Former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino was formally notified he was under an internal investigation just 16 days before he announced his retirement plans, records show. CBS News' homeland security correspondent Nicole Sganga breaks down what we know.
Page A8From§Eachthe early evening edition — 1 September 2026
Border Patrol commander under internal investigation quietly retires as asylum denial rates hit an all-time high.
As it ran on the front
All right, settle in, because today's document is a personnel record, and personnel records are where institutions keep their most polite secrets. Let's call our subject — because we never use the real name in this space — Agent Sundown, formerly a field commander at the agency in question. Records obtained and reported show Agent Sundown was under internal investigation at the time of retirement. Not before. Not after. During.
All together now — line one: an investigation opens. Line two: the investigation is, per the records, still open. Line three: the retirement paperwork gets filed anyway, and retirement paperwork, this reporter would like to note, does not require the investigation to close first. It just requires the retirement paperwork.…
…(cont) I want to be fair to the agency here, because I always want to be fair to the agency. An open investigation into a retiring commander is not, on its own, evidence of anything except that an investigation was open. Investigations open all the time. Some of them even close. What the records show us is simply the sequence: open investigation, then retirement, then, as far as the public record we have goes, no further public update on where that investigation landed. That's not an accusation. That's a gap in the paperwork, and gaps in paperwork are, again, my entire beat.
Meanwhile, separately, filed in a completely different drawer of the same institution: the asylum denial rate, according to the agency's own numbers, has reached an all-time high. I only mention it because it's the same season, the same institution, and the same public record. One drawer shows the agency getting stricter with the people asking it for something. The other drawer shows the agency getting quieter about the person who used to run part of it.
All together now, one more time — the file on the commander: open, then retired, then silent. The file on the applicants: denied, at a rate higher than any year on record. I'm not going to tell you those two drawers are connected. I'm just going to tell you they're in the same filing cabinet, and I'd very much like to see what's still in the folder marked Sundown, whenever the agency is ready to show us.
“The investigation opens, the commander retires, and the file just stops being public. Meanwhile the denial rate hits a record and everybody calls that enforcement. One of those numbers gets a press conference; the other gets a quiet exit interview.”
“Personnel matters are confidential, that's standard agency practice, we don't comment on individual investigations, full stop. Was he pushed out or did he retire on his own terms? Those are actually the same document if you look at it right, I mean, the timing is coincidental, personnel timing usually is.”
The receipts
Immigration judges are denying nearly all immigrant claims for asylum, while simultaneously plowing through asylum cases at an expeditious rate. A new analysis of asylum cases pending before the immigration courts, known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review, revealed that 94% of asylum claims — or roughly 13,500 immigrants’…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.