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."
Emphasis added.