Adam Isacson

Adam Isacson

Director for Defense Oversight

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With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

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A contingent of over 200 Border Patrol agents who had been pursuing migrants in an intense, controversial campaign of raids in Chicago since mid-September appears poised to leave the city after arresting more than 3,000 people. Several media outlets, citing official sources, reported that the deployment led by high-profile At-Large Commander Gregory Bovino would be departing shortly. The group’s next likely destinations are Charlotte, North Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, either simultaneously or consecutively.

Bovino posed on November 10 with about 100 agents in front of downtown Chicago’s iconic mirrored “Bean” sculpture. This recalled a group photo that Bovino posted to Twitter in front of the Hollywood sign in September, shortly before departing Los Angeles. (In both images, nearly all agents’ faces are masked or blurred.)

Bovino, an unusually publicity-seeking agent who began the year as chief of Border Patrol’s quiet El Centro Sector in southeast California, became the face of the Chicago operation, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called “Operation Midway Blitz.” This, and a June-September operation in Los Angeles, were marked by a constant stream of social media posts and videos touting the agents’ activities, along with a similarly constant stream of allegations of racial profiling and human rights abuse, and rebukes from federal judges.

(For more about the Border Patrol contingent’s controversial arrest and crowd-control tactics, including serious allegations of misuse of force, see the “‘Mass deportation’ and human rights in the U.S. interior links at the bottom of this and the last few WOLA Border Updates.)

Posed in front of the “Bean” (formally known as “Cloud Gate”), agents—many with their faces covered, some carrying long guns—shouted “Little Village!” as the photographer snapped the shot. This was a reference to the heavily Mexican-American Chicago neighborhood where the agents carried out many raids and frequently confronted residents. “Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” responded JB Pritzker (D), the governor of Illinois and a vocal opponent of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

The 110-ton sculpture’s creator, artist Anish Kapoor, said he was considering legal action. “Abducting street vendors, breaking doors, pulling people from cars, using teargas on residential street… I mean, this is fascist America and just beyond belief,” said the artist, a supporter of refugee causes.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other DHS agencies, along with a reduced number of Border Patrol agents, will remain and continue to operate in Chicago, just as they have in other cities where surges have declined from earlier peaks, such as Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Along with the Border Patrol agents, though, “an on-call task force composed of FBI and assistant U.S. attorneys” will also be departing Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune.

All media reports point to Charlotte, in Bovino’s home state, as a likely next destination, along with New Orleans. The sheriff’s office for Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, told CNN that it had not been in contact with any DHS officials about a possible move to their jurisdiction.

“If the reports are true, it could not have come soon enough,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) said on November 11, adding that Bovino’s agents are leaving behind “trails of tears and chaos.” In a statement reported by CNN, Johnson added, “Greg Bovino’s legacy in Chicago is chaos, criminality, and terror… It is the grassroots resistance to Bovino that has forced them to retreat… Bovino did nothing to make our city safer. He will not be missed in Chicago.” Gov. Pritzker added, “The people of Chicago have deserved better than having CBP [Customs and Border Protection] and Greg Bovino in this city.”

The Border Patrol contingent’s departure comes just days after U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis imposed new limits on their use of force, particularly in crowd control situations. Ellis castigated Bovino for appearing to defy an earlier order limiting use of tear gas and other crowd control weapons; she said that Bovino lied to her about being hit with a rock before personally tossing a tear gas canister at protesters in Little Village, an act caught on video. (Bovino is frequently photographed with a tear gas canister clipped to his uniform.)

The Los Angeles and Chicago operations laid bare a reality known to many border residents: Border Patrol’s tactics are more aggressive and violent than those usually employed by ICE. Nick Miroff explained in a November 10 post at the Atlantic:

Border Patrol and ICE tend to have a different approach to immigration enforcement: ICE officers are used to working in U.S. cities and targeting specific individuals they’re seeking to arrest. Border Patrol agents work in remote desert and mountain areas where they are trained to see anyone they encounter as a suspected illegal entrant. They don’t hesitate to use force on suspects who run or resist arrest. But they’ve never been deployed to U.S. cities at this scale, hundreds of miles from any border crossing.

