By The Associated Press

The commander of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis is leaving the city after federal agents fatally shot two people in less than three weeks.

Gregory Bovino had been the go-to architect for the large-scale immigration crackdowns ordered by Trump and the public face of his administration’s city-by-city sweeps. The Border Patrol chief led agents in Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans before he headed to Minnesota in December for what the Department of Homeland Security called its largest-ever immigration enforcement operation.

He’s also been heavily criticized for his norm-breaking tactics.

Here’s what to know about Bovino’s career, methods and approach:

Smashing car windows

Bovino revels in breaking norms. Agents have smashed car windows, blown open a door to a house and patrolled the fabled MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on horseback.

Smashing windows when a driver refuses to open and is subject to arrest is “a safer tactic than letting someone drive away and then getting in a high-speed pursuit,” he said.

Blasting the door off a home in Huntington Park, California, to search for a man accused of ramming a Border Patrol vehicle days earlier was a “very, very prudent, thoughtful application of tactics,” said Bovino, who joined that early-morning raid. “I don’t want to surround a house for hours and hours and hours and then create another riot.”

Bovino often appears in tactical gear, as he did outside California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s news conference on congressional redistricting in August.

Agents rappel from helicopter in Chicago

In Chicago, agents stormed an apartment complex by helicopter, deploying chemical agents near a public school and handcuffed a Chicago City Council member at a hospital.

Agents rappelled down to the apartment building from a Black Hawk helicopter. Authorities said they were targeting the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, but only two of the 37 immigrants arrested were gang members. The others were in the country illegally, they said, including some with criminal histories. One U.S. citizen was arrested on an outstanding narcotics warrant.

Activists, residents and leaders said the combative tactics sparked violence and fueled neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city.

Bovino also drew a rare public rebuke from a federal judge who said he misled the court about the threats posed by protesters and deployed tear gas and pepper balls without justification during a chaotic confrontation downtown.

Vowing a ‘turn and burn’ approach

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency primarily responsible for interior immigration enforcement since its was created in 2003, has historically made arrests in the streets after lengthy investigations of individual targets, including surveillance that an official once likened to watching paint dry. Officials rarely have judicial warrants to enter a home, causing them to wait outside.

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It is not a pace that will lead to the mass deportations Trump has promised.

“We’re going to turn and burn to that next target and the next and the next and the next, and we’re not going to stop,” he said in an interview in a seventh-floor conference room of the federal building in West Los Angeles, where an unused office wing served as a sparsely furnished temporary base.

In an internal memo obtained this month by The Associated Press, ICE leadership stated administrative warrants were now sufficient for federal officers to forcibly enter people’s homes if there’s a final order of removal.

Almost forced to retire in 2023

Bovino was one of 20 regional Border Patrol chiefs around the country when he was relieved of his command leading leading the agency’s sector in El Centro, California.

He blamed an online profile picture of him posing with an M4 assault rifle; social media posts that were considered inappropriate; and sworn congressional testimony that he and other sector chiefs gave on the state of the border during a record surge of migrants.

Thirty minutes after his second congressional hearing, Bovino said, he was removed from his position and asked, “Are you going to retire now?”

He didn’t retire. The change in administration from President Joe Biden to Trump in 2025 turned Bovino into a MAGA-world hero. The profile photo with the assault rifle was back online and by the summer, he was leading immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration launched its first sustained blitz of a U.S. city.

Deporting people who ‘skip the line’

Bovino joined the Border Patrol in 1996 and is nearing the agency’s mandatory retirement age of 57. He eventually plans to return home to North Carolina to harvest apples.

He served as Border Patrol chief in El Centro, California, long a relatively quiet part of the southern border that has become even quieter as illegal crossings have plummeted to their lowest levels in six decades.

His media savvy is on display each summer when Border Patrol sector chiefs hold news conferences to warn against illegal crossings. In 2021, Bovino led journalists in swimming across the All-American Canal, whose deceptively swift current and smooth concrete lining result in migrant deaths every year. In 2023, he locked reporters in a vehicle trunk, saying he wanted them to appreciate the dangers firsthand.

While administration officials like to say they are deporting the “worst of the worst,” Bovino embraces arrests of hard-working people with deep roots in the country. He said they “skip the line” ahead of people waiting to enter the country legally.

“The folks undercutting American businesses, is that right?” he said. “Absolutely not. That’s why we have immigration laws in the first place, and that’s why I’m here.”

‘Not afraid to push the envelope’

ICE has led interior immigration enforcement since it was created in 2003, but the Border Patrol has been around much longer. Bovino’s sense of mission never strayed from the Border Patrol’s roots. When assigned to lead a station in Blythe, California, he pitched his boss, Paul Beeson, on raiding the airport and bus stations in Las Vegas.

