Gregory Bovino reportedly mocked US Minnesota attorney’s Jewish faith

Recently demoted border patrol official Gregory Bovino reportedly made mocking and sarcastic remarks about the Jewish faith of Minnesota’s US attorney, Daniel Rosen, during a phone call with prosecutors in the state earlier in January.According to the New York Times, Bovino mocked Rosen for observing Shabbat, a weekly day of rest that begins at sunset on Friday and ends at sunset on Saturday – and used the term “chosen people” in a sarcastic way during a phone call with the lawyers on 12 January.The call came after Bovino requested a meeting with Rosen to push the Minnesota US attorney’s office into a stronger response toward criminalizing people whom Bovino believed were impeding federal agents from enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state, the Times reported on Saturday.Rosen delegated the call to a deputy and, with several prosecutors on the call, Bovino complained that Rosen had been hard to reach during the weekend because of Shabbat.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the justice department (DoJ) and Rosen’s office in Minnesota did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.Bovino, 55, has become one of the most visible faces of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown across the US, initially in Los Angeles, Chicago and other Democratic-led cities – and more recently in Minneapolis. His provocative responses to border patrol’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, were followed by his withdrawal from the midwestern city. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was shifting its posture about the shooting, backtracking from its initial claims that Pretti was “a domestic terrorist”.Pretti was filming immigration officials in Minneapolis on 24 January and, after a confrontation, border patrol shot him to death. Bovino claimed that Pretti intended to “massacre” federal agents before the killing was met with protests.The DHS claimed the agents fired in self-defense after the nurse, who they say had a handgun, resisted their efforts to disarm him – but videos recorded by witnesses show that Pretti was holding a phone, not a firearm.Pretti’s killing came 17 days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis while she drove away from a confrontation. Good’s killing also spurred protests.On Tuesday, the Trump administration demoted Bovino from his role as the agency’s commander at large and transferred him out of Minneapolis. Trump border chief Tom Homan was put in charge of the Minnesota immigration enforcement operation and on Thursday said he “recognized that certain improvements could and should be made”, but he stopped short of elaborating on what he meant by that.