politics

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/55630

Fresh off his appearance at a fascist conference in Portugal focused on "remigration," President Donald Trump's ex-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino has teased a run for US president in 2028 centered around his fantasy of deporting 100 million people from the United States.

Amid public backlash following the killing of two US citizens by his federal agents in Minneapolis, Bovino was kicked from the helm of Trump’s mass deportation crusade in January and sent into early retirement.

But as he later discussed with The New York Times, he departed with a sense of unfinished business, unfulfilled that he could not exact what was described as a “master plan” to purge a third of the country.

As News Nation reported on Monday, Bovino is not one to give up on dreams easily. The 30-year Border Patrol veteran told the network that he was launching an exploratory committee for a White House run in 2028 and planned to move ahead with a formal campaign "if it all comes together."

The website for his committee, Bovino2028.com, which features an image of Bovino in his signature SS-style trenchcoat flanked by the phrase "House Bovino. Men Fight Back," gives a sense of the campaign he seeks to run.

The website describes a future President Bovino leading the US with a “warrior mindset," “quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation’s cities," and creating a “department of youth masculinity” to turn young men into “warriors for freedom,” and calls for the reestablishment of Elon Musk’s failed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

His website also does not shy away from acknowledging his role in a conference in late May were he appeared alongside representatives of the global far-right. As Charles R. Davis described late last month for The Redoubt:

The "Remigration Summit 2026," so called, was held May 30 at the Salmanha Residence hotel just south of Porto, Portugal, and its organizers were not subtle.

"Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions," argues Afonso Gonçalves, chief organizer of the event. He's the founder of the far-right group Reconquista, so named for the mass expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. That's who Bovino was photographed standing next to after he landed in Europe.

Martin Sellner, an extremist from Austria, is best known for pushing the "great replacement" conspiracy theory— that Jewish elites are seeking to exterminate the white race via mass migration—that has motivated mass shooters from Pennsylvania to New Zealand.

He was the other man standing next to Bovino.

Other speakers included a Belgian fascist convicted of Holocaust denial and the founder of a Swiss neo-Nazi group called "Junge Tat" who is quite open about his fondness for "National Socialism."

Bovino is not looking to hide his affiliations with prominent neo-Nazis. The site prominently features a photo of himself with Sellner, who at a previous summit outlined a plan for the forced expulsion of "non-assimilated" citizens of immigrant backgrounds from Germany.

The ex-Border Patrol commander said during the conference that his and Sellner's ideas "mirror each other."

Gregory Bovino poses with Martin Sellner in an image posted to his 2028 website.(Photo from Bovino2028.com)

Confirming that he was considering a presidential run on Monday, Bovino wrote on social media: "My one and only priority is deporting the 106 million illegals who are here. That’s it."

According to May data from the Center for Migration Studies, the number of undocumented immigrants actually in the United States was only about 14.6 million as of 2024, meaning that what Bovino is actually proposing is the mass expulsion of tens of millions of legal immigrants, as well as naturalized and US-born citizens.

David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, testified about this plot by Bovino in front of the Senate Budget Committee in March, describing it as a plan for “ethnic cleansing"—and pushing back when one Republican senator dismissed the claim as "hyperbole."

Polls indicate Americans have overwhelmingly turned against Trump's crusade to round up millions of immigrants, with strong majorities having negative views of his tactics and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In early March, just over a month after Bovino's tenure ended, a record 50% of Americans said in a YouGov poll that they would support abolishing ICE.

But Bovino said the "grassroots support" he's seeing indicates that "the polls are completely wrong."

He said: "If I’m getting this much energy, it’s probably because 90% of the country wants mass deportations, and the media just isn’t asking the right questions."

While it is difficult to see Bovino achieving mass appeal on the back of an immigration crusade even more extreme than Trump's, Oliver Willis, a writer for the Daily Kos said it was a sign of where the base of the GOP could be heading.

"The Republican Party has increasingly tied itself to the white supremacist movement through continued support of Trump and the rising influence of figures like conservative podcaster and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes," he wrote. "Bovino considering a 2028 presidential bid shows that the party—and the wider conservative movement—isn’t moderating at all."

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