The 2010 operation was supposed to last three days but got called off after the first hour yielded dozens of arrests and unleashed a furious reaction from then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

“He’s not afraid to push the envelope, very articulate, leads from the front,” said Beeson, who, as a sector chief, selected Bovino to lead stations in Blythe and in Imperial Beach, California.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union said Tuesday it’s stepping in to make sure Google gives rival AI companies and search engines access to Gemini AI services and data as required by the bloc’s flagship digital rulebook.

The executive arm of the 27-nation bloc said it was opening up so-called “ specification proceedings ” to ensure that Google complies with the sweeping Digital Markets Act, which requires Big Tech companies to give smaller players equal access to hardware and software features.

Brussels said part of the proceedings will specify how Google should give third-party AI companies “equally effective access to the same features” available through its own services.

The EU will also look at whether Google is giving competing search engines fair and reasonable access to Google Search data. This will include whether AI chatbot providers are eligible to access to the data.

The proceedings fall short of an investigation and must wrap up in six months with draft measures that Brussels will impose on Google.

Clare Kelly, Google’s senior competition counsel, said she was concerned about the reasons behind the procedure.

“Android is open by design, and we’re already licensing Search data to competitors under the DMA,” Kelly said in a statement. “However, we are concerned that further rules which are often driven by competitor grievances rather than the interest of consumers, will compromise user privacy, security, and innovation.”

Teresa Ribera, who oversees competition affairs as executive vice president of the European Commission, says it seeks to “maximize the potential and the benefits of this profound technological shift by making sure the playing field is open and fair, not tilted in favor of the largest few.”

The move adds EU pressure on Google, which is facing antitrust scrutiny after the bloc’s regulators last year started investigating whether the company gave itself an unfair advantage through the use of online content for its AI models and services.

By PAUL WISEMAN, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has strong-armed many of America’s biggest trading partners into pledging trillions of dollars of investment in the United States. But a study out Tuesday raises doubts about whether the money will actually materialize and questions how it would be spent if it did.

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“How realistic are these commitments?’’ write Gregory Auclair and Adnan Mazarei of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank that supports free trade. “The short answer is that they are clouded with uncertainty.’’

They looked at more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Persian Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Trump used the threat of punitive tariffs – import taxes – to pry concessions out of those trading partners, including the investment pledges.

The White House has published an even higher investment figure – $9.6 trillion – that includes public and private investment commitments from other countries. Trump himself, never one to undersell his achievements, has put the number far higher — $17 trillion or $18 trillion — though Auclair and Mazarei note that “the basis for his claim is not clear.’’

All the numbers are huge. Total private investment in the United States was most recently running at a $5.4 trillion annual pace. In 2024, the last year for which figures are available, total foreign direct investment in the United States amounted to $151 billion. Direct investment includes money sunk into such things as factories and offices but not financial investments like stocks and bonds.

“The pledged amounts are large,’’ Auclair and Mazarei write, “but their time horizon varies, and the metrics for measuring and thus verifying the pledges are generally unclear.’’ They note, for example, that the European Union’s pledge to invest $600 billion in the United States “carries no legally binding commitment.’’

The report also finds that some countries would strain to meet their pledges. For the Gulf countries, “the commitments are large relative to their financial resources,” the researchers write.

“Saudi Arabia appears capable of meeting its targets, with some difficulty.’’ The United Arab Emirates and Qatar would find it even harder and might have to finance the investments by borrowing. “In all three cases, the commitments are nonbinding, and investments from these countries could fall well below headline numbers,’’ they write.

Moreover, “these agreements have been reached under duress,’’ Mazarei, a former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund, said in an interview. “It’s not necessarily being done willingly.’’

So trading partners could look for ways to escape their commitments – especially if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs Trump used to negotiate the one-sided agreements. A ruling is expected as early as February. “Other countries may find a way to wiggle out,’’ Mazarei said.

Still, the Trump administration can turn to alternative tariffs if the justices rule the current tariffs illegal.

“President Trump agreed to lower tariffs on countries we have trade deals with in exchange for investment commitments and other concessions,’’ White House spokesman Kush Desai said. “The president reserves the right to revisit tariff rates if other countries renege on their commitments, and anyone who doubts President Trump’s willingness to put his money where his mouth is should ask Nicolas Maduro and Iran for their thoughts.”

U.S. troops overthrew and arrested Venezuelan President Maduro early this month, and Trump ordered the United States to join Israel in bombing Iran last year.

Auclair and Mazarei agree that the investment Trump lands could end up creating jobs, spurring economic growth and making supply chains more secure by bringing production to America.

Trump, they note, is in some ways taking a similar approach to Biden, using government “industrial policy’’ to encourage more manufacturing in the United States.

But Biden tapped taxpayer dollars to finance infrastructure projects and incentives for companies to invest in green technology and semiconductors. Trump is using the tariff threat to get foreign countries – and their companies – to pick up the tab. And he has dropped the push to encourage clean energy, focusing instead on promoting fossil fuels.

In their report, the Peterson researchers worry about how the investment decisions would get made and whether they would reflect sound economics. “This approach may yield real investments and jobs,’’ they write, “but it raises familiar industrial policy concerns: opaque projection selection, weak accountability, and the risk that political criteria crowd out economic efficiency.’’

