The Paramilitary Surge: How Border Patrol’s Elite Units Brought War Tactics to America’s Cities
Before dawn on September 30 last year, hundreds of federal law enforcement agents descended on South Shore Apartments, a tan brick complex on Chicago’s South Side. While agents in full body armor abseiled down from an overhead Black Hawk helicopter, others battered down the building’s entry doors with rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint.
A tight, fast-moving column of burly masked agents—clad in helmets and bulletproof vests, carrying M4 rifles fitted with suppressors—pushed through the building’s hallways. Leading the four-person entry team was Corey Myers, a Marine veteran assigned to Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, who checked each apartment door as the group moved. At the front of the column was 34-year-old Padraic Daniel Berlin, a Michigan native and son of a Detroit firefighter, who held a leash on Yoda, his Belgian Malinois K-9. Close behind Berlin walked 53-year-old David Dubar Jr., a former construction worker. Rounding out the team was Paul Delgado Jr., a former high school standout cross-country runner.
All four men are operators with the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, better known as BORTAC. Headquartered primarily out of Fort Bliss, with at least 11 detachments spread across the United States, BORTAC and its sister unit Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue (BORSTAR) were originally created for narrow, high-stakes border use cases: desert search and rescue, serving high-risk arrest warrants, confronting armed drug cartels, and conducting manhunts along the southern border.
But during Donald Trump’s second administration, these units have been deployed to the streets of some of America’s largest urban centers. This deployment marks the largest known use of BORTAC and BORSTAR agents in U.S. history—a fact heavily obscured by the federal government’s blanket secrecy around the units’ domestic operations. Most operators’ identities have never been disclosed to the public, and the decision to deploy heavily armed, offensive-minded paramilitary units to conduct street-level immigration raids in major American cities is unprecedented. It serves as a clear bellwether for the Trump administration’s broader push to militarize domestic law enforcement.
Myers, Berlin, Dubar, Delgado, and their fellow operators were primed for action ahead of the South Shore raid. The pre-operation briefing claimed the entire building was controlled by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang that the Trump administration labeled a foreign terrorist organization—even though the administration’s own intelligence agencies had compiled evidence contradicting that designation. Operators were told gang members occupied the building and stockpiled grenades, handguns, and rifles on the second floor, where a suspect with an outstanding firearms possession warrant resided. That intelligence was never publicly released or proven, and Illinois officials later launched an investigation into allegations the building’s owner fed false, unsubstantiated claims to federal authorities to get the raid approved. None of that mattered in the moments before entry.
At every door the team approached, Berlin shouted a warning: “Police! Speak to me now or I’ll send the dog!” On the second floor, the team took one man into custody. Further down the hall, Myers spotted what he believed was evidence of forced entry into an apartment and smashed the door open. Tolulope Akinsulie, an undocumented immigrant from Nigeria, was hiding in the unit’s bedroom. Without giving any verbal warning or command, Berlin released Yoda’s leash. The Belgian Malinois lunged, biting deep into Akinsulie’s leg as he screamed in agony. Yoda bit Akinsulie repeatedly across his leg, hip, and hands before Berlin called the dog off, and his team cuffed the man. Akinsulie was not a target of the raid, had no known history of violent crime or gang ties, and was treated for his bite wounds before being transferred to the Broadview Processing Center to begin deportation proceedings.
Berlin’s conduct that morning was far from an isolated mistake. Records show he was involved in at least five separate use-of-force incidents during Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s 2025 mass surge of hundreds of immigration agents into Chicago and surrounding suburbs. A WIRED analysis of U.S. government records also found that Berlin’s team and other BORTAC/BORSTAR operators routinely escalated tensions with civilian bystanders, rather than defusing conflict. Over the past year, BORTAC and BORSTAR have led multiple federal raids into U.S. cities, often relying on dramatic, highly visible displays of force that dominate news coverage and social media. These high-profile actions have reinforced the U.S. Border Patrol Special Operations Group’s self-described identity as the “tip of the spear” of federal immigration enforcement.
