inewsource talked to El Centro’s Border Patrol chief now being sued over Bakersfield arrests. Here’s what he said

Operation “Return to Sender” immediately turned heads. 

The sight of dozens of Border Patrol agents in Bakersfield, a Latino farm worker community hundreds of miles from the southern border, was unusual. Headlines from news outlets across the state detailed the panic the operation sent across California in the final days of the Biden administration.

El Centro Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino declared the operation a success: It was another example of his team “taking it to transnational criminal organizations and those that smuggle,” Bovino told inewsource recently.

On social media, he touted the arrests of “two child rapists.” A written statement from the agency pointed to several drug seizures and other criminal histories among the nearly 80 arrested. 

“We did a pretty good job there making that community, anyway, a safer place,” he said. 

But while Bovino took a victory lap over one of his team’s “very best” operations, attorneys for immigrants say it violated due process rights and constitutional protections from unreasonable search and seizure.

A new lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union called the operation a “fishing expedition” that targeted Latino farm workers and day laborers “regardless of their actual immigration status or individual circumstances,” and then coerced them into agreeing to their own deportations.

The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration seeks to deport “millions and millions” from the U.S. While the administration boasts the arrests of immigrants they say are dangerous criminals, it has also signaled that it considers anyone in the U.S. without legal status a criminal.

Presence in the U.S. without legal status is a civil offense. Crossing the border without inspection is normally treated as a misdemeanor the first time.

An analysis by Austin Kocher, an immigration researcher and assistant professor at Syracuse University, suggests ICE officials are targeting an increasing number of people without criminal convictions or charges.  

ICE is the federal agency normally making immigration arrests in the interior of the U.S. Inside its detention centers, the population of those held only on immigration violations has grown at more than double the pace of those with criminal convictions or charges, according to Kocher’s analysis. 

The plaintiffs in the Bakersfield lawsuit include immigrants who have lived in Kern County for decades, have U.S. citizen spouses and children, and were on their way to work, a doctor’s appointment or going back home. They include farm workers, a construction worker, painter and a gardener. 

Bovino along with other top officials from Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security are named as defendants.

inewsource interviewed Bovino and other agents while reporting in the El Centro Sector a week before the lawsuit was filed. His team has since declined to answer questions related to the legal challenge, but their earlier responses offer a window into the sector’s enforcement approach and justification for the operation – which, at least at that time, they hoped to replicate in other places far from the southern border. 

“It was a proof of concept,” said David Kim, assistant chief patrol agent under Bovino. “Testing our capabilities, and very successful. We know we can push beyond that limit now as far as distance goes.”

Far away from home 

Agents in the El Centro Sector, which covers Imperial and Riverside counties, patrol one of the quietest regions along the southern border. In January, the sector reported the second fewest unauthorized border crossings – about 550 – of the nine along the international boundary. 

That same month, Bovino sent more than 60 agents fanning across several highways, including along Interstate 5, State Route 58 and 99, the last of which runs the length of California’s Central Valley from south of Bakersfield to Sacramento. Agents made enforcement stops at a Home Depot and, according to some reports, a gas station serving a breakfast popular among farm workers. 

Border Patrol can make arrests anywhere in the U.S., but have expanded powers within 100 miles of any U.S. land or maritime border. 

Bovino’s team emphasized that though based on the southern border, the agency used to operate a sector in central California that had been closed in the 2000s. After analyzing “illicit traffic patterns” going through Bakersfield, Bovino’s team conducted the “proactive” operation. 

When asked about the specific intelligence that led to the operation, Kim said agents were looking for smugglers carrying humans and narcotics, “specifically fentanyl,” along known trafficking routes in the area. 

“We did have intelligence, but I think to most people it would be common sense, too, that those major thoroughfares, that drugs and other things – that’s how they’re gonna get to other parts of California or the nation,” Kim said. 

The operation also included predetermined targets with orders of removal, but they “didn’t get everybody on that list.” They hoped the operation would yield “something” connected to a crime on the southern border so agents could pursue charges in that federal court district, instead of the one where they were making arrests, Kim said.

The ACLU lawsuit describes agents smashing windows, slashing tires, yanking people from their car and throwing a grandmother to the floor in an operation that “by design” dispensed with legal mandates outlined in the U.S. Constitution.  

