Mass deportations 2.0

ICE wasn’t tough enough ... Still waiting … And she could give Johnson a tour.

Hello, readers!

Sorry to ruin your morning cup of coffee, but we’ve got worrisome news for you.

Big changes are coming from the White House and immigration hardliners are about to take over Arizona.

We’ve got a long road ahead. Smash that button and we’ll walk you through it.

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Apparently, the mass deportation program that has terrorized immigrants for the past nine months wasn’t moving fast enough.

To speed it up, the Trump administration is removing the top ICE official in Phoenix and several other major cities. In their place, the White House is installing Border Patrol officials, some of whom will be hand-picked by the guy running the crackdowns in Los Angeles and Chicago.

The logic here, according to anonymous officials who spoke to the D.C.-based news outlets chasing the story, is that ICE officials were too focused on arresting individuals, instead of trying to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million people by the end of the year.

While ICE goes after immigrants with criminal records and those who have a “final order of removal,” the Border Patrol is scooping up anybody they see who might be in the country without papers.

“We’re arresting criminals, while they are going to Home Depots and car washes,” one U.S. official told CBS News, referring to Border Patrol agents.

Remember the Border Patrol agents in tactical gear jumping out of the back of a Penske truck a few months ago to chase people around a parking lot in Los Angeles?

Get ready for a lot of that in Arizona. Along with a lot of tear gas on residential streets.

The Trump administration is on pace to deport about 600,000 people this year, far below their goal. And they can’t turn to the border to beef up their statistics. Too few people are crossing anymore.

So they turned to the big cities, which Trump officials (some of whom are too scared of city life to even ride the subway) are doing their best to make look like crime-ridden, Democratic-run hellholes that are overrun by dangerous foreigners.

In Monday’s Arizona Agenda, we explained the Trump administration’s crackdown on cities like Chicago and Portland, with an eye on local officials who pushed back by declaring “ICE-free zones” or suggesting federal agents could be arrested under state law.

The guy in charge of those big-city operations, Greg Bovino, reportedly will help decide who takes over the ICE office in Phoenix, along with the offices in Denver, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Diego.

Greg Bovino at CNN’s bureau in Chicago.

Bovino is a hard-charging Border Patrol official from the El Centro Sector in California, right next to the Yuma Sector, who likes to add militaristic swagger to immigration enforcement.

His agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter onto a roof of an apartment building in Chicago last month, and they rode horses through MacArthur Park as a show of force in Los Angeles this summer.

They also broke up a children’s Halloween parade in Chicago last weekend. When residents intervened, Border Patrol agents threw tear gas canisters at them. The agents also dragged a 67-year-old man (who is a U.S. citizen) from his car and pinned him to the ground near the parade. The agents broke six of his ribs.

Bovino’s record of brutality is so extensive that he now has to meet with a federal judge in Chicago every day at 6 p.m. to review each day’s use-of-force incidents, and he has to wear a body camera at all times.

Last week, the judge told Bovino to bring her every one of those use-of-force reports since September 2, but Bovino said the “sheer amount” of reports was too much for him to deliver by the Tuesday deadline the judge set.

That doesn’t bode well for Arizona as we enter a new stage of the mass deportation program.

Hardliners who are closely aligned with Trump are taking over and they’re in a hurry to deport as many people as possible.

Thanks to the federal spending bill, they can draw on tens of billions of dollars for more agents, more detention centers, and whatever else they need.

And U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave federal agents the green light to consider race when making arrests, what are becoming known as “Kavanaugh stops.”

Who knows? A year from now, after Bovino and his Border Patrol crew run roughshod through Phoenix and Tucson, followed by widespread protests in the streets and a stack of lawsuits, ICE might come out looking like the “good guys.”

Grijalva on the road: Still waiting for House Speaker Mike Johnson to swear her in, Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva is staying busy, including by chatting with New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle about her life in limbo. Last week, the congresswoman-elect criss-crossed Congressional District 7 and met with seniors in Somerton, held a town hall with veterans and met with furloughed federal workers. As we reported last week, Grijalva also gave a speech at one of Tucson’s “No Kings” rallies. And while she had some harsh words in the Times for the “patronizing and misogynistic” Johnson, Grijalva thanked former Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks — a Republican — for blasting Johnson for not swearing her in, per The Hill.

“I’m a Republican. The House Speaker is a Republican. Adelita Grijalva is a Democrat,” Brooks said. “But what is right is right, and what the Republican House Speaker is doing to Democrat Adelita Grijalva is wrong. Period.”

Protesting in 2025: The FBI visited Tucsonan Miles Serafini at home to question him about attending an ICE protest in June, per Ring camera footage obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein. And in an age where simply attending an ICE protest can lead to a visit from the FBI, the First Amendment is getting very blurry, the Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller writes.

Big Brother gets new toys: For the past two years, the Tucson Police Department has been using the AI-powered Cobwebs software — a favorite tool of ICE — to monitor physical locations and social media, Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. TPD used the software to surveil the annual Gem and Mineral Show, the Fourth Ave Street Fair and last year’s visit to Tucson by then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Almost quarantined in Nogales: Two siblings have tested positive for the non-contagious Dengue fever in Nogales, Arizona, KGUN9 reports. The disease is transmitted by infected mosquitoes and both siblings are isolating outside of Santa Cruz County.

Southward bound: The dangerous Darién Gap, the jungles that separate Panama and Columbia, have been historically used by immigrants to travel north from South America. The Republic’s Amanda Luberto reports that immigrants are now traveling south to leave the U.S. since President Donald Trump took office.

We’re excited to hear that Arizona Senators Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly were able to get a bill to rename the federal building in Tucson after Raúl Grijalva through the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

There are still miles to go, but it is a good first step to honor his decades of service to the Old Pueblo.

The real hurdle is going to be the House, where it’ll run into House Speaker Mike Johnson, who told the press this week that Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva doesn’t know how things work in D.C.

Oh, sweet summer child, Adelita has been going to D.C. with her father for decades.

We’d like to point out that Raúl was in Congress for more than a decade before Johnson was elected.