By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz returned to Del Rio Friday to say goodbye to agents and staff before he retires at the end of June.
Ortiz sat down with the 830 Times to look back over the joys and sorrows of his long career and to look ahead to future adventures.
Ortiz served as chief of the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector before being appointed deputy chief of the Border Patrol in March 2020, then chief of the agency in August 2021.
“I’m excited. It’s been a little over 32 years now, and I can tell you that as I started to contemplate my exit strategy, I made a conscious decision to finish out my field exposure here in Del Rio, Texas. Not because this is where I started out – I started out in San Diego, Calif., in 1991 – but this is my home. This is where I grew up. I was the chief here. I was the agent in charge of multiple stations here, and I think this is where I really learned to be a chief and to be a leader within this organization,” Ortiz said.
“Yesterday, I got to spend the day with the horse patrol unit in Carrizo Springs, and we apprehended many groups that would potentially have gotten away had a horse patrol unit and or air or marine or other unit not been out there patrolling in 100-degree weather. So for me, it couldn’t have got any better than that, to finish it. Because I started with the horses in the 1990s. I was a horse patrol agent back in the ’90s, the early ’90s, almost, probably, before some of the agents I was riding with yesterday were born, and so to be able to finish out like that was really amazing,” the chief said.
Ortiz looked back over the rest of his career, speaking about the opportunities it has afforded him.
“It was an amazing career. This is an amazing organization and provided tremendous opportunities for myself and my family. I built friendships along the way, and for me, being able to belong to an organization that’s relatively large – we have 19,000 agents, 2,000 professional staff, a slew of contractors and others that support our mission – we operate in 20 sectors, plus our academy and our special operations group in El Paso, our headquarters division up in Washington, D.C., and when you go anywhere in this uniform, people know who you are.
“I’ve had the opportunity to go (out of the U.S.) in the Border Patrol. I served two tours in Afghanistan, visited Honduras, Mexico, Canada, Israel, Pakistan and other locations throughout the globe as a Border Patrol agent and everybody knows who we are. I think when you think about border security organizations throughout the world, the U.S. Border Patrol is front and center.
“No one’s been tested, and also, no one’s responded the way the Border Patrol has, to major events, and so, for me, I have very few regrets over these last 32 years,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz was appointed chief of the Border Patrol at an unprecedented time in its history.
He discussed some of the challenges he faced as a leader, assuming control of the agency during that time.
“You think about the last few years, the increase in traffic and flow across the country; not just the southwest border, but we’ve experienced increases in Puerto Rico, Miami, up on the northern border. You think about dealing with all of that during the COVID-19 pandemic. You think about coming right out of the civil unrest period after some of the events in Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., and in other areas.
“You think about a transition in administration, and then on top of all of that, having to deal with a reduced workforce. We went from 21,370 Border Patrol agents in 2012 to 18,973 agents as I walk out the door. Then you add on specific events: the Uvalde Robb Elementary School shooting, the Haitian migrants under the Del Rio International Bridge.
“All of those things, I think, tested us as an organization, but never during my tenure as deputy chief or chief of the Border Patrol did I ever think the Border Patrol would not be able to handle or manage what was getting thrown at us,” Ortiz said.
He also spoke about a more recent flashpoint: widespread worry that the end of Title 42 would overwhelm the Border Patrol.
“And then, you get to a point where everybody in the whole country thought May 11 was going to break the Border Patrol. I had media outlets and politicians and others asking me: ‘What are you going to do on May 12? What are you going to do? How are you going to manage? How are you going to handle this?’
“At no point during my conversations with my team and with the leaders in the field, did I say we’re not going to be able to handle this. I fully expected what transpired over those five days leading up to May 11 to be the case. I never expected us to get to 18,000 (migrants per day), like some had predicted, and so, for me, I felt like we had done everything within our power to prepare ourselves as an organization to deal with post-Title 42 environment, and now we find ourselves in a situation where we’re averaging between 3,000 and 3,300 apprehensions.
“I think we find ourselves in a relatively good spot operationally and that allows us to get back to some of our traditional mission sets, but also focus on building a process that takes all the asylum issues from in-between the ports of entry and puts them in a more structured area, which is at the ports of entry.
“I will tell you that I couldn’t be prouder of the men and women of the Border Patrol and what they were able to accomplish over my tenure as chief of the Border Patrol, and I know there was a lot of critiquing and a lot of naysayers about what transpired throughout these last couple of years, whether it was at my hearing or during other interviews or conversations, I think the truth eventually made it out, and I think people realize now that we were strictly focused on the mission,” the chief said.
Ortiz was asked if he had any advice for his successor, Jason D. Owens, who was also his successor as chief of the Del Rio Sector.
