Bluesky

We were in hot pursuit of the caravan that was chauffeuring Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who had just arrived in Minnesota the day before. In his wake were a dozen or so cars, some carrying journalists and others full of “commuters”—the term used by citizens who follow immigration agents around in an effort to alert community members to their presence. For months, I and a number of other members of the press had been following Bovino from Illinois to North Carolina to Louisiana, and now to Minnesota, documenting the impact of the Trump administration’s surges of federal immigration agents. We spent a lot of time in rental cars, driving like maniacs.

When you do this kind of work, you walk a fine line: You don’t want to get in the middle of the commuters and agents, but you don’t want to lose the caravan either. In my rental car, I straddled lanes, riding the bumper of the car in front of me. When a BMW tried to cut me off , I held my ground. I locked eyes with the driver, expecting a random pissed-off person who wouldn’t understand why I was acting like a jerk. Instead, I saw a masked man behind the wheel, his eyes and the bridge of his nose immediately identifying him to me as one of Bovino’s guys. The BMW was full of Border Patrol agents, and we were keeping them from the rest of their pack.

I slammed on the brakes, raised my hands, and shrugged. Oops, I mouthed. The driver shook his head and wagged his finger at us. When we ended up next to each other again at a light a few blocks up, the agents rolled their windows down and cracked a few jokes at my expense. Probably not the reaction a random civilian would have gotten.

I never really intended to cover immigration in any capacity, especially not with video. I’m a writer whose work focuses on the far right. But when President Trump brought the National Guard and ICE to Washington, DC, I started recording as much of their activities as I could. This meant recording federal agents lurking around Metro stations, apprehending people for smoking weed, and overseeing roadblocks conducted by the local police. After a few weeks, a friend who had followed ICE in DC with me suggested I go to Broadview, a village outside Chicago with an ICE facility that was central to Operation Midway Blitz, the administration’s name for the surge of federal agents into Chicago, ostensibly for immigration enforcement. By 8 am on my first day there, agents had gassed the handful of protesters who had gathered outside numerous times and had drawn handguns. After one weekend in Broadview, I could not imagine caring about any other story. I spent the rest of Bovino’s tenure following the surges, creating videos for Mother Jones.

The compulsion to stick with this story was not unique to me. A handful of us followed Bovino to the other cities, becoming increasingly obsessed with recording raids and abductions. How could anyone think anything else in the world mattered? People needed to see what we were witnessing. Going home for weddings, birthdays, or just a few days off was jarring. A Chicago-based journalist friend pointed out that if what was happening in Chicago had happened in New York City, it would be on the front page of every paper in the world. Until Renée Good was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January, most people did not have any concept of the scale of violence we were witnessing. Though Los Angeles was the first city to face a surge, many of the people, reporters included, who traveled around following immigration agents started in Chicago.

Chicago, a city with 560,000 immigrants, has been one of Trump’s favorite targets. Trump has attacked its governor, JB Pritzker, as a “loser” and “fat slob.” And throughout his first and second terms, he has depicted Chicago as a lawless city; crime statistics in Chicago are a favorite refrain of MAGA.

Federal agents guarded the Broadview facility during protests for the first few weeks of Midway Blitz. Their tactics, from tear-gassing the neighborhood to shooting pepper balls directly at protesters, resulted in an extreme amount of violence against a largely unprepared crowd of people. Agents often seemed to single out members of the press, routinely sniping at us from the rooftops of nearby buildings. On September 27, a day so violent and brutal that local police ended up taking over guarding the facility, photographer Dave Decker snapped a shot of an agent near the facility’s gate.

“I bet that picture looks cool as hell,” the agent told Decker, who had been shot with pepper balls numerous times that day as he tried to take photos. “Can you tag me on Instagram?”

