James Ray Walden III was 21 years old, a United States Marine, riding his motorcycle on a Maryland road in 2017 when a man driving without a license or insurance crossed into oncoming traffic and killed him in a hit-and-run. The driver, 38-year-old Mexican national Martin Martinez-Ballinas, had already been deported once. He came back anyway.
Then he came back again.
ICE is now publicly blaming Biden-era immigration policies for enabling Martinez-Ballinas to illegally re-enter the United States a third time — after being deported twice — following his conviction in the death of a Marine. Arthur J. Wilson Jr., the Enforcement and Removal Operations Newark Acting Field Office Director, didn't mince words about the man his agency just caught again.
"His conviction for an automotive offense that resulted in the tragic loss of a U.S. Marine in 2017 demonstrates a complete lack of respect for human life and our legal system," Wilson said.
The timeline is worth walking through slowly because every date on it is a policy failure. Martinez-Ballinas was first deported in 2020. By 2021, he was back in the country illegally and caught — earning himself 15 months in federal prison for unlawful entry. He was deported a second time in October 2022.
By 2023, he was back again. Third illegal entry. This time, a federal court sentenced him to 37 months in federal prison at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
James Walden, the Marine's father, went on The Will Cain Show on Fox News to talk about what this has meant for his family. "My son was 21 years old," Walden said. "He was just starting his life. He was in the Marine Corps."
That's the part that doesn't make it into the policy debates. A kid who signed up to serve his country got killed by a man who had no legal right to be here, and then that same man was allowed to return — twice more — while the people who were supposed to stop him shrugged and processed paperwork.
The enforcement infrastructure exists. It always existed. The question was never whether we could secure the border or track repeat offenders. The question was whether anyone in charge wanted to.