At the Wall Street Journal, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Tarini Parti found that the mismatch between ICE’s more targeted approach and Border Patrol’s flashy, indiscriminate approach is causing “infighting at DHS.” They note that “longtime immigration officials,” including White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan, “want to rely on traditional methods including using police research to develop target lists” and prioritizing migrants with criminal records. Bovino’s Border Patrol contingent, by contrast, prefers “large, attention-grabbing operations.”

The Journal authors note that Bovino currently has the upper hand, as he has the full-throated support of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, to whom he is reporting directly, and her special advisor Corey Lewandowski, a onetime Trump campaign manager. As detailed in WOLA’s October 31 Border Update, the Trump administration is replacing the directors of several ICE field offices around the United States with career Border Patrol agents whom Bovino is playing a role in recommending.

Despite their camera-ready bravado, the Journal noted, the Border Patrol tactics have “proved inefficient in significantly boosting arrest numbers.” In May, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller instructed ICE to arrest 3,000 people per day nationwide, about five times the Biden-era level. While daily arrests are usually below half that number, it’s notable that “Operation Midway Blitz” arrested just over 3,000 people over two months—equivalent to Miller’s one-day national quota. And on November 12, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings ordered the release from ICE detention of 615 people arrested in Chicago (although many of them have probably been deported already).

A data analysis from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found that during Greg Bovino’s tenure as chief of Border Patrol’s El Centro sector—a position he held since 2020, with one hiatus in 2023—that sector consistently led all of Border Patrol’s nine US-Mexico border sectors in the frequency of use-of-force incidents. “El Centro’s data reflects the highest ratio of use of force to assault of any Border Patrol sector in the nation, far higher than the other 19 sectors and the Border Patrol overall.”

El Centro under Bovino’s tenure is an outlier when comparing CBP’s use of force statistics with its migrant apprehension statistics. El Centro is a pretty quiet sector, apprehending fewer migrants than all but one of Border Patrol’s nine U.S.-Mexico border sectors. Measuring “uses of force per 100,000 apprehensions,” however, makes evident the propensity to use force of El Centro agents under Bovino’s command.

Use of Force Incidents, as a Proportion of Apprehensions, by U.S.-Mexico Border Patrol Sector, Fiscal 2022-2025

In fiscal 2025, El Centro agents were involved in 19 use-of-force incidents and apprehended 4,633 people; that ratio of 410 incidents per 100,000 apprehensions (or “4.1 per 1,000”) was one-third higher than the second-place sector (Laredo, 302) and more than double the border-wide average (187). In 2024, El Centro’s ratio of 349 incidents per 100,000 apprehensions was nearly triple that of the second-place sector (Big Bend, 122) and more than 8 times the border-wide average (40).

The table above also shows a sharp border-wide increase in “use of force incidents per apprehensions” in 2025. This could be a factor of the Trump administration’s more permissive attitude toward the use of force, and of the sharp recent 2025 reduction in apprehensions (see WOLA’s October 31 Border Update). One reason “organizational culture change under Trump” might be a factor is that apprehensions declined much more (-84%) than use-of-force incidents (-28%).

The “Border Patrol / Chief Bovino” model of aggressive enforcement may grow further in 2026, with profound effects on the makeup and mission of DHS, argued Jason Houser, a former Biden-era ICE chief of staff, in a November 1 column at MSNBC. “Under Bovino’s command, the Department of Homeland Security has assembled something new: a hybrid, unaccountable task force reporting directly to DHS headquarters and the White House and operating outside the traditional command structures that govern federal law enforcement,” Houser wrote. “It isn’t ICE. It isn’t CBP. It’s a Frankenstein force, stitched together from multiple agencies but loyal to none. Its purpose is to create a community response designed for social media clicks, rather than to keep communities safe.”

