By Steve Neavling
Louis M. Quesada, special agent in charge of the El Paso Field Office, will leave his post on Friday to become deputy assistant director of the bureau’s Incident Response Group in Quantico.
Quesada was promoted to head of the El Paso office in October 2019.
“Both professionally and personally, it has been a fantastic time, a time of growth,” Quesada told the El Paso Times. “I’m not from this area, but it’s been a wonderful experience. It’s a great community and I think that attributes to why El Paso is El Paso. For a major city to have the third least violent crimes and the fifth overall crime, I think speaks a lot to the people in the community and to the relationships that the law enforcement has with each other, which is something that I’ve never experienced in any other office in the last 25-plus years that I’ve been in the FBI.”
Quesada joined the FBI as a special agent in 1995 and began working in the Miami Field Office, where he investigated violent crimes with a focus on bank robberies, extortion, and kidnappings. In 1998, Quesada voluntarily transferred to the San Juan Field Office in Puerto Rico before returning to Miami in 2001 to investigates drugs. In both offices, Quesada served on the SWAT teams.
Quesada was promoted in 2003 to supervisory special agent and began working in the Counterterrorism Division of the Terrorist Screening Center, which manages and operates the nation’s terrorist watch list.
In 2005, he transferred to the FBI Academy in Quantico as a defensive tactics instructor. Quesada returned to Miami two years later as the supervisor of the violent gang and high-intensity drug trafficking area task force. He later became the acting assistant special agent in charge of Miami’s Criminal Branch.
In 2010, Quesada became the assistant legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he promoted FBI interests in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
In 2012, Quesada was promoted to a unit chief position in the Criminal Investigative Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, focusing on counter-narcotics efforts in Latin America and the U.S. Southwest border.
In 2014, Quesada became legal attaché of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, focusing on counterterrorism threats throughout the Balkans and the U.S.
A year later, Quesada became the assistant special agent in charge of the Criminal Branch in the Jackson Field Office in Mississippi. In 2017, he was appointed to assistant section chief in the Training Division, and a year later was promoted to section chief of the division’s Training Services Section.
Quesada earned a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Florida International University
