Bovino Gives a Hand to the European Far Right
The former Border Patrol official’s hangout with his admirers on the ethnonationalist fringe.
DONALD TRUMP’S ALLIES have for more than a year scolded those who compared the president’s mass-deportation policy and the agencies and agents enforcing it to the Gestapo. The use of that label really picked up in May 2025 when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in a speech at the University of Minnesota Law School that “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets.” His remarks provoked an immediate freakout from the administration. Trump critics’ use of the term “stormtroopers,” their brownshirt comparisons, and of course their invocations of “fascism” were, somehow, more concerning to the MAGA crowd than the disturbing tactics the Trump administration was using against immigrants.
It became harder for Trump defenders to rebut the critiques, though, when Greg Bovino, then commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, started wearing his SS cosplay outfits and even the German press noted his “Nazi attire.”
Bovino is no longer in the headlines much; after having been part of too many negative stories for the administration, he was reportedly stripped of his leadership role early this year. He has since retired from the Border Patrol.
But the flashy, fashy Bovino is back. Late last week, he tweeted out a message of encouragement to the “ICE Agents at Delaney”—a reference to the facility in New Jersey where federal agents and state police have clashed with protesters, journalists, and a Democratic senator. And to accompany the words of praise Bovino selected a striking picture:
Yep, that’s Bovino posting a photo of himself appearing to give the Nazi salute1 while sending a message of support to federal agents.
But wait, there’s more. Bovino sent his Sieg Heil signal just as he was off to Europe. In an interview beforehand with a far-right French website, as Politico reported, Bovino described Erwin Rommel—yes, the German general in World War II—as an inspirational figure for him and spoke of immigration as a “creeping horror.”
Bovino was traveling to Europe to speak at a “Remigration Summit” last Saturday in Portugal. “Remigration” is the latest incarnation of the old idea that people of different races, ethnicities, and linguistic groups must necessarily live in separate, homogenous places. Proponents of remigration advocate, as the term suggests, deporting everyone from a given country who doesn’t belong to the nominal majority of that country—Italy for the Italians, Germany for the Germans, France for the French. It’s a form of ethnic cleansing closely related to the Great Replacement theory as well as other far-right ethnonationalist European traditions. It doesn’t take much scanning of the continent’s history to come up with notable examples of right-wing groups who wanted to “deport” minorities so that the majority ethnolinguistic group could embrace its destiny unsullied by racial admixture.
The website of the conference Bovino attended doesn’t list speakers or attendees, but it’s possible to assemble quite a bit of information from photos, social media posts, and reporting from European journalists. European far-right websites crowed about individual attendees, starting with Austrian far-right extremist Martin Sellner, one of the conference’s top organizers. Sellner, who called himself a neo-Nazi as a young man, is a prominent leader in the Identitarian movement, an international network of racist, far-right, pro-white European, anti-immigrant groups.
Sellner is in friendly conversation with the furthest-right wing of Germany’s AfD party, even though that party’s leaders have placed his Austrian Identitarian group (Identitäre Bewegung Österreich) on their “incompatibility list”—meaning that no member of the party can be a formal member of Sellner’s group. In reality, there are still documented links between the two. The AfD party leadership had also asked party members in February to refrain from attending events with Sellner, not necessarily because they don’t share his views on migration, but because the association with Sellner garners bad PR. Even so, several members of the AfD attended last weekend’s “Remigration Summit,” including Lena Kotré, a state legislator from Brandenburg who has ties to the neo-Nazi scene. (In December 2024, she took part in a secret meeting in Switzerland that was attended by members of the Swiss neo-Nazi group Junge Tat and members of the “Blood and Honour” neo-Nazi-network, which is banned in Germany. The topic of that meeting was also “remigration.”)
A year earlier, in November 2023, yet another secret meeting about remigration—held in Germany not far from where Nazi leaders plotted out the “Final Solution” at their infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942—brought Sellner together with AfD members and other right-wing figures. When news of that gathering came out, one of the biggest protest movements in the history of post-WWII Germany followed, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets to show their resistance to the far right. The national backlash to that meeting prompted AfD leaders to attempt to put distance between their party and Sellner.
Two years later, AfD leaders are still trying—and apparently failing—to keep Sellner at arm’s length. Except now they have a lot more to lose: Today, the AfD is leading nationwide polls in Germany for the first time. Meanwhile, some legal commentators have suggested that the AfD’s association with Sellner’s völkisch deportation and denaturalization fantasies could contribute to German courts banning the AfD outright. Sellner’s call for “remigration”—including of “non-assimilated citizens”—was recently deemed unconstitutional by a Leipzig court.
