A top immigration official was tricked by a fake news story posted by a QAnon social media account shortly before getting demoted.
The 55-year-old Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino was duped on Jan. 25 by a social media post that said MAGA-favored rockstar Ted Nugent had pledged $100,000 to feed ICE agents in Minnesota.
He engaged with the post on X during his last full day leading Minnesota’s federal immigration enforcement operations before he was replaced by Trump’s border czar.
The story originated from the Facebook page “America’s Last Line of Defense,” which posts conservative-leaning satire. All of their posts are watermarked with a logo reading “Nothing on this page is real.”
The phony tale includes a Nugent quote from a Fox News interview that never occurred, in which the 77-year-old singer pledged to fly in a “metric ton of barbecue” to Minnesota.
Within hours, the story was reposted to X by the account “QTheStorm,” which posts QAnon conspiracy content. The account used a different picture of Nugent than the watermarked version posted by the “America’s Last Line of Defense” page.
Bovino, apparently believing that the story was genuine, replied, “Good job, Ted.”
Bovino was removed from Minnesota and replaced by Border Czar Tom Homan the next day. The DHS also suspended Bovino’s access to his social media accounts as part of the demotion, following a posting spree defending the killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot and killed by Border Patrol officials in Minnesota the day prior.
Bovino’s interaction with a fake news story came as he and other Trump administration officials pushed a narrative that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” looking to do “maximum damage” to law enforcement.
Pretti had a gun that he was legally permitted to carry when he was killed. Multiple videos of the scene show that Pretti never reached for his weapon as he was tackled by the Border Patrol officers who killed him.
The disconnect between the administration’s narrative and video evidence of the killing brought anti-ICE backlash to a boiling point.
In an apparent bid to “de-escalate” tensions, President Trump removed Bovino on Jan. 26, one day after the Border Patrol commander boosted the fake news story.
On Tuesday, Trump, 79, explained to a crowd of Iowa supporters that he makes such leadership changes “all the time.”
“Everybody here, these are a lot of owners of farms and places, you shake up your team if they can’t do the crops fast enough,” he said.
He also called Bovino an “out there guy” who “maybe wasn’t good” in Minnesota.
Under Bovino’s leadership, federal immigration operations in Minnesota involved federal agents detaining toddlers, ripping U.S. citizens out of their homes in their underwear, and gassing both protestors and themselves.
Agents also killed Pretti and 37-year-old mother Renee Good within three weeks of each other.