Houser views this model as central to a massive ramp-up of deportations next year, aided by over $170 billion in new funding for CBP and ICE from the “big bill” that Congress passed in July.

This isn’t just about optics today or this week — it’s about setting the stage for the administration’s next act. Bovino’s “task force” is laying the groundwork for a rapid expansion of so-called soft-sided detention facilities across the country.

Plans and resources are coming together to establish temporary detention compounds capable of processing thousands of people at a time in areas where the Border Patrol will expand deployments in early 2026. These aren’t being built to house violent offenders or national security threats. They’re designed to absorb the surge of arrests of people who pose no safety threat that this political task force intends to generate.

“The way Trump has organized ICE and CBP now, they are like a secret police. They wear masks,” Gov. Pritzker warned in a New Yorker interview. “They do not carry or show their badges or their names. They are in unmarked cars. They’re grabbing people without telling you who they are and throwing those people into their cars and taking them away.” Pritzker worried that this model could “end up in a clash” between federal and local law enforcement officers, because “What do you do when someone right in front of you is breaking the law? You’re supposed to arrest them. So I think something really dangerous and terrible could happen.”

At the Atlantic, Miroff focused on Trump-era agencies’ adoption of face masks, which “quickly turned officers and agents into a faceless, impersonal, undifferentiated goon squad. It’s a look that has long been associated with authoritarian regimes and secret police, and the basic visual signifiers of American law enforcement—criminals wear masks; cops show their faces—were suddenly inverted.” Voicing concerns about “online activism, facial recognition, and anonymous threats,” even veteran ICE officials told Miroff that they did not believe the practice might end anytime soon.

Recent coverage of the Defense Department’s role in border and migration policy, which the Trump administration expanded dramatically this year despite longstanding norms discouraging U.S. military participation in internal law enforcement, suggests that some aspects of these missions are declining or have leveled off. Some missions, though, appear set to grow significantly in 2026.

Four days into the Trump administration, the White House posted cinematic video of active-duty U.S. Marines deploying to the border, landing in Osprey aircraft and armored personnel carriers to fulfill a mission in support of CBP. Ten months later, Border Report revealed, the Marines have quietly withdrawn back to Camp Pendleton in Southern California.

The contingent was based at the Imperial Beach Border Patrol station, where the border meets the Pacific, and then moved about 60 miles east to Campo, California. “Most of their time was spent putting up concertina wire on border barriers to prevent migrants from scaling down the fences,” noted Border Report’s Salvador Rivera. People interviewed in Campo and a Border Patrol agent in Imperial Beach said they had not seen Marines “for weeks” or until “about a month ago.”

The U.S. Navy informed of the departure of a littoral combat ship, the U.S.S. St. Louis, that had been stationed near where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier in the year, the Trump administration had ordered Navy destroyers to be stationed off the coast of both ends of the U.S.-Mexico border; now it is not clear what vessel might replace the littoral combat ship, which is designed to operate near coastlines.

New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg, who covers events at the Defense Department’s Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in southeastern Cuba, published a report offering a view into the rushed, improvised way that military personnel prepared the base to receive detained migrants, after President Donald Trump’s January announcement that his administration would send as many as 30,000 people there. The new information comes from 84 pages of partly redacted emails obtained via Freedom of Information Act litigation by the organization American Oversight.

The base has since held a total of 700 migrants, reaching a daily high of 178 in February. “No ICE detainees were being held there this week. The last detainees, 18 men, were sent to Guatemala and El Salvador last month,” Rosenberg recalled.

The executive director of American Oversight, Chioma Chukwu, told Rosenberg that the trove of documents shows “that the administration had ‘no plan, no foresight and no concern for the human cost of its own chaos.’” They show that as many as 90 percent of people held at the base were considered “low risk to public safety,” that detainees often protested the poor conditions of their detention, and that ICE was woefully unprepared to receive them.

