EL PASO, Texas — Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz would like to see the organization's operations advance exponentially so that intake processing of illegal immigrants runs as smoothly and respectfully as the service provided at a famous fast-food restaurant.
"I want our processing facilities to be run like Chick-fil-As," Ortiz said during remarks at the Border Security Expo in El Paso Wednesday.
"I challenge industry, I challenge our partners, our stakeholders — I want my checkpoints to be state of art," Ortiz said. "I want crisis management to be our preparedness plans and not our everyday bandwidth for operations. And then I want our intelligence enterprise to be second to none. As I say to many of my team members, I do not want another Del Rio Haitian crisis on my watch."
Ortiz's comments come as thousands of immigrants have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border this week before the pandemic-era policy of Title 42 ends after Thursday. Ortiz has faced criticism from Republicans, who have alleged that the Biden administration's changes at the border have only sped up the human smuggling and human trafficking process.
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Border Patrol has hired 1,100 non-law enforcement employees under the Biden administration to do paperwork and interviews for each immigrant who illegally crosses the border and is apprehended.
The processing staff has allowed Border Patrol agents to increasingly work in the field on the border versus inside doing paperwork.