A 38-year-old Mexican national convicted in the 2017 hit-and-run death of a 21-year-old Marine has been caught inside the United States for a third time, and ICE says Biden-era border policies made it possible.
Martin Martinez-Ballinas sat in federal prison at Fort Dix, New Jersey, finishing a 37-month sentence for illegal re-entry when Immigration and Customs Enforcement took custody of him. He now faces deportation for the third time. The first two removals, in 2020 and October 2022, failed to keep him out of the country. Each time he came back. Each time the system caught up late. And the man whose life he took, Marine Lance Corporal James Ray Walden III, remains dead at 21, his family left to watch the cycle repeat from the sidelines.
Arthur J. Wilson, Jr., the acting field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in Newark, laid the blame squarely on the prior administration's enforcement posture and on Martinez-Ballinas himself.
"Martinez-Ballinas repeatedly and flagrantly disregarded the laws of the United States and faces deportation for the third time."
Wilson did not stop there. In a written statement accompanying an ICE press release, he connected the case directly to the Marine's death and to what he called a broader disregard for American law.
"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. Anyone who believes violations of U.S. immigration law are trivial or inconsequential should take note: Federal offenses carry serious consequences, and we will continue to enforce the law to protect our communities and honor those who serve our nation."
The timeline that led to Walden's death is its own indictment. Martinez-Ballinas was in the country illegally when Maryland officials arrested him five separate times between 2012 and 2017. Each time, they released him. State authorities knew his immigration status. They let him walk anyway.
On February 24, 2017, Martinez-Ballinas was behind the wheel of a BMW, driving without a license or insurance, when he crossed into oncoming traffic and struck Walden's motorcycle head-on. The 21-year-old Marine, a third-generation military veteran who had worked in intelligence and served as a crypto analyst for the National Security Agency, died from the collision. Martinez-Ballinas fled the scene.
A Maryland judge, Laura Kiessling, sentenced Martinez-Ballinas to six years in prison, well below the 10-year maximum. Kiessling cited the political climate under Trump as a possible reason Martinez-Ballinas fled the scene, a rationale that drew sharp criticism. ICE placed an immigration detainer on him after his arrest, confirming he was illegally present.
He served roughly three years before his first deportation in 2020.
Martinez-Ballinas did not stay in Mexico long. In 2021, federal authorities caught him attempting to cross back into the United States. A court sentenced him to 15 months for unlawful entry. He was deported again in October 2022.
By 2023, he was back a third time. The Department of Justice reported that he was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison followed by one year of supervised release for that illegal re-entry. He served that sentence at Fort Dix. When he finished, ICE was waiting.
ICE faulted Biden administration border enforcement policies for enabling that third crossing. The agency did not specify which policies it held responsible, but the pattern speaks for itself: a man deported in October 2022 managed to re-enter the country by 2023, undetected, despite two prior deportations and a felony conviction tied to the death of a United States Marine.
The case is far from unique. In Florida, two illegal immigrants were charged in the murder of a Marine veteran after both had been released into the country as minors under the Obama administration, another case where enforcement gaps proved fatal.
James Ray Walden II, the slain Marine's father, appeared on Fox News' "The Will Cain Show" to describe what his family has endured. His account was blunt. Martinez-Ballinas had been arrested five times. Maryland knew who he was. Nobody acted.
"My son was 21 years old. He was just starting his life."
Walden described his son's service with evident pride, calling him a Marine who "worked for intel" and "worked for the National Security Agency as a crypto analyst." The elder Walden framed the loss not as random misfortune but as a preventable failure of government.
He told the New York Post plainly: "You can't predict it, but you can prevent it."
Walden also took aim at Democratic lawmakers who have pushed to abolish ICE, the very agency now handling his son's killer's third deportation. He called the idea one of the most reckless proposals he had ever heard.
"I cannot believe that they're condemning our ICE agents and our DHS for actually doing their job and enforcing the laws that Congress passed."
That political fight has not gone away. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries recently refused to rule out a House vote to abolish ICE, even as cases like Martinez-Ballinas' make the agency's mission harder to dismiss.
Martinez-Ballinas' arrest fits into a broader Trump administration enforcement push. The administration launched Operation Take Back America, a nationwide initiative aimed at removing illegal immigrants and dismantling cartels and transnational criminal organizations.
In one week alone, July 24 through July 30, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas charged 263 people, including 227 illegal immigrants, with immigration and border security crimes under the operation. The Department of Justice released the figures as part of its ongoing reporting on the initiative.
A separate case spotlighted by ICE under the same operation involved Lopez Munongo Makengo, a 36-year-old native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Makengo won a slot in the Diversity Visa lottery, a program that distributes up to 55,000 permanent resident green cards each year through random selection, but was convicted in Sioux City, Iowa, of unlawful possession and use of identification documents. Investigators found he had lied on his application by failing to disclose that he had a child, despite swearing under oath that his statements were true. He faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and up to three years of supervised release.
Fraud in the legal immigration system and repeated illegal crossings by convicted criminals are different problems, but they share a root: a system that for years lacked the will or the resources to enforce its own rules. When a state governor pardons a convicted illegal immigrant specifically to block deportation, the signal to would-be border crossers is unmistakable.
Susan Walden, the slain Marine's mother, spoke at Martinez-Ballinas' original sentencing in 2017. Her words cut to the core of the case.
"It is the walking away that is the problem in this particular case. It is walking away and hiding."
She was talking about Martinez-Ballinas fleeing the crash scene. But the phrase applies just as well to every official who looked the other way, the Maryland authorities who arrested him five times and released him five times, the policymakers who loosened border enforcement, and the system that let a man with a felony conviction tied to a Marine's death cross back into the country not once but twice after deportation.
Martinez-Ballinas is now 38. He has spent chunks of the last nine years in American courtrooms and American prisons. Walden's family has spent those same years without their son. The father of the slain Marine continues to speak out, not because the system has changed enough, but because it hasn't.
ICE says it will deport Martinez-Ballinas a third time. The question every taxpayer should ask is why it took three tries, and what, exactly, anyone plans to do if he comes back again.
