Val Verde County Sheriff Appoints Two Chief Deputies, Splits Administrative and Enforcement Roles

With 45 sworn deputies responsible for 3,233 square miles of border-adjacent Texas, Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez moved this spring to divide his command structure in two, naming Lt. Gina Garcia as chief deputy over administrative operations and Enrique Reynaldo Trevino as chief deputy over enforcement.

The promotions, marked by a brief ceremony at the sheriff's office and announced publicly on April 2, represent the first time the Val Verde County Sheriff's Office has operated under a split administrative-enforcement model. Before this reorganization, a single chief deputy, Joe Ortiz, occupied the top position beneath Martinez.

"Gina will be on the administrative side, and Enrique will be on the enforcement side," Martinez said during the ceremony. "We've got a few more details to work out with the organizational structure, but we're going to move forward, and this is what our leadership is going to look like."

Martinez presented Garcia with her new badge at the event. Trevino's badge had been ordered and will be presented separately.

Garcia was elevated from within the agency, where she had served as a lieutenant. As chief deputy on the administrative side, she takes ownership of the internal machinery that keeps a 249-person workforce running: personnel, procurement, and the interagency coordination a border county depends on. The VVSO's jail holds up to 1,451 inmates and employs 204 jail officers, a staffing load that makes administrative oversight as operationally consequential as anything happening on patrol.

Trevino brings a considerably more varied resume to the enforcement post. A retired Texas Department of Public Safety trooper and military veteran, he also served as Val Verde County's veterans service officer and as a Court Compliance Officer, and ran his own business. That combination, law-enforcement credentials layered over years of community-facing county service, shapes the profile Martinez wanted leading patrol, investigations, and border-area operations along a county that shares 109 miles of the Rio Grande with Mexico.

For residents in a county seat sitting 154 miles west of San Antonio, the structural shift has direct bearing on how deputies are deployed and how priorities get set. Val Verde County covers terrain more than twice the size of Rhode Island, is roughly 80 percent Hispanic, and carries the operational weight of one of the longest county-level stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. Garcia's position means the administrative systems that determine staffing levels, equipment, and federal partnership agreements now have a dedicated executive accountable for them. Trevino's role puts a single named commander over the enforcement decisions that most directly affect daily life across Del Rio and the county's outlying communities.

The reorganization marks the start of Martinez's fifth term. He won re-election in November 2024 over Republican challenger Rogelio "Roger" Hernandez in a county where Trump's vote share had climbed from 43 percent in 2016 to roughly 63 percent in 2024. Martinez, 68, a conservative Democrat who publicly supports Governor Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star border-security initiative, first took office in 2008 as the first Latino elected sheriff along Val Verde County's stretch of border. By the 2024 campaign, he had spent nearly five decades in law enforcement.

"I look forward to seeing great things from both of you," Martinez told Garcia and Trevino at the ceremony's close.

The dual-chief structure gives each appointee a narrower lane and a clearer chain of accountability than any single deputy could maintain across an agency this size. Whether the reorganization produces measurable changes in response times, enforcement priorities, or community outreach will depend on the specifics Martinez acknowledged are still being worked out, but the architecture of who answers for what inside the VVSO is now, for the first time, formally split in two.