There are more than 100 million illegal aliens in the United States who could all be deported or coerced into leaving, according to recently retired U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) Commander Gregory K. Bovino.
Bovino’s 30-year career at USBP came to an end weeks ago, shortly after he rose to prominence as one of the most feared, respected, and loathed men in the country.
After serving as chief patrol agent in El Centro Sector during the Biden years, Bovino was named USBP’s commander-at-large in 2025 and became the de facto face of the Trump administration’s budding mass deportation operation.
EXCLUSIVE: Meet the Man Who Had a Plan to Deport 100 Million Illegal Aliens
Watch our full interview with @GregoryKBovino to learn how he planned to remove or drive out 100 million invaders, and how that operation was derailed just before it reached escape velocity . . . pic.twitter.com/qCu4E3dhGz
— Border Hawk (@BorderHawkNews) April 29, 2026
“The 100 million figure, that’s something I’ve looked at since I started with Border Patrol 30 years ago. When I started 30 years ago, that figure stood around between 10 and 15 million. There were actually studies in the 70s with approximately 15 million already in the United States, mostly centered in places like California, New York, Oregon, and Washington,” Bovino told Border Hawk during a wide-ranging interview.
“So we started with quite a bunch of illegal aliens already in the United States because those interior enforcement operations 30 to 40 years ago were already starting to wind down. I think that’s something pretty important for the viewers to realize — they were already starting to wind down. There were still some interior ops, but nothing like in years before, such as the Eisenhower administration.”
Bovino explained that prior administrations began shutting down USBP stations across the interior of the country, in places such as San Francisco, Dallas, Little Rock, and Amarillo.
He said he was “appalled” during his decades of service, as millions upon millions of illegals continued to swarm across the porous southern border, where USBP was “vastly understaffed and very much overwhelmed.”
“I started there under Billary Clinton, and let me tell you what, they didn’t take border security seriously at all — didn’t like the Border Patrol, didn’t visit the border,” Bovino explained.
“So it started back then. Even before then, we had the Obama years and even the Bush years. Same thing. There was always two or three of those southwest border sectors that were out of control. It was like Whac-A-Mole. We would go to one sector, put it under control, but you know what? It would crop up in another sector. So you always had that mass migration coming into the country with no interior operations to send them out of the country.”
In 2005, analysts at the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns published a study indicating there were as many as 20 million illegals in the U.S. at the time.
It started at 10 million 30 years ago with millions a year entering since then under all administrations ( except Trump), culminating in 20 to 30 million additional under Biden alone. Given on the ground assessments across all major regions of the US in conjunction with both…
— Gregory K Bovino (@GregoryKBovino) April 20, 2026
Bovino, who cherishes America’s natural resources and has dedicated his life to preserving them, cited those findings in a research paper he wrote in the early 2010s examining mass migration’s negative impacts on our wildlife, air quality, water, forests, and more.
“As a border security professional, even back then, I was at the 40, 50, 60 million figure. In the time since then, let’s take a look at what’s happened. Let’s fast forward to the Biden years — 80% of our border was wide open. We know that there were millions that came across that we granted asylum and immigration relief to — millions and millions and millions. That, in itself, was a travesty. We know that. But what about what we don’t know that came across that border wholesale? Millions for four years,” Bovino stated.
“We didn’t even monitor many parts of the border for four years straight until Trump came into office and fixed it overnight. So there’s another tens of millions over those four years. Now we’re starting to get up to that 80 million, 100 million figure. And then also look at who came in and overstayed visas, the folks that came in for some type of immigration relief that just decided to stay… You don’t think of those folks because they technically didn’t cross the border illegally, but they’re here illegally now.
“So I arrived at the 100 million figure. You might say, ‘How do you really know that?’ The scientific process always has to be first grounded in common sense,” he continued, before launching into an account of his time on the ground across the U.S., where even rural communities are rapidly being transformed by mass migration, both illegal and legal.
Watch our full interview with Gregory Bovino to learn about his plan to remove or drive out 100 million invaders, and how that agenda was derailed just before it reached escape velocity.
