It has been more than six weeks since U.S. Border Patrol agents from the agency’s El Centro sector launched a three-day raid in rural stretches of Kern County, California, resulting in the detention and deportation of scores of undocumented laborers. The unusual undertaking — carried out more than 300 miles from El Centro near the U.S.-Mexico border — came at the tail end of the Biden administration. Border Patrol Chief Agent Gregory Bovino, a 25-plus-year veteran who leads the Imperial County unit, headed up the operation without the involvement of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Los Angeles Times reports. Three former officials with the Biden administration, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share operational details, said Bovino “went rogue” with the January raids. No higher-ups knew about the operation before watching it unspool in real time, two of the former officials said. Instead, said one, it seemed to be a play by some Border Patrol agents, on the eve of President Trump’s return to office, to “show that there was a new boss coming and that that’s where their loyalties lay.”
In official statements, Bovino has justified the raid by noting that the sector’s area of responsibility stretches from the border to the Oregon line, “as mission and threat dictates.” Border Patrol officials have said the operation resulted in the arrests of 78 immigrants in the country illegally, including a child rapist. The agency has not specified how many of the immigrants detained had criminal records. Advocates on the scene, meanwhile, said the operation indiscriminately targeted Latino farmworkers commuting from the fields along California Route 99 and day laborers soliciting work in the parking lots of big box stores. They estimate close to 200 people were detained. What played out in Kern County offers a glimpse into the “emboldened” approach to immigration enforcement that is expected to become the norm under the Trump administration. Undocumented workers and their advocates interviewed in the wake of the Kern County raids say that the Border Patrol agents rounded up field hands and day laborers without regard to whether they had criminal offenses, sending them back across the border. In some cases, they said, the workers left behind spouses and children — many of them U.S.-born — who are now struggling to get by. “In our perspective, it was definitely meant to terrorize the community, and especially the Latino and farmworker community,” Sofia Corona, a directing attorney with the UFW Foundation in Bakersfield, said of the operation. “And sadly, it really did have that impact.”