LA Times Debunks Schumer's Border Security Claim

The Los Angeles Times is undercutting a narrative promoted by New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer when it reported on Wednesday that border security technology does in fact exist.

In a Wednesday article, the LA Times‘ Brian Bennett details new drone technology in use at the border. “A sophisticated airborne radar system developed to track Taliban fighters planting roadside bombs in Afghanistan has found a new use along the U.S. border with Mexico, where it has revealed gaps in security,” Bennett wrote. “Operated from a Predator surveillance drone, the radar system has collected evidence that Border Patrol agents apprehended fewer than half of the foreign migrants and smugglers who had illegally crossed into a 150-square-mile stretch of southern Arizona.”

“The new system is called Vader, for Vehicle Dismount and Exploitation Radar,” Bennett added later in the story. “It was borrowed from the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and has been deployed in Arizona since March 2012.”

The technology still has a little way to go before it is completely effective. But the fact that border security technology does in fact exist undercuts what Schumer said when he visited the border with Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain and others in the past week or so.

“In so many ways, whatever your views are on immigration, Arizona is ground zero,” Schumer said then. “What I learned today is we have adequate manpower, but not adequate technology.”

As Breitbart News’ William Bigelow notes, Schumer’s tact here appears to be “how the Democrats plan to sink the GOP on immigration: because border security is a prerequisite for any GOP immigration plan, when Schumer and the Democrats say it is technologically impossible, they kill the present bill.”

“Then they claim it’s the GOP’s fault the immigration bill died because of their insistence on border security,” Bigelow wrote.