The Intercept, reporting on information that the office of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) shared with the National Priorities Project, noted that the Trump administration’s military (mostly National Guard) deployments in interior U.S. cities have cost the Defense Department $473 million so far.

The current $473 million price tag now includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; and more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee, and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.

While these are not specifically border or migration missions, personnel sent to these cities have at times accompanied ICE and CBP, or have been stationed outside federal buildings during protests of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and actions.

The data provided to the National Priorities Project included an estimate of $323,333 per day to maintain a 60-day deployment of 500 National Guard members. That is $647 per soldier per day.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein recalled that the Defense Department’s four-year National Security Strategy, “now in its final edits,” will make the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere the Department’s top security priority, ranked above global terrorism or China and other “near-peer” powers.

“For the first time ever, the strategy incorporates everything from closing the borders and establishing ‘National Defense Areas’ along them, immigration enforcement operations, the war against Antifa and other domestic groups, and even boat strikes in the Caribbean into a singular coherent war,” Klippenstein noted.

We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.

Kyle Kingsbury, I Want You to Understand Chicago (Aphyr, Saturday, November 8, 2025).

Casey He, Masked ICE Agents Put Damper on Oak Park Girl Scout Food Drive: ‘It’s Heartbreaking as a Mom’ (The Chicago Sun-Times, Saturday, November 8, 2025).

Andrew Jeong, ICE Accused of Pepper-Spraying 1-Year-Old Girl and Her Dad Near Chicago (The Washington Post, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Charles Thrush, Feds Tell Faith Leaders ‘No More Prayer’ Outside Broadview Facility (Block Club Chicago, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Julianne Mcshane, A Border Patrol Agent Bragged About Shooting Someone, Texts Show (Mother Jones, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

Sara Tenenbaum, Undocumented Mexican Immigrant in Custody for Firing Shots at Border Patrol in Little Village, DHS Says (CBS News, Monday, November 10, 2025).

Robert Mackey, Border Patrol Chief Reprimanded for Lying Claims Shots Were Fired at Immigration Officers in Chicago (The Guardian (UK), Sunday, November 9, 2025).

Caroline Kubzansky, Laura Rodriguez Presa, DHS Reports Shots Fired at Immigration Agents in Little Village as Residents Confront Bovino, Border Patrol (The Chicago Tribune, Saturday, November 8, 2025).

Matt Delaney, Mexican Migrant With Criminal Record Charged With Shooting at Border Patrol Agents in Chicago (The Washington Times, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Bill Kirkos, Nayeli Jaramillo-Plata, Priscilla Alvarez, Federal Judge Says Border Patrol Chief Admitted He Lied, in Ruling Limiting Federal Agents’ Use of Force in Chicago (CNN, Friday, November 7, 2025.

Jon Seidel, Judge Says He’ll Order Release of Hundreds of People Arrested Under Feds’ Deportation Blitz (WBEZ (Chicago Illinois), Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

Gregory Royal Pratt, Judge Rules Mandatory Detention of Chicago Day Care Teacher by ICE Is Illegal (The Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

Tammy Duckworth @Senduckworth on Twitter (U.S. House of Representatives, [Twitter, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Andrew Carter, Inside Chicago’s Growing Resistance Movement Against Operation Midway Blitz: ‘Small Acts Have Huge Consequences’ (The Chicago Tribune, Saturday, November 8, 2025).

