House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., is pressuring Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to disclose the operational status of the towers Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) located along the 2,000-mile southwest border.

Last week, a news report revealed an internal memo from the U.S. Border Patrol that found about a third of cameras were not working properly.

Green sent a letter to Mayorkas regarding the matter and gave him until 5 p.m. on Wednesday, October 23 to provide documents and information regarding the status of the camera system.

Green’s office said his committee “recently spoke with sources within DHS” who confirmed that “approximately two-thirds of these cameras are completely offline and have not been repaired, preventing Border Patrol agents from using these important capabilities, thereby limiting agents’ effectiveness. ability to detect and respond to illegal entries, and likely contributing to an undercount of known escapades.

An inside source told the House committee that a “review conducted by CBP found that dozens of contractors who worked on these cameras were not even in the CBP system and therefore were not authorized to work on these law enforcement-sensitive assets,” according to a press release from Green’s office. “CBP was unable to verify that several workers, in particular, were even U.S. citizens.”