Leaked Documents Show CBP Is Being Remade in Image of Its Worst Stooge

Greg Bovino may no longer be atop the U.S. Border Patrol, but documents leaked to The American Prospect suggest there’s still a sea change inside the organization being pushed by his cronies.

One such memo, sent during Border Patrol’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, advises agents how to smash car windows and extract suspects from their cars while minimizing harm—and protecting the agent from legal responsibility.

“Courts evaluate the totality of the circumstances: no single factor is determinative. Your detailed articulation of the event, including prescribed threats and rationale for actions, is crucial for legal defensibility,” the memo reads.

While physically dragging people through a car’s shattered window may be excessive, the memo adds that “breaking a window to remove the driver or passenger may ultimately become necessary.

Another section of the document says to “ensure lethal coverage is available, if necessary, in accordance with use of force policy.” It was written in November 2025, a month before agents from Border Patrol and ICE began pouring into Minnesota, where they would eventually kill two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

A different memo dated February 9 addresses the revocation of a 2022 safety guidance that prohibited Border Patrol from arresting noncitizens in rivers and while they were physically on the border fence, as well as forcing them back into those dangerous areas while pursuing them. The safety guidance also forbade agents from forcing noncitizens back to the Mexican side of the border once they had crossed.

The February memo happily remarked that the 2022 safety guidance had been repealed. “Rescinding this policy restores agents’ authority to interdict, apprehend, and rescue individuals engaged in illegal crossings,” it reads.

The memos show how Bovino and his disciples altered Border Patrol protocol from the inside, away from public scrutiny. The Prospect identified seven different Border Patrol agents who tagged along with Bovino from his post in El Centro, California, to help him carry out this new, increasingly violent agenda.