Raul Ortiz, who led the Border Patrol under the Biden administration and served as deputy chief during the first Trump administration, says the southwest border has reached a level of calm he has never witnessed in his career — not even in the aftermath of September 11.
In a portion of an interview with CBS News released Monday, Ortiz was asked directly by CBS News Immigration Correspondent Camilo Montoya-Galvez, “Have you ever seen the border this quiet?”
“No. Never. Even after 9/11, when we pushed resources to the border, airports, to make sure that we didn’t have another terroristic threat, we did not see the level of security that we’re experiencing right now,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz credited the shift to policy changes he says are now enforced along the Texas, California and Arizona segments of the border.
“It just goes to show that, when you have consequences, when you repatriate people, return people back to their home country, then — and you prosecute people, that it will make a difference. Those policies that didn’t exist under the Biden administration, that exist now, are making a huge impact on what’s happening,” he said.
Ortiz, who oversaw border operations during a period widely described as a record surge in illegal crossings, offered a blunt assessment of how the Biden White House handled that period.
“It was a crisis, it was chaotic, and it was — at first, I thought that it was the fact that they were ignoring what was happening here on the border. Then I started to realize that they were actually embracing what was happening here on the border. They were embracing the chaos and the crisis because it fulfilled their agenda,” Ortiz said.
He went further, suggesting the mass migration seen across the southwest border — spanning south Texas, California and Arizona — was not an unintended consequence but a deliberate outcome sought by some within the administration.
“To me, allowing the mass migration that occurred along our southwest border — not just here in south Texas, but in California and Arizona — that’s exactly what some of the policymakers in the White House wanted,” he said.
Ortiz’s comments come from a man who held the top operational post at Border Patrol during the Biden years, giving his account particular weight for anyone tracking the policy shift between administrations on illegal immigration enforcement.
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