Former Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz claimed that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris never spoke to him during his tenure, the Daily Signal reported. Ortiz served for the first two years of Biden's term before retiring in 2023.
Ortiz made this shocking revelation to CBS News' 60 Minutes. "I’ve never had one conversation with the president, or the vice president for that matter," Ortiz said on the episode that aired Sunday.
"I was the chief of the Border Patrol; I commanded 21,000 people. That’s a problem," he added.
"I've never had one conversation with the president or the vice president for that matter… That's a problem,” says Raul Ortiz, the U.S. Border Patrol chief under President Biden until he retired last year. pic.twitter.com/bWoZkFbnVc
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 4, 2024
The Biden administration is overseeing a historic influx of illegal immigrants. Still, Biden seems to encourage it with his lax policies.
Ortiz suggested that the solution lies in deportations. "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 said, agreeing that Biden encouraged migrants with "mixed messages."
The former border chief did not save his criticism just for Democrats, however. Ortiz also accused Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott of using the crisis for political posturing.
The Biden administration had halted Texas's border security measures that the state tried to implement. Frustrated by the unwillingness to stem the tide of newcomers, Abbott deployed the Texas National Guard to Shelby Park near the popular crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas.
The guardsmen employed concertina wire, razor wire, and a barrier of shipping containers to effectively stop the Border Patrol's practice of using it as a staging area to process people captured at the border. "The National Guardsmen, even to some degree the Border Patrol agents, have become pawns in this political game between the two sides," Ortiz charged.
With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, voters are beginning to worry about unchecked illegal immigration. According to a recent Gallup Poll, the number of voters who worry about illegal immigration has jumped from 20% in January to 28% in February.
Notably, the issue surpassed "the government" as the most important problem people worried about in that same time period. Illegal immigration outranks other issues like the economy, inflation, and crime.
This comes as illegal immigration surpassed 300,000 border crossers in December of 2023. Even the most liberal "sanctuary cities" are beginning to cry uncle over this crisis.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke about rolling back some of the city's policies as illegal immigrant crime becomes big news. "I want to go back to the standards of the previous mayors, who I believe subscribe to my belief that people who are suspected of committing serious crimes in this city should be held accountable," Adams said late last month, the New York Post reported.
Biden has shown time and again that he has no appetite for stopping illegal immigration. If he can't be bothered to speak to his own Border Patrol chief about the problem, things will not improve until he's voted out of office.
