Outside the Beltway

Greg Bovino’s Costuming Choices

It is hard to ignore the aesthetic he is invoking.

Steven L. Taylor · Monday, December 15, 2025 · 5 comments

Greg Bovino is a Customs and Border Patrol officer and has been with the organization since 1996. He is currently, according to NBC News, some kind of “Commander at Large,” and he reports directly to Noem.

The DHS officials said Bovino does not report to the chief of Border Patrol or CBP’s commissioner, as other Border Patrol sector chiefs do. The law enforcement official said Bovino reports directly to Noem, who called him the Border Patrol Commander at Large in a recent op-ed.

This is how he is described in what appears to be his X account: Commander Op At Large CA Gregory K. Bovino.

That he wears a uniform is, therefore, totally appropriate. However, he does seem to purposefully choose a specific aesthetic. This came to mind upon watching a Newsmax clip. Here is a screencap of what he was wearing (which matches the FNC example that I used as the main image).

As best as I can tell, this is the CBP dress uniform look. I cannot find a definitive CBP uniform guide to confirm the exact choice. There is little doubt that this is not his only choice. But, ok, fine, maybe he just thinks that the dress uniform is the way to go for a TV appearance.

I am no expert on uniforms, and certainly not on the etiquette of the CBP. Still, I can’t help but think that he did not have to wear the tie and Sam Browne belt, but rather could have chosen a less formal uniform, as other online photos show him wearing (including on TV).

Still, the above images inevitably take my mind to images like these.

Identical? Of course not. But Bovino’s chosen look above is, well, evocative, of those some pretty famous shots of Der Führer.

It is not just the look as presented above, but also his affinity for a certain kind of trenchcoat. Here is a screencap of a Google image search of “Bovino’s clothing CNN” (because I was aware of some pretty amazing photos taken by Mustafa Hussain for CNN).

When you are in an administration that has been accused of fascistic, if not Nazi-like, behavior, especially in the area of immigration enforcement, it is rather hard to give Bovino the benefit of the doubt when he makes these kinds of choices.

Note: he posed for those photos. He is proud of his fit.

Again, a screenshot of a Google Image search, in case the aesthetic isn’t obvious.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good trenchcoat. I even own a black one. But there is something rather specific about a dark (in Bovino’s case, olive drab), double-breasted military trenchcoat with the brass buttons and all the military accouterments that really takes your mind certain places.

Not only am I always suspicious of officials (or, really, people who aren’t in the entertainment industry) who are overly concerned about how they look (see also, Noem and Hegseth), but I can’t help but think of the adage about dressing for the job you want.

I can’t know what is in Bovino’s mind, but we all know that our clothing choices are a constant and ongoing deliberate act. No one wears a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt to a self-described Philadelphia Eagles bar by accident. You don’t whoopsie your way to wearing sweats and a Sex Pistols t-shirt to your grandma’s funeral, nor do you don a tutu and crop top for an interview at an accounting firm without some forethought. The vast majority of people understand context and appropriate dress.

Bovino is roughly my age. I know how ubiquitous images like those above were in the movies and television programs of our youth. There is no way he can’t see what we all see.

This is especially true because movies are part of his origin story (source: The Chicago Sun-Times, Greg Bovino’s the star of Trump’s deportation show. We trace his roots).*

Bovino has said he was inspired to join the Border Patrol when he saw a movie called “The Border” that came out when he was just 11. Produced by a distant cousin of his mom, it starred Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel as agents.

But the young Bovino was crestfallen that the movie portrayed the agents as bad guys and said he was moved to join the Border Patrol in 1996 to show he was the opposite — a good border cop.

“Making the border secure is my personal responsibility,” Bovino said on a podcast in 2021.

If you belong to an administration that has been accused of being fascist, if not Nazi-like, and then you show up to a photo shoot, or to an interview, looking like Bovino does, you are sending a signal. This is doubly true if your job has to do with the use of force to apprehend and expel human beings that the administration finds undesirable.

(Do read the footnote to gain even more perspective on this individual.)

*The story also notes the following, but since it deviates from the main post’s topic, I will just share it here:

But Bovino’s full story is less ma-and-pa and more nonna-and-nonno. The ancestry of Bovino’s father is Italian with rural, working-class origins not much different from the Mexicans and other newcomers who’ve been targeted lately by federal deportation efforts.

The American story of the Bovinos begins with a miner named Michele, who emigrated in 1909 from Calabria in southern Italy to Pennsylvania’s coal country, later becoming Michael, according to public records.

His wife Luigia and their children stayed behind in their rural, mountainous village of Aprigliano in a region lacking opportunity and plagued by organized crime. At the time of Michele Bovino’s arrival, there were no legal restrictions on Italians who dreamed of crossing the Atlantic.

That changed in May 1924. U.S. politicians, expressing alarm at the high percentage of foreign-born residents and driven by bigoted beliefs in eugenics, decided to stifle huge waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Congress passed a law that created strict quotas, cutting the number of arrivals allowed from countries like Italy, whose immigrants were derided as being less intelligent and more prone to crime than Protestant western and northern Europeans.

Also in May 1924, the Border Patrol was created.

Days later, Michele Bovino, 43, filed documents indicating his interest in becoming an American.

Three years later, records show, the chain migration of the Bovinos took place.

Here’s how the Bovinos managed to get around the new quotas that limited how many Italians and others deemed to be “undesirables” could end up in the United States.

After Michele was naturalized in 1927, he was reunited with his wife and four children in a Pennsylvania coal-company town after their arrival on the steamship the S.S. Giuseppe Verdi, records show.

Then, the kids, including Vincenzo, 12 — Gregory Bovino’s future grandfather — automatically benefited from a “derivative citizenship” law for minors. Luigia would become a naturalized citizen.

Nearly a century later, it’s astonishing to see “a person whose grandfather was an immigrant engaging in such abhorrent and violent treatment of contemporary migrants,” Joseph Sciorra — the director of academic programs at the Calandra Italian American Institute at the City University of New York — said of Bovino.

It is astonishing, but not surprising (see also Stephen Miller and a president who has had two foreign-born wives).

I recommend the entire piece, including:

Budd said the agency has low standards for accepting new recruits, does not vet hires thoroughly enough and routinely engages in excessive force, referring to detained migrants as “tonks” — the sound made when officers bash heads with flashlights.

“The pattern and practice down here is to make false accusations against the people you just beat up,” she said.

Budd said she quit after unearthing wrongdoing and being threatened to keep quiet. So she took delight at the rulings of federal judges in Chicago who sought to curtail Bovino. Last month, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis found that Bovino wasn’t hit in the head with a rock before he deployed tear gas despite the Department of Homeland Security’s assertions that he was in justifying his use of force. The judge said Bovino admitted he lied.

“He laughs when they call him out on the stuff, and it’s just a bro thing,” Budd says. “He’s just going around with his bros, just capturing migrants and people of color and harassing people.

Surely such a person wouldn’t evoke Nazi imagery in their clothing, now would they?