Gregory Bovino, who led Minnesota operation, says he’s retiring end of March

Gregory Bovino of the US border patrol, who was demoted in late January as the public face of the controversial and deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, says he is retiring at the end of March.

Bovino announced his retirement in an interview with Breitbart on Monday, weeks after federal immigration agents fatally shot 37-year-old US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good to death in separate cases in January.

Bovino said: “The greatest honor of my entire life was to work alongside border patrol agents on the border and in the interior of the United States in some of the most challenging conditions the agency has ever faced.”

Bovino joined the border patrol in 1996 and spent most of his career in California’s El Centro sector before being tapped by the Trump administration to lead its sweeping Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.

The Trump administration removed Bovino from his commander-at-large role, sent him back to California and replaced him with border czar Tom Homan after the shooting deaths of Good and Pretti, each of which remain under investigation.

A homeland security spokesperson at the time, Tricia McLaughlin, said Bovino had “NOT been relieved of his duties” entirely and remained “a key part of the president’s team and a great American”.

Trump later said that Bovino’s return to California was “a little bit of a change” – but did not elaborate on the reasoning behind it.

Shortly before Operation Metro Surge, Bovino had led a team of border patrol agents in Los Angeles where they conducted immigration arrests. The agents were then deployed to Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans. At each stop, local residents and leaders protested that agents’ enforcement actions were heavy-handed.

But it was Bovino’s comments after Pretti’s death that may have precipitated his transfer out of Minneapolis. He said Pretti, who had been disarmed by agents before they shot him, intended to “massacre law enforcement” without any evidence to back up the assertion.

He also said “the suspect put himself in that situation” and that “the victims are the border patrol agents there”.

Furthermore, the New York Times reported earlier in March that Bovino was under investigation after making disparaging remarks about the Jewish faith of Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor.

Bovino, who was raised in North Carolina’s Appalachian region, held a degree in natural resource conservation and served on foreign border patrol assignments in Egypt, Africa and Honduras.

In 2018, well into his border patrol career, an email sent to him by a colleague compared Bovino to a Confederate general, according to multiple reports.

The Confederate army was the white supremacist and losing side of the US civil war in the mid-19th century.

Bovino told Breitbart it was “humbling” to have watched “these agents out there giving it their all in some of the most dangerous of environments we have ever faced”.