The operators deployed to Chicago—and to other cities including Los Angeles, Charlotte, Boston, Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Sacramento—operate in a secretive, insular community. Their names, which WIRED is publishing for the first time after obtaining them from a limited set of unsealed court records, are almost always redacted from official government documents and shielded from public records requests. When operating on U.S. city streets, most operators wear masks to hide their faces, and are only identified by generic call signs sometimes printed on their uniforms—they refuse to share official badge numbers with members of the public who demand identification.
One BORTAC agent is married to a local television news anchor who reports on Border Patrol activities. Another operator, who was on the scene during the 2022 gun battle with the Uvalde, Texas, school shooter, has posted repeatedly on an online gun forum, including in a thread titled “Whipping Haitians.” Most agents are military veterans, many of whom saw combat during the Forever Wars. Multiple operators have documented histories of domestic violence or sexual assault. Others are former local police officers who joined Border Patrol after being involved in questionable use-of-force incidents in their previous roles. BORTAC and BORSTAR agents are not conventional civilian police officers: they are paramilitary operators that operate under different rules and different standards of engagement, trained and equipped for combat, not routine domestic law enforcement.
WIRED reviewed more than 78 incident reports from Operation Midway Blitz, and found that BORTAC and BORSTAR agents were, as a group, the most violent faction of the hundreds of federal agents deployed to Chicago. Across the reports, CBP personnel documented 144 separate uses of force by agency personnel between September and early November. Over an eight-week period, 62 BORTAC and BORSTAR operators were involved in these use-of-force incidents. Of that group, 25 were involved in two or more separate incidents, and 16 more used force at least once. Of the 234 federal law enforcement officers WIRED identified in these incident reports, BORTAC and BORSTAR agents made up nearly a quarter of all personnel involved in documented confrontations with civilians during the operation.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty is currently investigating 17 separate incidents involving federal agents for potential criminal misconduct. According to on-scene photos and video, at least two of those incidents—the January 21 gassing of a crowd in South Minneapolis, and a chaotic enforcement action outside Roosevelt High School—involved BORTAC personnel.
The Department of Homeland Security has tightly guarded all data and documents related to these mass federal immigration deployments, only releasing records in response to ongoing litigation. U.S. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina has been locked in a battle with DHS to obtain records related to Operation Charlotte’s Web, the 2024 surge in his state. Tillis has requested records of stops, detentions, interrogations, searches, releases, uses of force, and property damage incidents, as well as the total number of people detained and a full count of all encounters between agents and U.S. citizens.
Beyond the South Shore Apartments raid, Operation Midway Blitz included a string of other chaotic incidents: agents gassed an upscale Chicago North Side neighborhood moments before a children’s Halloween parade, led a dangerous high-speed car chase across the South Side, and clashed repeatedly with protesters outside the Broadview immigration detention facility.
BORTAC and BORSTAR agents’ use of force in Chicago included punching and kicking protesters, firing tear gas and pepper spray at civilians, shooting pepper balls and 40mm foam rounds into crowds, stunning people with tasers, unleashing attack dogs on deportation targets, and shooting unarmed civilians—killing at least one person. As reporting from The American Prospect has documented, this pattern of excessive violence follows a loosening of Border Patrol’s use-of-force guidelines under directives issued by Gregory Bovino.
“I think if we push this whole fucking block back, that ought to teach ’em a lesson,” Bovino can be heard saying on a September 27 body camera recording taken during clashes with demonstrators outside Chicago’s Broadview detention facility. “And if it doesn't, we arrest.” Bovino, who has since retired, was the public face of Trump’s immigration surges throughout 2025 and early 2026. A longtime BORTAC member, he led dozens of operators on incursions into Southern California, Chicago, and Minneapolis, putting the units front and center in many of the highest-profile clashes between immigration enforcement and the public over the past nine months.
Nearly a month later, other body camera footage captured BORTAC agent Edgar Vazquez telling his colleagues he planned to defy Bovino’s order. “The chief wanted us to throw gas, and I was like, we can’t!” Vazquez said. “Nah, I’m not gonna fucking do it—I’m gonna stay within policy.”