Despite all the reasons AfD leaders have to distance their party from Sellner, some party members seem to relish the association. That Kotré attended this year’s “Remigration Summit” is not surprising, given her record of previous interactions with extremists like Sellner. But she was not the only AfD politician in attendance: Kay Gottschalk—a member of the AfD federal executive board and the party’s deputy national spokesperson—joined Bovino in Portugal, as did Sven Tritschler, deputy chair of the AfD parliamentary group in the state parliament of Nordrhein-Westfalen. While Kotré’s participation was to be expected, the presence of Gottschalk and Tritschler may serve as a trial balloon for the party to test whether there is public pushback, to see how much the Overton window has already shifted.
Tritschler posted a picture of himself and Bovino showing a thumbs-up, with the added quip: “Just asked Bovino about his tailor”—a pretty obvious reference to Bovino’s SS officer–style coat, with a winking emoji added for good measure.
THE COMFY CONFABS BETWEEN THE MAGA far right and the AfD go back at least half a year. AfD Bundesdag member-politician Markus Frohnmaier (who is Romanian by birth and married to a Russian) attended the New York Young Republicans gala in December. Then, in March, the AfD hosted Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republicans, at a meeting in Berlin, at which time Forte declared his party and the AfD “natural friends.” In a tweet posted last weekend, Gottschalk shared a picture of himself, Bovino (whom Gottschalk called “legendary”), and Forte (a “friend”). In a video from the event, Bovino assures Gottschalk that Germany could implement ICE-style enforcement back home, and in case he can be useful, he is merely “a phone call away.” Gottschalk immediately took Bovino up on his offer and invited the former border chief to visit parliamentary lawmakers in Berlin, where he might “give us some ideas for Germany.”
The people Bovino was hanging out with are bad enough. The things he himself said onstage are even worse. In one video, he tells the event’s far right organizer, Martin Sellner, that “[our] ideas mirror each other. . . . we were on the same sheet of music.” Sellner was banned from entering both the U.K. and the United States during Trump’s first administration.
Bovino has been saying many things lately. He claims the Trump administration has gone soft, for instance, and that members of Trump’s cabinet and inner circle “might have other interests” leading them to backpedal their policy of mass deportations after border agents murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Creepily, Bovino wrote in a tweet targeting Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, that “Mass deportations are the solution to perpetual victory!” To put it as neutrally as possible, this is not the language of liberal democracy.
Retirement is clearly not agreeing with Bovino, who posts relentlessly, apparently in hope of getting invited to go on Fox. As the recent protests intensified outside Delaney Hall, the ICE facility in Newark, he posted a message that perfectly combines self-aggrandizement with a sort of reputational rent-seeking—a hallmark of minor MAGA celebrity:
It is a minor consolation that this cosplayer of fascist officialdom has been cut loose from the centers of power within Trump’s immigration enforcement system. In place of officers under his command, he now has annoying fans online, some of whom are even attempting to entice him to pursue a loony, single-issue presidential bid.
But “remigration” is not confined to the Bovino fringe; it’s arguably near the core of the MAGA project, insofar as one can be defined. Bovino ally Stephen Miller remains ensconced in the White House, and DHS continues to find sick ways to flog its mass deportation project. It’s undoubtedly a good thing that Bovino has been scraped off the government’s shoes. But even so, if you stop and take a whiff, you’ll be able to tell that those soles are just as dirty as they’ve ever been.
The image Bovino tweeted is cropped from a photo snapped by AFP photographer Kamil Krzaczynski on October 28, 2025. (The photo atop this article was taken a moment apart by the same photographer.) When the picture was taken, Bovino had just left a federal courthouse and, before getting into the driver’s seat of a waiting pickup truck, he made a series of hand gestures in the air as if to signal comrades on a secret mission with him—but obviously really intended to be seen by the large crowd of people with cameras. The choice of this specific image—when he could have picked any other image of himself, such as a shot of a hand-to-brow salute that is part of the same set of pictures—makes clear Bovino’s intention.
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The Bulwark community spends a lot of time considering how to handle these cretins on the other side. I've often thought de-Nazification in Germany after WWII was the roadmap. But look how strong AfD is. I guess one can outlaw an actual group or organization, or label them a threat, but a bit more difficult to outlaw personalities, thoughts, and amorality.
As JVL often points out, it's the asymmetry of fighting illiberalism with liberal ideals. Whoever figures it out should win a Nobel Peace Prize.
BTW, "flashy fashy?" BRILLIANT.