In the trauma wards of this city’s major hospitals, patients from the border have arrived every day with gruesome injuries: skull fractures, broken vertebrae, and shattered limbs, their lower extremities twisted into deranged angles.
The patients have fallen from new nine-meter segments of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a structure he touted as a “Rolls Royce” that “can’t be climbed”. His administration built more formidable barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, with kilometers of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it.
US Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But new statistics published on Friday by University of California San Diego physicians in the medical journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.
Since 2019, when the barrier’s height was raised to more than nine meters (30 feet) along much of the border in California, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Centre’s trauma ward after falling off the structure has jumped fivefold, to 375, the physicians found. Falling deaths at the barrier went from zero to 16 during that time, according to the report, citing records maintained by the San Diego County medical examiner.
“I never expected we would have to climb the wall,” said Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old dentist from Cuba, recovering this week in the trauma ward at UC San Diego Health. He fractured his left leg in a fall Monday. Smugglers led his group to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb up and slide down the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw one woman fall and break both legs, and an older man with a severe head injury.
The falling incidents are a subset of the soaring number of injuries, deaths, and rescues occurring all across the southern border, where immigration arrests have reached an all-time high under President Joe Biden. Migrants attempting to evade capture have drowned in the Rio Grande, died of exposure in South Texas and Arizona, and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean during smuggling attempts at sea.