By KAITLYN HUAMANI, Associated Press Technology Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Trump administration has not shied away from sharing AI-generated imagery online, embracing cartoonlike visuals and memes and promoting them on official White House channels.

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But an edited — and realistic — image of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong in tears after being arrested is raising new alarms about how the administration is blurring the lines between what is real and what is fake.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s account posted the original image from Levy Armstrong’s arrest before the official White House account posted an altered image that showed her crying. The doctored picture is part of a deluge of AI-edited imagery that has been shared across the political spectrum since the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by U.S. Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis

However, the White House’s use of artificial intelligence has troubled misinformation experts who fear the spreading of AI-generated or edited images erodes public perception of the truth and sows distrust.

In response to criticism of the edited image of Levy Armstrong, White House officials doubled down on the post, with deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr writing on X that the “memes will continue.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson also shared a post mocking the criticism.

David Rand, a professor of information science at Cornell University, says calling the altered image a meme “certainly seems like an attempt to cast it as a joke or humorous post, like their prior cartoons. This presumably aims to shield them from criticism for posting manipulated media.” He said the purpose of sharing the altered arrest image seems “much more ambiguous” than the cartoonish images the administration has shared in the past.

Memes have always carried layered messages that are funny or informative to people who understand them, but indecipherable to outsiders. AI-enhanced or edited imagery is just the latest tool the White House uses to engage the segment of Trump’s base that spends a lot of time online, said Zach Henry, a Republican communications consultant who founded Total Virality, an influencer marketing firm.

“People who are terminally online will see it and instantly recognize it as a meme,” he said. “Your grandparents may see it and not understand the meme, but because it looks real, it leads them to ask their kids or grandkids about it.”

All the better if it prompts a fierce reaction, which helps it go viral, said Henry, who generally praised the work of the White House’s social media team.

The creation and dissemination of altered images, especially when they are shared by credible sources, “crystallizes an idea of what’s happening, instead of showing what is actually happening,” said Michael A. Spikes, a professor at Northwestern University and news media literacy researcher.

“The government should be a place where you can trust the information, where you can say it’s accurate, because they have a responsibility to do so,” he said. “By sharing this kind of content, and creating this kind of content … it is eroding the trust — even though I’m always kind of skeptical of the term trust — but the trust we should have in our federal government to give us accurate, verified information. It’s a real loss, and it really worries me a lot.”

Spikes said he already sees the “institutional crises” around distrust in news organizations and higher education, and feels this behavior from official channels inflames those issues.

Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at UCLA and the host of the Utopias podcast, said many people are now questioning where they can turn to for “trustable information.” “AI systems are only going to exacerbate, amplify and accelerate these problems of an absence of trust, an absence of even understanding what might be considered reality or truth or evidence,” he said.

Srinivasan said he feels the White House and other officials sharing AI-generated content not only invites everyday people to continue to post similar content but also grants permission to others who are in positions of credibility and power, like policymakers, to share unlabeled synthetic content. He added that given that social media platforms tend to “algorithmically privilege” extreme and conspiratorial content — which AI generation tools can create with ease — “we’ve got a big, big set of challenges on our hands.”

An influx of AI-generated videos related to Immigration and Customs Enforcement action, protests and interactions with citizens has already been proliferating on social media. After Renee Good was shot by an ICE officer while she was in her car, several AI-generated videos began circulating of women driving away from ICE officers who told them to stop. There are also many fabricated videos circulating of immigration raids and of people confronting ICE officers, often yelling at them or throwing food in their faces.

Jeremy Carrasco, a content creator who specializes in media literacy and debunking viral AI videos, said the bulk of these videos are likely coming from accounts that are “engagement farming,” or looking to capitalize on clicks by generating content with popular keywords and search terms like ICE. But he also said the videos are getting views from people who oppose ICE and DHS and could be watching them as “fan fiction,” or engaging in “wishful thinking,” hoping that they’re seeing real pushback against the organizations and their officers.

Still, Carrasco also believes that most viewers can’t tell if what they’re watching is fake, and questions whether they would know “what’s real or not when it actually matters, like when the stakes are a lot higher.”

Even when there are blatant signs of AI generation, like street signs with gibberish on them or other obvious errors, only in the “best-case scenario” would a viewer be savvy enough or be paying enough attention to register the use of AI.

This issue is, of course, not limited to news surrounding immigration enforcement and protests. Fabricated and misrepresented images following the capture of deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro exploded online earlier this month. Experts, including Carrasco, think the spread of AI-generated political content will only become more commonplace.

Carrasco believes that the widespread implementation of a watermarking system that embeds information about the origin of a piece of media into its metadata layer could be a step toward a solution. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity has developed such a system, but Carrasco doesn’t think that will become extensively adopted for at least another year.

“It’s going to be an issue forever now,” he said. I don’t think people understand how bad this is.”

Associated Press writers Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report.