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’…
Page A2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 2 September 2026
Border Patrol commander retires amid misconduct probe as agency's asylum denial rate hits record high
As it ran on the front
Follow along, folks, page by page. Line one: CBS News obtained records showing Gregory Bovino, formerly the Border Patrol's commander, was under an internal investigation at the exact moment he filed his retirement paperwork. Nothing dramatic; the man simply signed out before anyone signed off on the inquiry. That's it. That's the document.
Now flip forward. Line two, filed separately: the same period, the agency's asylum denial rate reached the highest mark ever recorded. Not a headline about a hearing. Not a memo about reform. Just a rate, printed plain, going up while a commander's file went quiet.…
…(cont) All together now — the two pages side by side. One shows a man walking out a door mid-review. The other shows a stamp landing harder than it ever has. The paperwork doesn't say why. The paperwork never says why. That's the whole trick of a well-run filing cabinet — it tells you everything except the part where somebody explains it.
This reporter has read a great many retirement records in his time, and most of them close with a pension notice, a thank-you memo, maybe a photo with a cake. Bovino's closes with an open investigation nobody followed into the hallway. The file doesn't say what he was investigated for. It doesn't have to. It only has to say 'was under investigation' and 'retired' in the same sentence, and let the reader do the rest of the arithmetic — which, again, we are simply following along here, is not our department, we just read the page aloud.
All together now, one more time — line forty-seven, if you're keeping your own copy: the man who ran the agency left before the review did, and the agency he left kept setting records without him. That's not a coincidence filed in triplicate. That's just two documents that happen to sit on the same desk, in the same year, with nobody in the room to reconcile them.
We are told records exist. We are shown a rate exists. Nobody has yet produced the memo connecting the two, and this reporter, ever polite to institutions, will simply note that the memo's absence is itself a filing. In lieu of a hearing, the records office keeps the files open, right where we found them.
“You want to know how accountability actually works inside a federal agency? A commander gets investigated, and while the file's still open, he just retires. Paperwork closed, pension intact, no hearing, no public finding. That same year the agency he ran hits its highest denial rate on record — nobody had to fire him for the machine to keep running exactly the way it was already running.”
“Personnel matters are confidential, and an open inquiry doesn't imply wrongdoing, it's a routine review that happened to coincide with his retirement — that's just scheduling. The denial rate is a separate data point; it's not connected, why would you connect two numbers that both happen to be public?”
The receipts
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.