House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., is pressing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to disclose the operational status of Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) towers located along the 2,000-mile southwest border.
Last week, a media report had exposed an internal U.S. Border Patrol memo that said about one-third of the cameras are not functioning properly.
Green sent a letter to Mayorkas about the issue and gave him until 5pm on Wednesday, Oct. 23 to provide documents and information regarding the status of the camera system.
Green's office said his committee "recently spoke to sources within DHS" who confirmed that "roughly two-thirds of those cameras have gone completely off-line and not been repaired, preventing Border Patrol agents from making use of these important capabilities, limiting agents’ ability to detect and respond to illegal entries, and likely contributing to an undercounting of known gotaways."
An internal source told the House committee that a "review conducted by CBP discovered that dozens of contractors who were working on these cameras were not even in CBP’s system, and were thus not cleared to work on these law-enforcement sensitive assets," according to a news release from Green's office. "CBP was unable to verify that several workers, in particular, were even U.S. citizens."
