Source: Houston Chronicle
WASHINGTON — Sections of Texas' border with Mexico eventually could be secured by the same kind of high-tech "virtual fence" that's been deployed in Arizona, key legislators said Friday after touring the state-of-the-art surveillance network.
The comments by two subcommittee chairmen with the House Homeland Security Committee — Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, and Christopher Carney, D-Pa.— followed an inspection tour Friday of the $20.6 million virtual fence near Sasabe, Ariz.
The project links high-tech surveillance towers, cameras, radar, ground sensors and unmanned aerial drones along a 28-mile section of the 1,947-mile international border.
"In Texas, there is an outcry and a great deal of conflict over installing physical barriers along the border," said Jackson Lee, chairman of the panel's subcommittee on transportation security and infrastructure protection. "What I have seen here today can be a very effective 21st century tool to secure our borders."
Carney, the chairman of the panel's oversight subcommittee, called the virtual fence "a tremendous concept" that's ready for eventual deployment elsewhere along the border "once we make sure the bugs are ironed out."
