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mass deportation
Bovino Launches Exploratory Committee for Presidential Campaign With Pledge to Deport 100 Million People
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."
‘A New Level of Corruption': DHS Bought ICE Warehouses From Trump Cronies For 10x Markup
But when Mae Ryan, a reporter at More Perfect Union, looked into the contracts, she said she "noticed something weird."
"Many of these warehouses had been sitting on the market for years," she explained in a video posted Wednesday. "Now DHS was buying them at a massive markup."
She pointed to one warehouse in Socorro, Texas, recently valued at $11 million, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased from the company El Paso Logistics II LLC for $123 million—more than a 1,000% profit.
According to Michael Wriston, an ex-military analyst and investigative journalist who tracked the enormous markups for several of these warehouse purchases for his website Project Salt Box back in March, "across more than a dozen warehouse acquisitions, ICE paid prices that exceeded both prior property valuations and recent market comparables at nearly every site."
For one warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, previously valued at just under $12 million, ICE paid over $70 million. For another in Social Circle, Georgia, valued at about $30 million, the agency paid nearly $130 million.
(Graphic by Project Salt Box)
Many of the warehouses that raked in obscene taxpayer-funded purchases by DHS were owned by financial institutions with deep connections to the Trump administration, Ryan explained.
One warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, valued at about $54.6 million in 2025, inexplicably sold to ICE for over $129 million, more than double. Its majority owner was the investment bank Goldman Sachs, where many Trump appointees during his first term—including former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Trump financial adviser Gary Cohn—were formerly employed.
ICE paid double for another warehouse in Tremont, Pennsylvania, buying it for nearly $120 million despite a valuation of about $60 million. It was owned by the private capital firm Blue Owl, where at least 33 members of Trump's administration have investments in its funds, including the president himself, who has about $5 million invested in the firm.
Another in Salt Lake City, valued at just $97 million, was purchased by ICE for $145 million, and the agency now plans to convert it into a 10,000-bed facility. It was owned by Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump about $2.5 billion over the past two decades.
Wriston told More Perfect Union that the financial payout to Trump allies was top of mind for DHS as it drew up the controversial warehouse plan.
"ICE doesn't necessarily want to be using warehouses," he said. "The plan came from folks very close to the White House who were sitting on properties that were causing them losses every year. And the decision was made to buy them at taxpayer expense."
It's part of a larger pattern of ICE contracts being distributed to companies that have given major financial support to Trump.
According to an investigation in March by OpenSecrets, the GEO Group and CoreCivic, two private prison companies that have collectively received more than $2.8 billion in ICE contracts, each donated $500,000 to Trump's inaugural committee. The GEO Group's employee-funded political action committee contributed $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. during his reelection campaign in 2024.
The vast majority of those who have been detained during Trump's second term have had no criminal records, despite claims by the administration that they are targeting "the worst of the worst" criminals for deportation.
Those who have been held in ICE detention centers—often without any due process or access to a lawyer—have consistently reported being held in horrendous conditions, denied access to basic food, sanitation, and medical care, and subject to torture and sexual assault by guards.
DHS has reportedly spent only about $1 billion of the more than $38 billion allotted for immigration detention warehouses so far. According to The New York Times, the administration is hoping to build a mass detention system that could stuff these warehouses with over 100,000 detainees at a time across more than 20 facilities.
According to Wriston's running tracker of ICE warehouse sales, at least 13 purchases have been canceled, in many cases due to public backlash. Still, the administration has already purchased enough warehouse space to hold more than 41,500 people at once.
"What we're seeing happen now—I never in a million years envisioned seeing this happen on US soil," Wriston said. "Never. Never once."
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