11/22/2017 - Michelle Malkin Townhall.com
The circumstances of
U.S. Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez's death this week remain murkier than
the Rio Grande River.
Agent Martinez
succumbed to critical head injuries early Sunday morning. An unnamed partner,
who came to Martinez's aid after he radioed for help from a remote area of the
Big Bend sector in Texas, also suffered serious wounds. Whether by deliberate
ambush or accident, one of our border enforcers is dead and the other
hospitalized.
This much is clear:
Dumb sensors + depleted forces = deadly border disorder.
Agent Martinez had
ventured out alone to check on a ground sensor to determine who or what had set
it off. He confirmed to his colleagues that human activity had activated the
alarm before he died.
Here's the scandal: Our
federal government has been squandering billions of dollars on inferior border
technology for years. It's a monumental waste of taxpayer funds and a dangerous
redistribution of wealth to crony contractors, whose ineffective pet projects
are putting our men and women on the front lines at risk.
Nearly 14,000 ground
sensors have been littered along the southern border over the past several
decades -- some dating back to the Vietnam War era. Untold numbers have simply
been buried and lost by federal workers who failed to record where they put
them. Twelve years ago, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general's
report found that agents couldn't determine the cause of 62 percent of the
sensor alerts because they were "unable to respond to the dispatch, or it
took the agent too long to get to the sensor location."
Compounding staff
shortages are outdated sensors unable to distinguish between humans, vehicles
and animals. They can't tell cows from criminals or wild boars from dirty
bombers. Thirty-four percent of alerts were confirmed false alarms in the 2005
review. Only 2 percent resulted in apprehensions of immigrants in this country
illegally, the feds admitted.
The Arizona Republic
reported that "a possible false alarm from a ground sensor, and faulty
radio communications, may have contributed to the death of Border Patrol Agent
Nicholas Ivie in a friendly-fire incident" in 2012. "(A)gents didn't
detect anyone but each other when they arrived. Ivie, responding separately,
apparently mistook the other agents for smugglers and opened fire. One of the
agents shot and killed him."
A $1 billion integrated
fixed tower project, fronted by Boeing, was supposed to remedy the flaws of the
ground sensor system. A surveillance program along the southwest border in
Arizona, the IFT systems "are fixed surveillance assets that provide
long-range persistent surveillance" using radars that send pictures back to
a central hub to monitor illegal crossings and criminal activity.
But the Department of
Homeland Security's inspector general reported this summer that the towers had
never been properly tested for suitability and operational effectiveness. Its
successors haven't fared much better.
On a trip to the Sierra
Vista, Arizona, region earlier this summer for my CRTV.com show, "Michelle
Malkin Investigates," I talked to ranchers who pointed out fancy new
towers with fatal blind spots, out of reach of deep washes and heavy forests
where illegal immigrants and drug smugglers travel.
"We have $50
million of infrastructure on this ranch now," fourth-generation Arizona
rancher John Ladd told me during a tour of his property, "and none of it
has worked. Camera towers, radar, fence, roads, street lights." All the
technology in the world is useless, he has long pointed out to politicians and
bureaucrats, without boots on the ground. And Border Patrol agents parked in
air-conditioned cubicles hours from the border don't count.
"You got 600
(agents) in Tucson" who "take 6 hours to get to the border. Move them
down! You got Nogales ... and Naco and Douglas that are within a mile of the
border," Ladd points out. "All the rest of them are more than 50 miles
north. Why do we have that? What good is that?"
Longtime illegal
immigration activist and systems engineer Glenn Spencer, who I first met in
California in the 1990s, has lived and worked on the Arizona border for more
than decade. He patented and tested a pilot system of seismic detection and
ranging on 1.5 miles of his friend John Ladd's property called Seidarm and
paired it with a drone, dubbed Hermes, which automatically launches when border
activity is detected within 500 feet of the smart sensors. It can be
manufactured and built at a fraction of the cost of the big defense
contractors' systems. Unlike much of the government's gold-plated technology,
Ladd said: "It worked."
"If they had
SEIDARM/HERMES installed, they could have checked out the ground sensor without
putting the agent in jeopardy," Spencer told me after Agent Martinez's
death hit the news this week.
But politicians in both
parties have spurned Ladd's pleas and Spencer's proposals. Special interests
have raided public coffers to fund border security Kabuki theater and stave off
meaningful assessments. Spencer doesn't mince words:
"They don't want
to measure it; they don't want to secure the border; they want to make it LOOK
like they are."
Beltway business as
usual. Another agent's life sacrificed. President Trump, the clock is ticking.
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