a political event held by California Governor Gavin Newsom and other Democrats in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo district. According to the Los Angeles Times, CBP police, masked and wielding semi-automatic rifles, arrested at least one person who was delivering strawberries outside the venue.
In September, Bovino was put in charge of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Midway Blitz,” targeting Chicago workers. On September 30, Border Patrol, FBI and ICE agents swarmed a Southside apartment complex in Chicago, using chainsaws to break fences and a Black Hawk helicopter to rappel onto the roof of the building. Once inside the residential complex, the armed agents busted down doors and detained virtually all of the residents for hours, regardless of citizenship status, separating them by race.
On Tuesday, Bovino testified for several hours before U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis at the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago. Ellis summoned Bovino in response to a lawsuit brought by local media organizations over the daily abuses carried out by his thugs. Since the start of “Midway Blitz,” CBP agents have repeatedly tear gassed entire neighborhoods, including elementary schools, and used “less lethal” weapons on journalists and protesters.
Journalists at the hearing reported that Judge Ellis ordered Bovino to provide her with daily reports on his operations in the city and to start wearing a body camera on Friday. “The camera is your friend,” Ellis said, adding that it would show alleged crimes committed by protesters. “And then it won’t just be your word.”
Rejecting requests by the plaintiffs, Judge Ellis did not block Bovino or his agents from using tear gas, pepper ball rounds or other “riot control” munitions while carrying out their kidnapping operations.
Ellis required only that the immigration Gestapo provide two separate warnings before assaulting workers, bystanders and journalists. Last week, Bovino was filmed throwing chemical munitions at protesters, who posed no threat to the agents and were not interfering with arrests.
It would be a fatal mistake for workers and youth to leave it up to the capitalist courts to protect democratic rights. Already this year the Supreme Court has greenlit so-called “Kavanaugh stops,” named after far-right Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which allow immigration agents to detain and question without cause anyone they suspect of being “illegal,” a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In violation of the First Amendment, the Trump administration, under the direction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has canceled the visas of thousands of students and workers for exercising their right to free speech. These fascistic measures are being coordinated with the immigration Gestapo, who have targeted students such as Momodou Taal, Rumeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.
Joining the list of people who have been kidnapped for the crime of speaking out against genocide is photojournalist Yaa’kub Ira Vijandre, 38. On October 7, one day after speaking in support of a community member taken by ICE at a City Council meeting in Richardson, Texas, Vijandre himself was kidnapped by ICE agents, despite being “protected” under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Vijandre has lived in the US since he was brought to the country from the Philippines as a 14-year-old boy. Neither ICE nor any other government agency has accused Vijandre of committing a crime. It appears the sole reason for his detention is his speech denouncing the genocide in Gaza and the US government’s prosecution of alleged “terrorists.”
In a statement, immigration attorney Eric Lee, one of Vijandre’s lawyers, revealed that in November 2023, over a month into the US-backed genocide in Gaza, Vijandre was approached by FBI agents and asked to become a confidential informant, which he declined to do.
In a statement by Vijandre’s legal team, his lawyers noted that the government’s attempt to deport him was part of the ongoing effort by the Trump administration to expand the definition of “domestic terrorism” to any and all speech in opposition to the administration.
“As a longtime US resident,” Vijandre’s legal team wrote, “the First Amendment applies fully to Yaakub. There is no legitimate legal distinction between the type of speech Yaakub engages in and the type of ‘Anti-American’ and ‘anti-fascist’ speech the White House policy memos (NSP-7) now characterize as ‘domestic terrorism,’ and which millions of people expressed by participating in demonstrations across the country in the No Kings demonstrations…”