Derek Benner was born in Hartford, grew up in Norway and graduated from Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in 1989. A long way — in many respects — from Southern California. But that’s a hot spot for the Customs Service, so that’s where Derek is.

Since 1991, Benner has risen to become the top law enforcement official at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations office in San Diego. His division investigates drug smuggling, human smuggling, illicit tunneling, financial crime, cyber crimes, document and immigration benefit fraud and other crimes. On the way up, one of his positions was customs inspector at the San Ysidro border crossing in California, the world’s busiest land crossing. He saw it all.

Name: Derek Benner

Age: 40

Occupation: Special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego

What drew you to customs enforcement? Even in high school, one of my interests was to become a special agent with the federal government. Not knowing really how to navigate all of that, I remember even arranging for a local FBI agent to come in, speak to our class and talk about the career. It really stuck with me, and my family certainly encouraged it. The reason I chose to go to college at George Mason University was because it was right outside of Washington, D.C. I figured that if I went to college outside Washington, D.C., I might be able to get some kind of internship or some arrangement inside one of the federal agencies’ headquarters that might give me an edge when it came time for applying for jobs. . . . The first call I got was for the U.S. Customs Service and Treasury. I jumped on it immediately and started as a criminal investigator and student trainee. . . . When I graduated, I moved to San Diego where I started here as a customs inspector at the San Ysidro border crossing.

That’s the busiest crossing in the world, right? It sure is. . . . College was an eye-opening experience. You can imagine coming from the small community that Oxford Hills is, coming to the San Ysidro border crossing. . . . There’s not a better training ground in the world to become a special agent, either. You see more in two or three years than some places see in 10 or 15 years, just by the sheer size of it.

What types of crimes did you investigate as a special agent? When I first was converted to a special agent, for the first five years I worked primarily in narcotics investigation, and I was assigned to the San Diego maritime task force, which was a Customs-led task force. We solely focused on the smuggling threat on the oceans here in the San Diego region. Basically, boats and vessels coming up from Mexico, landing on the beaches or continuing farther north into our harbors both day and night. There was plenty of work to keep us busy.

Any interesting stories from back then? I think the interesting thing about that aspect of smuggling is how creative the smugglers are when it comes to watching what law enforcement is doing. They really adapt their methodologies to what our enforcement trends are. You’d see everything from Jet-skis with a couple hundred pounds of narcotics coming up the coast in the middle of the night, to inflatable boats, surfboards, if you can imagine that, to pleasure-type crafts, where they build compartments in the floors of the boats and then fiberglass narcotics into the hull to avoid detection. Everything we saw was incredibly interesting as far as the smuggling techniques they went through to get the drugs in.

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