Joseph Cox, The Latest Defense Against ICE: 3d-Printed Whistles (404 Media, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Natasha Korecki, DHS Takes Credit for Crime Being Down in Chicago. Data Shows That Was Happening Before It Arrived. (NBC News, Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

Adrian Carrasquillo, ICE Has Created a ‘Ghost Town’ in the Heart of Chicago (Huddled Masses, The Bulwark, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Texas Sues Harris County Over $1.35m Deportation Defense Fund (UPI, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Jill Cowan, Mimi Dwyer, Immigration Agents Arrest Man in L.A. Raid and Drive Off With His Toddler (The New York Times, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Izzy Ramirez, “They Took My Mom. Then They Took My Dad and Uncle,” Oxnard ICE Raids Through the Eyes of 16-Year-Old Boy (L.A. Taco, Monday, November 10, 2025).

Dana Rubinstein, Luis Ferre-Sadurni, New York Prepares for a Potential Trump Immigration Crackdown (The New York Times, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Benjamin Weiser, Luis Ferre-Sadurni, Sister of Blind Man Targeted for Deportation Asks U.S. to Free Him (The New York Times, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Mike Rogoway, Veterans Rally Near Portland ICE Facility to Decry Deportations, ‘Authoritarianism’ (Oregonlive, Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

C.J. Ciaramella, Oregon Woman Says ICE Broke Out Her Car Windows and Detained Her for Filming Them (Reason, Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

Camilo Montoya-Galvez, ICE’s Detainee Population Reaches 66,000, a New Record High, Statistics Show (CBS News, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

David Ingram, Julia Ainsley, ‘Mega Detention Centers’: ICE Considers Buying Large Warehouses to Hold Immigrants (NBC News, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, Inside Adelanto: A Visit to Adelanto Ice Processing Facility (The LA Ten Four, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

Pablo Manriquez, Judge Puts ICE Detention Center Under Court Supervision (Migrant Insider, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

Migrants at Largest Us Detention Camp Face Foul Water, Rotten Food, Congresswoman Says (Reuters, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

How Records About a Death in ICE Custody Helped Propel a Case to the Supreme Court

Alisa Reznick, ‘Shock to the System’: As Funding Remains Uncertain, Some Migrant Children Are Facing Court Alone (KJZZ Arizona, Friday, November 7, 2025).

Anusha Mathur, Ximena Bustillo, The DOJ Has Been Firing Judges With Immigrant Defense Backgrounds (National Public Radio, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

Rebecca Schneid, Viral Videos Show Toddlers Caught Up in ICE Arrests (Time, Sunday, November 9, 2025).

Ben Strauss, Maria Luisa Paul, As Deportation Fears Rise, Immigrant Parents Ask: Who Cares for My Kids? (The Washington Post, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Joseph Cox, Ice Plans to Spend $180 Million on Bounty Hunters to Stalk Immigrants (404 Media, Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

Isabela Dias, Then They Came for the Dreamers (Mother Jones, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Doris Anahi Munoz, ICE Destroyed Her Family’s American Dream — So She’s Chasing the Mexican Dream (Palabra, Tuesday, November 11, 2025).

Kelly Rissman, Noem Wanted to Buy Spirit Airlines Planes – Except the Airline Didn’t Own Them (The Independent (UK), Saturday, November 8, 2025).

Austin Kocher, ICE and EOIR Data Cut Off During Government Shut Down Just as ‘Mass Detention’ Gets $45b Boost (Austin Kocher, Sunday, November 9, 2025).

Minho Kim, To Preserve Records, Homeland Security Now Relies on Officials to Take Screenshots (The New York Times, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

Jason Koebler, AI-Generated Videos of ICE Raids Are Wildly Viral on Facebook (404 Media, Wednesday, November 12, 2025).

Caitlin Dickerson, Hundreds of Thousands of Anonymous Deportees (The Atlantic, Sunday, November 9, 2025).

Elizabeth Bruenig, The Catholic Church and the Trump Administration Are Not Getting Along (The Atlantic, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

John Ismay, Ruth Graham, Bishops With Ties to Trump Commission Criticize Treatment of Immigrants (The New York Times, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

Astead Herndon, Voters Signed Up to Deport Criminals, Not Grandmas (Vox, Thursday, November 6, 2025).

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