Newsom Blasts Retiring Border Patrol Boss Bovino As 'Smallest Man' Alive

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) sent controversial U.S. Border Patrol official Greg Bovino a blistering farewell message following news he is set to retire from the agency at the end of this month.

“Good riddance. You ruined lives. Spread fear. And spewed hatred,” Newsom wrote on X. “If you’re remembered, it will be as the smallest man who ever lived.”

The account for the governor’s press office also tried to needle the agent with an illustration of the Statue of Liberty bending down to tell a bawling Bovino, “You’re fired,” a phrase that lives in infamy from President Donald Trump’s run on “The Apprentice.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, here at the 2026 SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 15, needled retiring Border Patrol boss Greg Bovino in a post Monday on X.

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Bovino became the face of the second Trump administration’s nationwide deportation crackdown, overseeing the aggressive operations that sparked mass protests in Los Angeles last summer.

Scrutiny on Bovino only intensified after “Operation Midway Blitz,” when hundreds of immigration agents and National Guard troops were deployed to Chicago and the surrounding area.

Bovino, here in January, became the face of President Donald Trump's nationwide deportation crackdown as the lead on operations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.

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He was removed from his post as Border Patrol’s “commander-at-large” in January after federal agents killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which inflamed already-fierce backlash to Trump’s immigration crackdown locally and across the nation.

Bovino, who has been with Border Patrol since 1996, told Breitbart Texas that working with the agency and its officers was “the greatest honor of my entire life.”