Greg Bovino was removed from his post in January following a controversial incident involving the deaths of two US citizens during a federal operation.

A former US Border Patrol commander has called for sweeping immigration measures, saying life should be made so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they are forced to leave the country.Greg Bovino, who recently retired, made controversial comments in a video interview in which he claimed that current anti-immigration enforcement efforts are not strong enough. He said, “We need an increase of DHS agents in all major cities. We need to make it so difficult for them to live, work, reproduce, do anything in the United States that they have no choice but to self-deport.”He also rejected the focus on targeting serious criminals, warning that it sends the wrong message. “They should have incentives to self-deport. Saying we are targeting ‘the worst people’ is signaling to most illegals that they are safe from deportation,” Bovino said.Going further, he claimed that the scale of undocumented immigration is much larger than publicly available statistics. “There’s still a lot of work to be done… They all need to go. We’re talking about potentially 100 million people who are still living here illegally.”Bovino previously played a key role in early immigration actions under President Donald Trump, overseeing operations in blue cities including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. He was later reassigned to California following a controversial incident in January in which two US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretty, were killed by ICE agents.He retired at the end of March, after which his access to official government social media accounts was revoked. However, he has been active online through a personal account.In recent days, Bovino courted controversy for publicizing a blog post in which he was praised as “Commandant Greg Bovino” and his policies were described as “support for mass deportation.” The article was written under the name “Federale”, an anonymous person associated with extremist online content.The account that authored the article had a history of posting racist and anti-Semitic content, including praise of Adolf Hitler and use of offensive profanity. The anonymous author is linked to platforms associated with white nationalist views, the Daily Beast reports.This adds to Bovino’s earlier criticism. He has previously been accused of using offensive language about colleagues and appeared in a government video that criticized some of the imagery compared to Nazi symbolism.