San Diego’s new Border Patrol chief decided he wanted to go into federal law enforcement while clerking for an attorney in North Dakota.

Veteran Border Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke, who officially took over last week as the chief patrol agent of the busy San Diego Sector, earned a law degree and practiced law as a public defender for a short time before joining the Border Patrol in February 1998.

“I had a chance to see a lot of the different areas within law, and as an early 20-year-old, I was bored. I thought it was boring. I wanted to come into law enforcement,” said Heitke, who has now worked in six different sectors during his more than two-decade career with the Border Patrol.

“There are areas (of the law) that are very difficult. I truly believe everybody should be afforded their right to a proper defense, but when I did work on the public defender’s contract, I did have to work on many child abuse and child sex abuse cases, which are very difficult,” said Heitke, during a 40-minute media roundtable Monday at the agency’s Chula Vista headquarters.


Now, Heitke is stepping into the top role in the San Diego Sector, after his predecessor was promoted to lead the Border Patrol nationally from Washington.

Heitke replaces Rodney Scott, named chief of the U.S. Border Patrol last month.

“I have big shoes to fill,” Heitke, a 48-year-old Minnesota native, said.

He said his top priorities for the San Diego sector are strengthening partnerships with the public and improving transparency, but first he wants to understand everything going on in the San Diego area. He said the sector encompasses nearly every type of terrain.


“You’ve got coastal. You’ve got desert. You’ve got urban area. You’ve got remote area. It encompasses pretty much everything that any border in the country has, and it has it all in one,” said Heitke. “That’s probably the biggest difference and obstacle to this specific area.”

He began his career as a Border Patrol agent at the Wellton Station in the Yuma, Ariz. Sector. In November 2004, he was promoted to supervisory Border Patrol agent at the Grand Marais Station in the Grand Forks Sector in North Dakota and was named its patrol agent in charge in 2005. For the past four and a half years, he has served as chief of that sector.

Now in San Diego, Heitke said he plans to ease into his new position.

“One of my big focuses each time I come to a new place is not to jump in and make big changes when I first arrive. because I don’t know exactly how everything works,” said Heitke. “I don’t want to fix one thing and cause two more problems. I try to move in slowly.”


The new chief patrol agent pointed to community trust as one of the biggest challenges for the agency. He said he plans to use social media to speak directly to the public and host a series of town halls with the community.

His focus will be on “explaining what the agents do each and every day out in the field. They save a lot of lives. They save lives virtually every day.”

He also said his measure of success for increasing transparency and partnerships with the community will be how the public and agents feel about their interactions.

Heitke will oversee 2,400 law enforcement agents in eight Border Patrol stations. The jurisdiction stretches from Imperial Beach east to the San Diego-Imperial County line, as well as up the Pacific coast to the Oregon state line.


The new chief said even though his sector is several hundred employees short of the staffing levels they are authorized to have, the sector is still “in a good condition.”

“I’m inheriting a great bunch of people that work within the sector. The operations are going very well,” said Heitke. He said family groups and unaccompanied minors trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border undetected remain challenges for the agents.

In the San Diego Sector, there has been a 40 percent increase in the number of unaccompanied children from Mexico trying to cross the border alone and undetected, during the first quarter of this fiscal year compared to the previous quarter, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Heitke said the San Diego sector is getting help from military the Trump administration deployed to the U.S. southwest border. He said about 90 military personnel are “running surveillance” for the agency, using Border Patrol equipment, including cameras and binoculars, which he said frees up agents to patrol the border.