We were all gobsmacked by the navel-gazing request. But the agent’s comment was a sign of the perverse narcissism that was to come. DHS agents might not like journalists, but they love being recorded and photographed. Weeks after this event, agents made small talk with another photographer I spoke with who had been following them around the Chicago area since the start of Midway Blitz. They asked if he had photos of them, and he replied that he wasn’t sure, because all the agents looked the same to him. Acting as though that was a ridiculous statement, they explained the differences in how they each wore their vests and uniforms. Eventually, the agents gave up and asked for the photographer’s Instagram handle to check for themselves.

DHS agents routinely stole and repurposed videos and photos taken by journalists and used them in their own propaganda campaigns. In other circumstances this might have given us pause, but there was a stark contrast between the agents’ reactions to the footage and the public’s responses to it. We were documenting the agents to make sure the public saw their violence. The agents just thought they were in the eye of the paparazzi.

At a gas station in St. Paul, I watched Border Patrol agents tackle and arrest a protester unprovoked. The agents then busted out the window of a car driven by a man who Bovino, without evidence, had declared was a Honduran national. Bovino dragged the man out of his vehicle with such force that he fell unconscious. He was hauled off in an SUV and was ultimately deported.

The next day, a photographer and I were following a small caravan of agents from the Bureau of Prisons and BORTAC, the elite tactical unit of Border Patrol. During a stop at a gas station, they asked who we worked for. The photographer explained wire services to them, and I asked if they had seen the previous day’s gas-station melee on the news that morning. I told them it was my video and that the photographer with me had taken a perfect, clear shot of the car window as they broke the glass. Impressed, the agent asked which car was ours, giving us their blessing to follow them.

Two days after I filmed the gas-station detainments, I recorded video as Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman who was driving by as a raid was taking place, was yanked from her car. I was not prepared for the response the video got. People messaged me to tell me it was the first thing they had seen that made them concerned about the immigration surges. News outlets around the world played the footage, and Rahman ultimately testified to Congress about her experience. A journalist from a major national outlet called me about it, expressing horror. They kindly asked me if I was shocked at what I had witnessed. Tired, hungry, covered in tear gas, and unable to regulate my response, I said that the only shocking part of this was that such a large media organization was calling me about it.

And it wasn’t just media outlets that seemed surprised by the footage. Sometimes I would read about my videos in X comments and on Reddit, which reach an audience much larger than my written work does. Those viewers, unaware of who I was, would wonder how I was so close to the violence without being hurt myself. Some speculated that I was lugging around a large television camera and assumed that the agents avoided harming television reporters because of the optics. But I am just a writer who records video on an iPhone, and the truth about the agents was far more bizarre: They accepted our presence and welcomed the attention. Perhaps in their minds we were part of their official entourage.

Early on in Minnesota, an agent I didn’t recognize got out of his car at a red light and yelled at my vehicle, telling us to stop following them. We explained that we were press, but he didn’t care. Less than a minute later, another agent ran up, apparently to do damage control. We were the ones who took a lot of video, right?, he asked us. We shouldn’t worry about that other guy—we were totally fine to follow them! Soon after, a few of us were following a lone commuter in Minneapolis who was honking while tailing a couple of Border Patrol cars. When the Border Patrol cars stopped abruptly and the agents hopped out, so did we. An armed masked agent prepared to pound on the commuter’s window and briefly looked back at us.

“Oh, hey man, what’s up?,” he said, cheerfully greeting a photographer he recognized from Charlotte or New Orleans. Then he turned back and barked at the commuter: “This is your one and final warning!” The guy inside the car looked terrified. Though Bovino has said that the horns and whistles activists use to alert people that Border Patrol is nearby actually help agents, the reality is they irritate the agents and hinder their ability to conduct raids.

In the online magazine Hammer and Hope, the photographer Ashley Gilbertson wrote that agents in Chicago recognized him from his time embedded in war zones in West Africa and Iraq. By the time Operation Catahoula Crunch—an action where law enforcement reassigned Border Patrol agents—kicked off in Louisiana, the Border Patrol agents assigned to Bovino had begun to address some journalists by name, which was startling. Bovino frequently replied to our videos on X, and it was hard to imagine they didn’t all know who each of us were. But to us, the agents were all interchangeable and nameless.

