As his retirement looms, Gregory Bovino, the US border patrol’s former commander-at-large, has contended that efforts to curb illegal immigration by Donald Trump’s administration have not gone far enough – showing no remorse over federal agents’ killings of two US citizens in Minneapolis in January.

“I wish I’d caught even more illegal aliens,” he told the New York Times on Tuesday in an exit interview, during which he also referred to the Republican president as “the Trumpster” and acknowledged his retirement at the end of March was not entirely voluntary.

“We went as hard as we could, but there’s always a creative and innovative solution to catching even more.”

Bovino announced his retirement from the patrol earlier in March.

He had spent most of his 30-year career in California’s El Centro sector before being tapped by the Trump administration to lead its sweeping Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota.

Trump then demoted Bovino after federal agents fatally shot 37-year-old US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good in separate encounters in January, each of which remains under investigation.

In successive sweeps through Democratic-led cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans, Bovino was the public face of the ongoing campaign, personally lobbing pepper gas canisters into crowds and reporting directly to the since-replaced secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.

He became a figure of hate for the left. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said Bovino’s dark green, double-breasted coat looked as if he “literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb,” referring to the Nazi paramilitary group that managed concentration camps during the Holocaust and second world war.

In his Times interview, Bovino said he bought the coat as a young agent. He referred to himself in the third person as “Chief Bovino” and said he felt he had been hampered by bureaucrats who limited his “turn and burn” tactics of high-speed operations meant to be completed before protesters could descend on them.

“We wanted total border domination,” Bovino told the outlet. “When you use terms like that, perhaps it scares some of the weaker-minded people. Domination. I want you to dominate that border.

“I’m not going to ‘control’ it. We’re going to dominate the hell out of that damn place.”

In what is bound to rank as one of the most starting career-reflection interviews, Bovino praised Trump and said he had received “a lot of kudos from the Trumpster”. He said that commendation was relayed to him by Corey Lewandowski, a top aide to Noem, whose replacement as homeland security secretary, the US senator Markwayne Mullin, received Senate confirmation on Monday.

Bovino said his plan – the White House cut it short – was to enable the deportation of 100 million people (far more than the number of immigrants estimated to be in the US without permission).

The Times cited previously unreported legal documents which show Bovino referred to undocumented immigrants as “scum”, “trash” and “filth”.

Occasionally, the Times noted, the exaggerated persona Bovino adopted drew comparisons to the fictional Col Steven J Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn in the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another. Bovino commented that he had not seen the movie but dismissed Penn as “fringe, left, liberal”.

Other politically incorrect terms that Bovino said he relished included calling Barack Obama by the former president’s middle name, Hussein. He also referred to migrants at the US border during the Covid-19 pandemic as “walking zombies”.

He said he organized teams to approach people at gasoline stations and transit hubs to ask about their immigration status in the US – a tactic he described as “consensual encounters”.

Bovino also used social media to get his message across to residents in cities upon which federal agents descended, even if it caused a reprimand. “I got yelled at a whole lot and got in trouble a whole lot, and didn’t care,” Bovino told the outlet.

Bovino said the immigration raids he led were targeted at criminals, though agents didn’t know the criminal or immigration history of most people they arrested, according to a judicial ruling generated by a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The Times interview alluded to how a homeland security spokesperson told another outlet that the Trump administration had selected Bovino to lead its immigration crackdown “because he’s a badass”.

But after the killings of Good and Pretti by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer and border patrol agents, respectively, Bovino was told to stand down.

He said he stood by his comments that Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement” when agents killed him. Video at the scene showed Pretti was unarmed at the moments agents shot him to death.

Bovino furthermore confirmed that he had brushed aside a warning that his tactics could result in fatalities.

He told the outlet he recalled replying to the warning: “It’s possible, yes.”

Bovino is facing a number of lawsuits from civil rights groups as well as an internal investigation for disparaging a Jewish prosecutor in Minnesota taking time off for Shabbat – an accusation he calls unfounded and “made by troglodytes”.

Bovino denied reports that he had been thrown out of a bar in Las Vegas at 12.30am during a farewell tour of US cities, saying the night was a “really positive experience” and “the bartenders loved” his group.

Bovino, who holds a degree in natural resource conservation, said his retirement plans include cracking down on “non-native invasive species” that are killing off local timber rattlesnakes in the North Carolina Appalachian region in which he was raised.

The Times said he was referring to coyotes – but, as he put it, not the human smugglers nicknamed coyotes who smuggle undocumented immigrants into the US.

Of that retirement mission, he told the Times: “I’ll take it in my own hands.”