Becoming Bovino

Making

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Who is Gregory Bovino? For months, the Border Patrol Commander-at-Large led agents through Chicago on an aggressive immigration enforcement campaign, while making sure his noticeably uncovered face was in front of as many cameras as possible. But there’s very little information online about Bovino’s background, his experience, or his rise to overnight prominence. So our team went digging – to his hometown in North Carolina, and to California where his Border Patrol career got started. In “Becoming Bovino,” Sun-Times investigative reporter Lauren FitzPatrick and WBEZ investigative reporter Dan Mihalopoulos sit down with WBEZ’s Patrick Smith to share what they found about Gregory Bovino – from his upbringing, to his efforts to keep himself in the limelight.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I want to take you to the Imperial Valley of California.
0:04.1	It's early December.
0:05.5	WBEZ reporter Dan Mihalopoulos and producer Noah Jennings
0:08.9	are hiking along the U.S.-Mexico border.
0:11.9	So we're in the shadow of the mountain and the shadow of the wall.
0:15.0	It was this border,
0:16.8	where Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino started his career with the Border Patrol.
0:21.7	So it looks like some people have crossed here recently.
0:24.6	Yeah. Interesting.
0:27.3	They're walking with E.D. Harmon, an environmentalist in California.
0:32.1	She lives in the desert, right on the Mexico border.
0:34.8	If you want to go in the area with the big cactus that I walked with Bovino.
0:38.6	She once did a hike nearby with Bovino.
0:40.8	She was trying to show him the environmental impact his agency was having.
0:44.6	When you were talking with him, what was his tone?
0:46.2	How was he receptive?
0:48.4	My guess.
0:49.6	But he didn't stay for the peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches I made.
0:53.8	He loved to go back.
0:55.5	But not before insisting on one last thing, that they pose for a photograph.
1:00.0	He wanted his picture taken with me and with all the guys that were there.
1:06.4	Bovino is very fond of photo ops.
	...

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