“It’s clear the administration likes the optics of BORTAC—the long guns, the camouflage, the body armor. They certainly did for Trump’s first term,” says John Sandweg, who served as ICE director from 2013 to 2014. But the unit has little experience with routine urban policing, he says, and its track record in Chicago shows that border combat tactics are a poor fit for dense, residential cities. “It’s malpractice to have paramilitary teams try to impose order by force,” he says.
In response to WIRED’s requests for comment, CBP cited the risk of doxing and declined to confirm whether any of the agents identified in government records are actually employed by the agency. CBP personnel are “trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves,” an agency spokesperson wrote in a statement.
CBP also declined to say whether any use-of-force incidents from Operation Midway Blitz are the subject of internal investigations, noting that the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility handles all such probes before they are sent to CBP’s Use of Force Review Boards.
The documents, body camera footage, and other material that WIRED used to identify more than 60 BORTAC and BORSTAR operators were obtained through litigation against DHS, which alleges First Amendment violations, unconstitutional arrests, and severe uses of force during Operation Midway Blitz—including the killing of Silverio Villegas González by ICE agents and the nonfatal shooting of Marimar Martinez by Border Patrol agents.
None of the BORTAC or BORSTAR agents named in this report responded to WIRED’s requests for comment. In Illinois, civil rights attorneys and civic groups are pressuring the Cook County State’s Attorney to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and potentially prosecute ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol agents for uses of force and wrongful arrests during Operation Midway Blitz. To date, no Border Patrol, CBP, or ICE agent has faced criminal charges for their conduct during the Chicago operation.
The full scale of the paramilitary surge into American cities was on clear display on the morning of October 25, 2025, when a convoy of BORTAC and other Border Patrol agents rolled through the quiet Chicago North Side neighborhood of Irving Park, followed by activist “ICE watchers” in cars and on bikes blowing whistles to alert residents.
Shortly before 10 a.m., a gray Suburban carrying BORTAC agents Andy Chavez and Tee Rico cruised down Irving Park’s tree-lined residential streets. A black Jeep Wagoneer full of other Border Patrol agents followed close behind, with BORTAC agent Javier Puente, an Army veteran, riding in the back seat. All agents wore masks and camouflage tactical gear, with pistols holstered at their hips and M4 rifles within easy reach. Puente’s body camera footage shows him holding a 40mm grenade launcher designed to fire “less-lethal” rounds loaded with pepper spray.
On the nearby sidewalks, Irving Park residents were gathering for the neighborhood’s annual Halloween parade. Within an hour, the quiet residential block had erupted into chaos.
Chavez and Rico spotted a Latino man running away from their convoy, jumped out of their SUV, and tackled him on the front lawn of a white townhouse. The home’s owner, Brian Kolp, an attorney and former Cook County assistant state’s attorney who previously represented Chicago police officers in civil lawsuits, ran out of his house barefoot, screaming at the agents to get off his property and remove their masks.
“This has nothing to do with enforcing the law, and everything to do with intimidating citizens with military tactics,” Kolp told WIRED of the incident.
Other residents and ICE watch activists joined the confrontation, blowing whistles, yelling at the agents, and recording the encounter on their phones. When the Border Patrol convoy tried to leave the area, angry onlookers—at least one still wearing a bathrobe—moved to block their exit.
As the crowd grew more hostile, agents escalated their use of force. Michael Brosilow, a 68-year-old photographer, lifelong Irving Park resident, and decorated long-distance runner, had just returned from a training run and pulled into his driveway. Rico and Chavez confronted Brosilow, who yelled “Fuck you!” as he stepped out of his silver Toyota. Rico then tackled Brosilow, drove his knee into Brosilow’s back, and cuffed him. “This is my block!” Brosilow screamed. The encounter left Brosilow with six broken ribs and internal bleeding.
As onlookers screamed, Chavez pulled the pin on a tear gas canister and threw it into the street. Meanwhile, Puente saw 25-year-old ICE watcher Maria Bryan allegedly strike Rico in the head, and slammed her and her bicycle to the ground, fracturing seven of her ribs.
