It’s not unusual for people who live near the border to show up in trauma wards of the big hospitals in this city with gruesome injuries like skull fractures and broken vertebrae. Their lower legs have been twisted into weird angles.

The patients have been injured after falling from new 30-foot sections of President Donald Trump’s border wall, which he has described as a “Rolls-Royce” that “can’t be climbed.” His government erected more powerful obstacles in the San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, including miles of double-layer steel fencing, but more migrants continue to attempt to scale them.

Officials with US Customs and Border Protection say they don’t keep track of deaths and injuries caused by such incidents. However, new numbers published Friday in the journal JAMA Surgery by University of California at San Diego physicians represent one of the first attempts to quantify the toll.

The number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma department after falling off the structure has increased fivefold, to 375, since the barrier’s height was raised to 30 feet along with parts of the border in California in 2019. According to the paper, deaths at the barrier went from zero to 16 during that time, citing records available at the San Diego county medical examiner.

Hector Almeida, 33, from Cuba says “I never expected we would have to climb the wall.”

In a fall on Monday, he shattered his left leg. Smugglers brought a ladder to his group and ordered them to climb up and slide down the other side, according to Almeida, who saw one woman fall and break both legs, as well as an older man with a significant head injury.

The decreasing incidences are a subset of the rising number of injuries, deaths, and rescues taking place all along the southern border, where immigration arrests have risen to an all-time high under President Biden. Migrants have drowned in the Rio Grande, died of exposure in South Texas and Arizona, and vanished into the Pacific Ocean during smuggling attempts at sea.

What makes the border wall unique is that it is a man-made barrier that creates a fatal threat and a public health concern where none previously existed.

UC San Diego Health’s trauma chief Jay Doucet noted that while injuries happened along the border wall prior to its rise in height, the older, shorter form of the barrier, spanning from nine to 17 feet, was not lethal.

“Once you go over 20 feet, and up to 30 feet, the chance of severe injury and death are higher,” he adds. “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.”

According to Vishal Bansal, the head of trauma at Scripps Mercy Hospital, border wall falls accounted for 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher percentage than shooting and stabbing incidents.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bansal says in an interview. “This is crazy.”

Last year, his trauma center saw 139 border wall patients who were injured by falls, up from 41 in 2020.

According to San Diego doctors, those harmed in falls generally require sophisticated intensive care and many, staged procedures. Due to a lack of health insurance, many people are unable to participate in physical therapy and rehabilitation programs, causing them to stay in hospitals longer, resulting in millions of dollars in unreimbursed costs.

The most difficult to climb wall prototype created by the Trump administration in San Diego in 2017 has a rounded, “barrel-shaped” top. However, previous barrier designs were constrained by congressional budgets, and Trump told advisers that he preferred the “spiky” aspect of the steel bollards, which he thought more menacing.

According to authorities involved in the design, the best height for new barriers was found to be thirty feet because it matched financial concerns with US Customs and Border Protection’s goal to give agents more time to respond by making it more difficult to climb.

Despite the completion of the 30-foot barrier, border crossings have grown dramatically, according to data. Border officers in San Diego made 16,660 arrests in March, about four times the monthly average before 2019.

The proof for former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano’s remark — “show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder” — can be seen along the dirt road that runs beside the barrier south of San Diego.

Between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa bridges, improvised ladders litter the vegetation along the base of the wall. Some are made of metal rebar segments, but the most advanced variants are made of lightweight aluminum with pieces that connect like tent poles.

Smugglers tie them to the top of the wall and lift them 30 feet into the air, frequently with little explanation as to how to get back down. The majority of the injuries appear to be caused by migrants attempting to descend.

Athletic young males may be seen shimmying up and grasping the bollards like fire rods to zip down the other side in videos posted to social media. Many migrants, however, are unable to do such a skilful maneuver since they prefer to climb at night to escape discovery.

“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 adds. “They are middle-aged, and a fair number of women, even pregnant women.”

Those who fall backwards while trying to slide down may hit their heads and necks.

At a cost of roughly $11 billion, the Trump administration constructed 450 miles of new fencing along the Mexican border, largely replacing previous, smaller barriers with three-story steel bollards embedded in concrete. After taking office, Biden suspended work, but his government has devised plans to fill in the gaps, especially in Arizona.

Republicans have slammed Biden’s decision to halt building, campaigning with vows to finish the wall ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The enormous number of migrant releases into the United States under Biden, according to Ronald Vitiello, former chief of the Border Patrol, has created an incentive and encouraged ever-riskier attempts to cross. He remarked, “More traffic equals more misery and death, from all causes.”

Injuries and deaths tend to be less common in areas where gaps in the barrier exist. Falling incidences have risen dramatically in border areas with a new, continuous 30-foot barrier, such as the deserts west of El Paso, across eastern Arizona, and along California’s Imperial Valley.

Many border wall victims require many, staged surgeries and long-term rehabilitation, but they lack insurance, so UC San Diego Health has transformed a postpartum wing into a temporary recovery ward.

Some smugglers use ropes and harnesses to securely lower clients onto the American side, although this method has also proven dangerous. A Mexican woman in a harness became stuck descending the wall near Douglas, Arizona, earlier this month and died of asphyxiation after hanging upside down for many hours.

Officials with US Customs and Border Protection said they’re stepping up their safety warnings and stepping up their attempts to catch traffickers.

According to Doucet, a fall from a height of 40 feet is considered 50% deadly in trauma medicine, meaning only half of patients survive their injuries. It was similar to being hit by a car at a modest speed, according to Bansal.

The San Diego medical examiner’s reports describe injuries that are hard to believe. Last March, Amet Garcia Mendez, a 31-year-old Mexican, plunged 35 feet to the ground, where he was discovered dead by authorities. An examination revealed that he died of skull and thoracic fractures, as well as several punctured organs.

Marifer Jimon Rojas, a Mexican 19-year-old, died in 2020 from a fractured neck and severe skull and sternum fractures. In 2019, weeks before her due date, an expectant mother fell from the wall, shattered her pelvis, and lost her newborn son.

According to data, US Customs and Border Protection has documented more than 3,000 breaches since 2019, and a welding crew was busy Thursday repairing a critically damaged span along the barrier. Almost every steel bollard had been sawed through and a metal sleeve had been inserted. Some of the pieces had been sliced through four times.

Image Credit: Getty

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