Former Border Patrol Chief Says He ‘Never Had One Conversation’ with Biden, Harris

Former Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said in an interview released Sunday that he never had any conversations with President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris when he worked in their administration.

Ortiz appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday to discuss the illegal-immigration crisis at the Southern border and the dispute between Texas governor Greg Abbott (R) and the Biden administration over border enforcement.

“I’ve never had one conversation with the president or the vice president for that matter. That’s a problem,” Ortiz said. He was Border Patrol chief under Biden and deputy chief under former president Donald Trump before retiring last year.

“We need to make sure that Central America, South America, Mexico, that those regions understand that if you pay a smuggler, and you cross in between the ports of entry, and you do not have a legitimate claim to some sort of asylum benefit, you’re going to be sent back,” Ortiz added.

Ortiz accused Abbott of playing politics with the border by refusing to work with Border Patrol but also acknowledged that the White House’s mixed messaging to migrants has led to an influx of illegal immigration.

Early in Biden’s presidency, the president assigned Harris the responsibility of overseeing immigration policy and figuring out ways to curtail illegal immigration. Harris appeared reluctant to take on the border assignment and took months to visit the border after becoming Biden’s immigration czar, insisting instead that she was working on addressing the “root causes” of illegal immigration, referring to poverty and corruption in Central and South America.

Immigration has become the number one concern among the American public as the Biden administration allows record numbers of migrants to enter the U.S. illegally, recent Gallup polling found. The brutal murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia, allegedly carried out by an illegal immigrant, brought additional scrutiny to the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies.

President Biden and Trump both visited parts of the southern border on February 29th, and the Border Patrol union harshly criticized Biden for avoiding the border’s busiest areas.

Abbott has deployed thousands of state law enforcement personnel to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, a town near the Rio Grande, to compensate for the Biden administration’s lack of enforcement.

Texas has attempted to block Border Patrol from coming to Shelby Park and setting up a processing center because state law enforcement believes it incentivizes migrants to cross.

“The issue is trying to prevent another influx, because when Border Patrol is here setting up a processing center, it’s going to attract, it’s going to encourage more migrants to cross the river because they know where to go,” Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Christopher Olivarez told 60 Minutes.

The effort is part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, Texas’s initiative to substitute for the Biden administration’s lack of border enforcement. A federal judge on February 29th blocked a Texas law allowing the state to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, a decision Abbott said the state would appeal immediately.