CBP Continues Interior Deployments to Assist ICE Arrests Three Months After Minnesota Officer-Involved Shooting

Gregory Bovino was the since-retired Border Patrol chief of southeastern California. The national chief of the Border Patrol told the Washington Examiner last October that its agents were deployed across 27 cities assisting ICE. 'Supporting ICE, that has not changed,' Scott said.

'The numbers have fluctuated, but we still, we’re still doing that, and we will continue to do that. We do have agents [we are] sending in weeks and months at a time,' he stated. CBP is the nation’s largest law enforcement agency with more than 68,000 employees globally.

U.S. -Mexico border in Trump’s second term. The work that CBP did with ICE beginning last summer through January 2026 was largely publicized by Noem and Bovino.

Border Patrol agents led by Bovino were deployed to Charlotte, North Carolina; Portland; Chicago; New Orleans; and Minneapolis. Noem and Bovino frequently posted fiery videos about immigration enforcement. CBP operations lagged after nearly two months in Chicago and Minneapolis.

'Chicago and Minneapolis, specifically, we had this massive protest movement that came out that literally doesn’t want us to enforce the laws in the United States that were enacted by Congress,' Scott said. 'That got a lot of media attention, and that drew even more just chaos, if you will.

So we had to surge in additional agents just to protect the teams that were going out and making the arrests,' he added.

'The targeted enforcement that we’re doing right now around the country … there’s a lot less local backlash, and honestly, there’s less manpower,' Scott said. In Minneapolis and Chicago, Bovino and Noem declined to speak with local and state officials.

White House Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller declared in a Fox News interview last May that the administration was looking to make 3,000 arrests per day.

During the Biden administration, ICE was instructed to prioritize arresting those who were national security concerns and serious criminals, and to only arrest illegal immigrants without criminal histories if encountered while searching for those individuals.

'If we go into a house and there’s 20 people and … only one target, we’ll arrest all of them,' Scott said. 'There’s not a quota, per se,' he stated.

'This is what I heard from the Trump administration when I came in, the entire time: focus on the highest threats,' Scott said. 'Make sure that when you’re deploying agents, you’re doing it in the most effective way you can to make Americans safe,' he added.