In another blow to controlling the flow of immigrants at the border and reducing illegal immigrants from crossing the border the virtual border fence project has been scrapped. This sad bit of news today from MSNBC.
How can we say we control our own border with Mexico if we can't even get a mere $20 million dollar project off the ground? Homeland Security Chief Chertoff told us all that the Boeing sponsored project (dubbed Project 28) would be all the high-tech moving our border security to the 21st Century.. instead the project doesn't even respond to illegal border crossers and does not relay any information it gathers about such crossings to Border Patrol Agents.
GAO - the Gov't Accountability Office, who publish excellent reports say that the 3,000 alerts that the prototype sent to Border Patrol Agents in the past few months were a mere fraction of the actual amount that passed through that area and among those 3,000 alerts were false readings that led Agents on Wild-Goose chases through the brush.
Boeing has a $860 million dollar contract to put up the virtual border system is being replaced by a plan to go back to placing "communications towers" along the border to detect illegal immigrants. The problem still exists however that the Border Patrol neither has near the strength in agent numbers nor the equipment funding to apprehend and return illegal aliens at the rate at which they cross even if they were informed of each incident.
Such is the sad state of Immigration control along our southern border.
Also, a CNN link here
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