U.S. Border Patrol named Raul Ortiz to the second-highest post within the 21,000-person agency, completing a full swap of the agency’s leadership after several turbulent months of debate over who should take over.
Border Patrol’s overseeing agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, announced the move in a phone call with employees Monday and shared the promotion on social media Wednesday. The move comes days after Rodney Scott, a lifelong agent, was named as the replacement to national chief Carla Provost. Scott and Ortiz’s jobs do not require Senate confirmation and are named by the acting CBP commissioner, Mark Morgan.
The Washington Examiner first reported last May that Provost was expected to retire by the year’s end after taking over shortly after President Trump took office. In November, senior CBP officials said Morgan was unsure about tapping Scott for Provost’s job and Chavez for deputy chief due to concerns about having a white man atop an agency that largely arrests people from Latin American countries. CBP stuck with Scott, who is white, but pulled Chavez, a Latina, for other reasons.
Chavez’s husband, Gustavo Zamora, a senior Border Patrol official who worked in Arizona and lived in California, received four felony charges for the rape and kidnapping of a female employee. Nine Border Patrol employees who spoke with the Washington Examiner in December said Zamora did not face internal discipline over the incident and retired as a result of his internal connections. Chavez is known to be very well connected both in the region and with officials in Washington.
Two weeks after Chavez’s husband was charged, Chavez was abruptly moved from her post atop southeastern California operations to El Paso, Texas. Senior CBP officials told the Washington Examiner earlier this month that Chavez was increasingly viewed as a liability for the organization due to her affiliation with Zamora. Her long-anticipated promotion to Washington was axed in December.
“If her husband is found guilty, it’s going to be pretty hard for her to continue as the deputy chief,” one of the CBP officials said.
The new deputy chief, Ortiz, most recently oversaw all Border Patrol operations in the south central Texas region of Del Rio. The 53-year-old worked six years as the second-highest official in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which sees the most apprehensions of illegal border crossers on the U.S.-Mexico border and is considered a grooming post for managers who are promoted elsewhere.
Ortiz first started as an agent in 1991 and was in the agency for 18 years. In 2009, he moved to Afghanistan and led a border management task force and then was promoted to several other Department of Homeland Security jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