Attorneys said agents relied on apparent race and occupation in determining whether someone was in the country without legal status. Instead of evaluating those detained for flight risk, all were arrested, the lawsuit said. 

After making arrests – 78 people, according to Border Patrol, though some news reports claim close to 200 were swept – agents transported them from Bakersfield to El Centro and coerced “at least 40” into signing voluntary departure forms, according to the lawsuit.

United Farm Workers, the California farm worker union with 7,000 members, is also named as a plaintiff. More than half of farm workers in California don’t have legal status, according to a 2022 report from the Public Policy Institute of California.

Yolanda Aguilera Martinez, a legal permanent resident, was driving to a doctor’s appointment when unmarked vehicles with flashing police lights pulled her over, according to the lawsuit. 

Aguilera Martinez spoke to Univision in Fresno about the experience: she said an agent threw her to the ground as she got out of the car – she was getting out slowly because she was recovering from hip surgery she said. The agent handcuffed her before helping her up to a seat, she said. 

She wasn’t released until she was allowed to make a phone call so a family member could send a photo of her green card confirming her status, the lawsuit said. Attorneys say she has no criminal record and has been a farm worker in the Central Valley since she was 16. 

Agents also arrested Maria Guadalupe Hernandez Espinoza. They took her belongings and denied her request to call family. After transporting her to the El Centro station, agents searched her “in front of dozens of men by lifting her shirt and exposing her bra,” then photographed and fingerprinted her, according to the lawsuit. 

She was held in a cold room with no windows and only a bench. Two women and children who said they were asylum seekers told Hernandez Espinoza they had been there for days, the lawsuit said. 

Hernandez Espinoza initially verbally agreed to sign a voluntary departure form. But later, after telling agents she wanted to see a judge instead, she unwittingly signed the form on an electronic device that did not show the documents, the lawsuit said. 

It wasn’t until Border Patrol dropped her off across the border in Mexicali that an agent handed her a copy of the form, leaving her in disbelief, the lawsuit said. 

‘Unusual’ tactics 

The operation quickly sent shockwaves through the community: farm workers avoiding work and kids staying home from school, CalMatters reported.

The local congressional representative, Republican David Valadao, released a statement after receiving calls from constituents concerned for their families’ safety. He said immigration officials assured him they were focused on “known criminals or those with ties to criminal organizations in our community.” 

None of the arrests in the three-day operation were connected to human or fentanyl smuggling, Kim said, though agents arrested someone carrying 30 pounds of cannabis and seized small amounts of methamphetamine, likely for personal use. 

Some of the people arrested also had criminal convictions ranging from petty theft and tampering with a vehicle, to burglary, DUIs with a hit-and-run or other injuries, and spousal and child abuse, a statement from the El Centro Sector said.

Kelly Thornton, director of media relations for the Southern District, said she wasn’t aware of any charges filed in the district resulting from the operation. 

Still, Bovino pointed to the arrest of a convicted rapist, someone wanted for sexually assaulting a child and “criminals that we caught there walking around in the middle of the day in public without a care in the world” as evidence of the operation’s success. 

When inewsource asked for the names of those arrested, among other questions, James Lee, supervisory border patrol agent in El Centro, did not provide them. Instead, he said the operation was an “all-threats approach.” 

“Those with criminal histories, deportation orders, and those involved in other illicit activities work and live among citizens, documented, and undocumented individuals,” Lee said in an email.

Katherine Hawkins, a senior legal analyst with the nonpartisan watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said tactics used in the operation were unusual. 

“Normally if you are looking to prosecute people for human smuggling near the border, you look near the border where people have recently been smuggled,” she said. 

Hawkins also said it’s normally other agencies – Homeland Security Investigations and ICE – which handle investigating transnational crime and carrying out immigration enforcement away from the border. 

In social media posts showcasing the arrests of the operation’s most egregious offenders, some commenters applauded the Bakersfield raid. Others criticized the agents’ perceived targeting of farm workers.

On Facebook, one commenter asked why agents weren’t posting “all the hard workers from the fields” getting arrested.

In other comments, the chief promised additional operations in Fresno and “especially Sacramento.” 

Last week, Bovino posted a photo of yet another arrest: A man in work boots and an orange hoodie and jeans covered in paint stains sat handcuffed inside an unmarked patrol car next to Agent Kim – this time in Los Angeles County, they said.