“I’ve already provided some advice to the next chief, because the next chief of the Border Patrol will be the 26th chief of the United States Border Patrol. We just celebrated our 99th birthday, so we’ll be celebrating our 100th birthday as an organization next May, and so that chief will have to take us into what I think will be a pivotal time as an organization. “I’ve shared this not only with the next chief, but with the Secretary and the Commissioner of CBP, in that I think the next chief will take off where I left off, and they’re going to continue to build upon some of the same priorities that we had: ensuring that our communities are taken care of along the border environments, making sure our workforce is taken care of, doing everything they can to address the fentanyl crisis out there, focusing on the criminal organizations that continue to try and manipulate this humanitarian flight for their own gain, and then building the team.
“We have tremendous leaders and tremendous members of the professional staff and the uniformed ranks, and we have to recruit. For a long period of time, not just the Border Patrol, but law enforcement agencies across this country have been challenged in their recruitment efforts after the civil unrest period.
“I think now we have to instill a level of public service in our communities and in the people that we recruit, and I’m very optimistic that we’re going to be able to build our ranks back up because we are very reliant on technology to help improve what we’re doing out there and to make us more efficient and safer and all those things that are important, but at the end of the day, it’s a Border Patrol agent that’s going to make that apprehension or that seizure or that arrest,” Ortiz said.
Nowhere did that reliance on an agent or group of agents become more clear than in the school shooting inside the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
While scores of other law enforcement officers milled around inside and outside of the school, a group of Border Patrol agents stormed the classroom where the lone gunman had barricaded himself and shot and killed him, ending the threat.
“I’ve shared quite often and in multiple conversations I’ve had about the Uvalde event in that when I was advised right after the subject made entry into the school and there was an active shooter situation in Uvalde, I sent a message to Chief Owens and it was just between he and I, and I told him, ‘You have the green light to do whatever you need to do to take care of this,’ and I was very confident that that one line was all I needed to say to him and I kept that, because I’ve always felt like that that message was going to be very important through all of this, and to me, it has become a central to how we as an organization responded to that event.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the men and women who showed up there and who continue to deal with the circumstances of that event, because I don’t know that this country has seen an event that has tested a community the way Robb Elementary School tested Uvalde, but I am awfully, awfully proud of the chief and his team and how they responded and even after, how we did everything we could to take care of our personnel and the community and bridge as much of that gap as we possibly could,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz also spoke about his own future.
“After 32 years in the Border Patrol and my military time prior to that, I’ve worn a uniform my entire adult life, so for me, spending time with family, being able to continue to advocate for the men and women of the Border Patrol, and be a good steward and a good representative of the Border Patrol in some fashion, would be helpful.
“I do think that we have not been able to tell the entire story about what transpired over these last couple of years, and I think that it’s important that the men and women know that they have leaders and they have an organization that is very supportive of what they do each and every day.
“I think quite often the story became sound bites of a muster or a conversation and this isn’t a sound bite for me. This mission is what I took an oath to support and defend and I think that we as leaders owe it to our men and woman out there to continue to be a spokesperson and a mouthpiece for the tremendous work that happens each and every day.
“This is my last time in the field. I spent a couple of days in the Rio Grande Valley, south Texas, a couple of days in Laredo and I purposely wanted to finish it up here in Del Rio. So I spent all day on the horse patrol yesterday and I will conclude my last muster in Uvalde at 2 o’clock.
“And so, I’ve been going to muster for 32 years, and so, for me, that will be the exclamation point on a career that I feel like has allowed me to give something back. As you know, I come from a family of service, third-generation Army. My brother and I are both in law enforcement, him for the state of Texas and me for the Border Patrol and public service is often, in border communities, an opportunity.
“So many of our young men and women that go to school in these border communities look at federal service, military service, state service and public service, as a career path. I hope, as I walk out the door, I can be a representation of opportunities that exist for kids that are going to elementary, junior high, high school, here, that anything is possible, regardless of where you come from,” Ortiz said.
Finally, Ortiz said he wanted to make a statement to the Del Rio community.
“I think it’s important for your readers to know that your last two national chiefs came out of Del Rio, Texas. That says a lot about how well Del Rio Sector and the rest of the country is run by the Border Patrol.
“Chief Owens is going to do a tremendous job representing the Border Patrol, Del Rio and all the other sectors out there and we’re in a good spot right now. The Border Patrol has, right now, we average about 16 percent of our workforce conducting non-enforcement and processing. That means between 80 and 84 percent of our workforce is out there on patrol, and that’s where we want to be, and we have to continue to try and put ourselves in a position where we are on the offensive, not on the defensive. “Unfortunately, we found ourselves on the defensive quite often over the last few years, and so we are cautiously optimistic that we are going to continue to build on that and so the readers know that when it was all said and done, we left everything on the field,” Ortiz said.
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