He Killed a Marine, Was Deported Twice, and Came Back Twice. Now the Government Is Trying a Third Time.
On February 24, 2017, a speeding BMW crossed the double yellow line on Patuxent Road in Gambrills, Maryland, and struck a motorcycle head-on. The rider, 21-year-old Marine Lance Corporal James Ray Walden III, died at the scene. The driver, Martin Martinez-Ballinas, fled on foot and was captured hiding nearby.
Nine years, two deportations, and two illegal reentries later, Martinez-Ballinas is back in ICE custody, awaiting a third removal. Walden’s father spoke publicly about it for the first time on August 1, 2026.
- 3rd the deportation Martin Martinez-Ballinas now faces, after being removed in 2020 and again in 2022 and illegally reentering both times — Fox News Digital
- 37 mo. the federal sentence a judge gave him in April 2025 for his second illegal reentry — on top of the original 6-year state sentence for killing LCpl. Walden — U.S. Attorney, District of Maryland
- 21 LCpl. James Ray Walden III's age when he was killed — an NSA crypto-analyst stationed at Fort Meade — Patch / Fox News
Walden, of Peoria Heights, Illinois, was stationed at Fort Meade, where he worked as a crypto-analyst for the National Security Agency. He was riding his motorcycle near Conway Road in Gambrills when Martinez-Ballinas — driving roughly 65 mph in a 35 mph zone — crossed the center line and hit him head-on. Anne Arundel County prosecutors indicted Martinez-Ballinas, then 29, and he pleaded guilty to failure to remain at the scene of an accident resulting in death. On August 23, 2017, he was sentenced to six years in prison plus five years of supervised probation. Then-State’s Attorney Wes Adams (R) oversaw the prosecution.
Martinez-Ballinas, a Mexican national, had been arrested five times in Maryland between 2012 and 2017 and released each time — Anne Arundel County did not have an ICE jail-screening partnership in place until December of 2017, months after the crash. He completed his state sentence and was deported to Mexico in 2020.
The deportation didn’t hold. In 2021, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended Martinez-Ballinas illegally crossing into Texas. A federal court there convicted him of illegal reentry and sentenced him to 15 months; he was deported a second time in October 2022. By December 2023, he had reentered the country again, undetected, until ICE located and arrested him in Maryland. A federal grand jury indicted him on December 14, 2023 — Case No. 8:23-cr-00458, District of Maryland. He pleaded guilty in January 2025.
On April 29, 2025, U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby sentenced him to 37 months in federal prison plus one year of supervised release for that second illegal reentry. He served the sentence at FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey. On July 22, 2026, ICE took custody of him there, upon completion of his federal term — and he now sits in ICE detention awaiting a third deportation.
ICE Arrests Man Convicted in Fatal Gambrills Crash Again. The agency says it took Martin Martinez-Ballinas into custody as part of an effort targeting what ICE calls 'the worst of the worst' among criminal illegal aliens. Martinez-Ballinas, 38, is a citizen of Mexico who has now been deported twice before.
James Walden Jr. had stayed largely out of the press for nine years. On August 1, 2026, he told Fox News’s The Will Cain Show what his son had been building toward before the crash. “My son was 21 years old. He was just starting his life. He was in the Marine Corps. He worked for Intel. He worked for the National Security Agency as a crypto-analyst,” Walden said.
“You're never gonna understand the pain, the hole in your soul that this brings until it happens to you. And don't think that it can't. It can happen to anyone at any time.”
James Walden Jr. · father of LCpl. James Ray Walden III · The Will Cain Show, August 1, 2026
Walden Sr. said Maryland officials knew Martinez-Ballinas was in the country illegally before the crash and had arrested him five times without ever removing him — a pattern that only changed after his son was already dead. Nine years and two failed removals later, he still doesn’t know whether a third will hold.
“Father who lost Marine son speaks out on repeat deportees and border security” — James Walden Jr.’s full interview aired on Fox News’s The Will Cain Show, August 1, 2026. The segment streams on Fox News Digital and Fox Nation; it was not mirrored to YouTube at time of publication, so it is cited here by direct link rather than embedded. See Sources & Methodology below.
DHS included the case in its July 24, 2026 “Worst of the Worst” release, a roundup of ICE arrests the agency frames as its highest enforcement priority. ICE Acting Field Office Director Arthur J. Wilson Jr. (Newark ERO, Trump DHS) put the case plainly: “Martinez-Ballinas repeatedly and flagrantly disregarded the laws of the United States and faces deportation for the third time.”
Nothing about the underlying facts is in dispute. Both of Martinez-Ballinas’s criminal cases ended in guilty pleas, not contested trials: the 2017 hit-and-run death and the 2025 illegal-reentry conviction. What remains genuinely open is whether a third deportation succeeds where two others didn’t — the removal itself is an administrative process, still pending as of this writing, not a fact already in the record.
A Marine crypto-analyst is dead nine years. The man who killed him has been deported twice, reentered the country illegally twice, and served two federal sentences on top of his original state term. He is now in ICE custody awaiting a third removal. Two deportations already failed to keep him out. His father is the one left explaining, in public, for the first time, what the system's failures actually cost.
