U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino stood beside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the immigration enforcement facility in Broadview on Oct. 3 as she gave dozens of his agents a pep talk, telling them it was time to “go hard” and “hammer” protesters.
The protesters included several Jewish faithful holding a pro-immigrant prayer circle. They also included a hospitality worker named Cole Sheridan, who was protesting in Broadview for the first time and planning to go to work afterwards.
Sheridan, 27, was disturbed by the Chicago-area deportation blitz Bovino was leading and by “seeing people kidnapped off the street, dragged out of cars, taken from their jobs.
“I just felt compelled to be there,” Sheridan says.
The protest was calm until a convoy of federal vehicles paraded through, Sheridan says. Drones buzzed overhead. Government photographers scurried into place. A tank-like armored vehicle rumbled past, carrying Noem, according to Sheridan.
“It seemed pretty clear it was a stunt to show force and intimidate people,” according to Sheridan, who says Bovino and several masked Border Patrol agents stepped in front of Illinois State Police officers.
After some jostling, Sheridan ended up on the ground under Bovino and other agents and was taken away, spending three days locked up — first at the Broadview facility, then at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago.
In a criminal complaint, Bovino accused Sheridan of pushing him. An agent under Bovino’s command accused Sheridan of taking a “swing” at Bovino.
The federal charges accused Sheridan of “forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding and interfering with a federal officer.”
Most of those charges held up until, four weeks later, a friend happened to spot Sheridan getting pushed down in footage from an Oct. 31 news report.
“The video demonstrates that, not only did I have no kind of altercation with Bovino, I wasn’t even in front of him,” Sheridan says.
A prosecutor dropped the charges the next business day.
Sheridan’s run-in with Bovino is one of several occasions in which the Border Patrol boss appears to have invented facts, rearranged chronologies or distorted what happened. A string of similar cases has been dismissed against Chicago-area protesters and arrested immigrants.
In an interview with Telemundo on Oct. 23, Bovino seemed to imply that he started deploying tear gas in Little Village, a heavily immigrant neighborhood, because he had been “hit in the head with a rock.”
A week later, he admitted under oath that he wasn’t hit with a rock until after the tear-gassing.
Shown a video of agents on the Broadview facility’s roof shooting pepper balls at a pastor and hitting him in the head, Bovino denied seeing that happen.
When Bovino was played footage of a protest in which he tackled a man who was backing away from him, the chief denied he had used force. Bovino testified that “the use of force was against me.”
Bovino also testified that, during a protest, people associated with the Latin Kings street gang had been found taking weapons from the back of a car and that they wore maroon hoodies. He said the “maroon hoodies … would signify a potential assailant or street gang member that was making their way to the location that I was present.”
But the Latin Kings aren’t known for wearing maroon. Bovino admitted he could not identify a gang associated with that color. And federal authorities provided evidence of only a handful of people on the scene wearing maroon. One was an alderman.
Bovino’s apparent misrepresentations have provoked rebukes from federal judges. In early November, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis found that Bovino “admitted that he lied about whether a rock hit him before he deployed tear gas in Little Village.”
Asked whether, in Sheridan’s case, Bovino and the other agent had been truthful, a Homeland Security spokesperson says, “Our law enforcement shows incredible restraint and prudence in their exercise of force to … protect the lives of their fellow officers and fellow Americans.”
A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office says the prosecutor’s office is “constantly evaluating new facts and information relating to cases and investigations arising out of Operation Midway Blitz,” as the Trump administration dubbed the deportation campaign.
In a written statement, the spokesman says the “continuous review process applies to all matters, whether charged or under investigation,” and that that process “helps ensure that the interests of justice are served in each and every case.”
After Chicago, Bovino and scores of his agents focused their aggressive deportation operation on immigrant communities in Charlotte, North Carolina. Their next reported stop is New Orleans.
Sheridan says people in that city ought to be skeptical of anything Bovino says.
“He lied on me,” Sheridan says. “He decided to abuse his power in such a casual way that led to me missing four days of work and to a month of fretting over whether I was going to prison.
“His word means nothing.”
