In 2019, the border wall separating San Diego and Mexico was raised to 30 feet. Donald Trump, then the president of the United States, was enthusiastic about the heightened security, calling it a “Rolls Royce” structure that “can’t be climbed.”
But that hasn’t stopped migrants from trying. And one of the chief effects of the heightened security is a massive uptick in injuries and deaths from falls. The Washington Post reports on a new set of statistics published Friday by UC San Diego physicians in the medical journal JAMA Surgery:
Since 2019, when the barrier’s height was raised to 30 feet along much of the border in California, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’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.
Before Trump ordered his renovations, the border wall in the San Diego area ranged from nine to seventeen feet tall.
“Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher,” said Dr. Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, to The Post. “We’re seeing injuries we didn’t see before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and a lot of open fractures when the bone comes through the skin.”
Treating the injured is both complex and expensive. More from The Post:
Those injured by falls often require complex intensive care and multiple, phased surgeries, according to San Diego physicians. Lacking health insurance, many are ineligible for physical therapy and rehabilitation programs, so they remain longer in hospitals, which absorb millions in unreimbursed costs.
The Post adds:
Dr. Amy Liepert, the director of acute care surgery at UC San Diego Health, said the hospital is looking for help, having incurred at least $13 million in costs from border wall patients alone. “We need policies that fund the care that’s being delivered, in order to make sure we’re providing access for our other populations that need trauma care,” Liepert said.
Liepert said the volume of falling victims from the border wall is straining San Diego’s entire trauma system. “It means trauma surgeons, medical teams, the ICU, therapists and others all have grossly increased work loads,” she said.
The Post reports that many migrants use ladders to climb over the wall and athletic border-crossers are able to negotiate the barriers with ease. In addition, power tools are often employed to create holes migrants can slip through.
But dangers still abound.
“One thing I have noticed is the people who are falling are not as athletic as you think they would be to go up ladder like that,” Doucet said to The Post. “They are middle aged, and a fair number of women, even pregnant women.”