The agents eventually loaded back into their vehicles, drove away, and radioed in that they had arrested two U.S. citizens for “impeding” agents and “assault.” Neither Brosilow nor Bryan ever faced criminal charges.
As the agents left Irving Park, the sound of car horns and whistles from trailing ICE watchers was clearly audible over the radio. When one of the SUVs stopped at a red light, two men on the sidewalk stepped up to confront the agents. Puente took a photo of one man on his iPhone, then rolled down the window and pointed his grenade launcher at the second man.
“Get the fuck out of the way!” he yelled, aiming the muzzle at the civilian as the vehicle pulled away. “Fuck you!”
BORTAC was founded in 1984 to respond to riots inside immigration detention camps. Over the decades, the unit has been deployed to South America for anti-narcotics missions alongside the DEA, conducted operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Jordan, and in recent years has raided migrant aid stations in the Arizona desert. While BORTAC is trained for close-quarters combat, BORSTAR was founded in 1998 in response to rising migrant deaths along the southern border, and specializes in search and rescue operations in remote open terrain. Members of both units complete Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training, learn advanced military surveillance and countersurveillance tactics, and are often recruited from elite military units like the Army Rangers.
“They go in real hot—in my opinion, too hot and too unruly,” says a former U.S. Special Forces member, who spoke on condition of anonymity. This veteran says that in his experience, BORTAC operators tend to be “ego-driven hotheads” who are highly trained but have little to no real-world combat experience. “Even then, they’re definitely not the people I’d want in any sort of civilian law enforcement context.”
In February 2020, during Trump’s first term, the administration deployed BORTAC to Democratic-led sanctuary cities to conduct civil immigration enforcement, a surge that was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic. Later that summer, BORTAC agents were documented snatching protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon during the George Floyd uprisings.
Since the start of Trump’s second administration, BORTAC and BORSTAR agents have led mass immigration blitzes in California, North Carolina, Minnesota, and Vermont. Since October, Border Patrol’s paramilitary units, led by Timothy P. Sullivan, head of the Fort Bliss-based Border Patrol Special Operations Group, have overseen the federal presence at an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon that has been the site of ongoing protests, often resulting in violent clashes. Most recently, in mid-March, operators from one of Border Patrol’s local Special Operations detachments used crowd control munitions against protesters during a chaotic immigration arrest in South Burlington, Vermont.
Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies who has studied police militarization and paramilitary units for decades, says BORTAC’s deployment to Chicago is a textbook example of authoritarian overreach. “Why are they enforcing civil immigration violations with paramilitary teams?” Kraska says. “Armored personnel carriers, hostage rescue tactics, Special Forces–grade weapons, SEAL-style tactics—why do you need all that for civil violations?”
A week and a half before the Irving Park confrontation, another encounter between Border Patrol agents and a Latino couple illustrates how quickly operators escalated to gassing dozens of civilians and even Chicago police officers.
On October 14, Border Patrol agents were involved in a high-speed car chase that ended in a collision with a Latino couple. One of the agents involved in the crash, Carlos Chavira Jr., called for backup, and multiple BORTAC agents rushed to the scene.
One of the responding SUVs was driven by John Bockstanz, a Michigan resident and former Marine who runs a side business selling pre-workout supplements. His company’s “Alpha Testosterone Booster” promises users they can “Conquer each day with unparalleled potency.” Riding with Bockstanz was John Leslie, an agent assigned to BORTAC’s Detroit detachment.
Other responding agents included Derek Volmering, a 39-year-old Michigan native, BORTAC supervisor, and a former prospective linebacker for the Buffalo Bills; Paul Beaulieu, a New England native assigned to Border Patrol’s rough-terrain search and rescue team; Edgar Vazquez, a 39-year-old BORTAC firearms instructor who joined Border Patrol in 2007; Padraic Daniel Berlin, who had sicced his dog on Tolulope Akinsulie during the South Side raid two weeks earlier; David Dubar Jr., the BORTAC Michigan agent who also served on that South Shore Apartments entry team; and supervisory agent Warren Becker from the