Bovino showed up in Minnesota the same day that Renée Good was killed. The next morning, a fairly large crowd of protesters gathered outside of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, which houses an immigration court and an ICE processing center. Tear gas, pepper balls, and violent arrests ensued, and eventually a line of agents stood guard, keeping the protesters off the property. I started taking B-roll to kill time, but ran into a videographer I knew from other surge cities. We stopped to catch up, close enough to the agents they could have joined our conversation. As we chatted about our experiences in Chicago and New Orleans, the agents remained stone-faced, pretending not to listen or care. But when our conversation ended, one of them asked me what Broadview had been like.

“Extraordinarily violent,” I told him, surprised by his question. I asked if he had been to any of the other surges, and he said no.

As I described the obscene amounts of tear gas that had been unleashed on peaceful protesters and the targeting of the media, the agents nearby gave up the pretense of not listening. They were standing at their home base, where they have guns and some degree of authority, but here I was, telling them what their future deployment would be like. It was as though they were the outsiders at their own event.

In fact, my time covering the surges has been a continued point of interest to immigration agents. When President Trump announced in March that ICE would be stationed at airports to “assist TSA,” I flew to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport to see what it was all about. The agents were far more talkative than the ones I had met during surges: some right away, while others warmed up after I continued to show up every morning and stand around, or after they saw videos of themselves go viral or get picked up. (In my experience, people don’t like to read about themselves, but they do like to see themselves on television).

On ICE’s second day at the airport, the subject of activist photographers came up. “Isn’t that you?” one agent asked. “An activist?” They hadn’t heard of Mother Jones when they met me the day before, but they had since looked up the magazine. I thought they might tell me to get lost, but for the rest of the week, they seemed to feel that my presence at the surges made up for my political stances. Perhaps they were just lonely, happy to have some female energy around.

Some of these agents had been deployed to Minnesota and told me about their experiences there. A few had been stationed in DC, which surprised me, since the conversion of FBI, ATF, and IRS agents to ICE agents had led me to assume there weren’t many out-of-towners brought in. Some who had not been deployed before asked me what it had been like to be at the surges. One even said he was grateful that he hadn’t been deployed: Apparently, the experience was not alluring for everyone. All the agents who had been to Minnesota told me they never wanted to go back, for any reason.

Some agents in Houston said they were likely deployed to the airport for optics. Many of them were upset that all immigration officials were branded as “ICE”—apparently they didn’t want to be associated with Bovino’s cowboy-style Border Patrol raids. Even so, when I took a video of agents handing out water to people in line, some rolled their eyes, saying it was embarrassing for them to be doing this. According to the crew in San Antonio, some of them had signed up thinking they would get to work the TSA machines, which could at least be cool. Instead, they were stuck being cart boys and girls. A weak and disappointing turn of events!

But as unhappy as they might have been about the public perception of ICE, many agents also did not want to be the new TSA. I knew that they would not be leaving the airport anytime soon. (ICE stayed at the airports in Houston for several weeks). “It’s not my cup of tea, but I’ll drink it,” one agent told me about airport patrol. Another said he had declined the six-hour TSA training, knowing that learning to man the machinery would be a de facto career shift. After all, if he had wanted to be a TSA agent, he would have joined the TSA.

These conversations were always peppered with questions about what I thought of the surges, from topics as benign as the weather in Minnesota to my take on Bovino, who had recently told me he’d love to see me “bustling around the kitchen, baking a pie” (a story that flabbergasted even the ICE agents). In New Orleans, I had a similar experience with a BORTAC team who, after inviting me and a photographer to follow them to a raid, asked us even more questions than we asked them.

For now, the flashy raids that regularly poured tear gas into homes and schools have stopped. Some of the photographers have left for war zones, while others are now covering more routine aspects of life. I am struggling to finish writing an overdue story detailing the entire experience, worried I’ll fail to fully convey the horrors of things I witnessed. Almost all of us would drop everything in our lives and be on the next flight out if the “Papers, please” style of immigration enforcement returned. But for now, at least we have the videos.