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SAN DIEGO – In the trauma wards of major hospitals in this city, patients from the border arrive every day with horrific injuries: skull fractures, broken vertebrae and broken limbs, their lower limbs are bent at crazy angles.
Patients have fallen from new 30-foot segments of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a structure he advertises as a “Rolls Royce” that “cannot be climbed.” His administration has built worse barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else on the southern border, with miles of double-walled steel fencing, but that hasn’t stopped more and more migrants from trying to take it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not account for deaths and injuries from such falls. But new statistics released Friday by doctors from UC San Diego in the medical journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the fee.
Since 2019, when the barrier height was raised to 30 feet across much of the California border, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma unit after falling off the structure has jumped five times to 375, doctors found . Falling deaths at the barrier have risen from zero to 16 during that time, according to the report, citing records maintained by the San Diego County Medical Court.
“I never expected to have to climb the wall,” said Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old Cuban dentist who is recovering this week in the trauma ward at UC San Diego Health. He broke his left leg in a fall on Monday. The smugglers led his group to the wall with the ladder and told them to climb and slide to the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw a woman fall and break both legs, as well as an elderly man with a severe head injury.
The declining incidents are part of a growing number of injuries, deaths and rescues across the southern border, where immigration arrests have reached record highs under President Biden. Migrants trying to escape capture have drowned in the Rio Grande, died from exposure in South Texas and Arizona, and disappeared in the Pacific Ocean while trying to smuggle at sea.
The difference is that the border wall is a man-made obstacle, which is a deadly danger and a challenge to public health where it did not exist before.
Trump’s border wall has been breached more than 3,000 times, CBP records show
Dr. Jay Dusset, head of the trauma department at UC San Diego Health, said injuries along the border wall occurred before it increased in height, but the older, shorter version of the barrier, ranging from 9 up to 17 feet, was not deadly.
“Once you go over 20 feet and up to 30 feet, the chance of serious injury and death is higher,” he said. “We see injuries we haven’t seen before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and many open fractures when bone passes through the skin.”
At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center in the San Diego area, victims of a fall in the border wall make up 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher proportion of firearms and stabbing cases, according to the director. of trauma Dr. Vishal Bansal.
“I have never seen anything like it,” Bansal said in an interview. “This is crazy.” His trauma unit treated 139 patients on the border wall injured in falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.
Fall injuries often require complex intensive care and multiple phased surgeries, according to San Diego doctors. In the absence of health insurance, many of them do not qualify for physiotherapy and rehabilitation programs, so they stay longer in hospitals that bear millions of unreimbursed expenses.
When the Trump administration developed a series of prototype walls in San Diego in 2017, the most difficult to climb involved a rounded, “barrel-shaped” peak. But Congressional barrier appropriations have limited development to existing barrier projects, and Trump has told his staff that he prefers the “sharp” appearance of steel poles, which he finds more frightening.
Thirty feet was set as the optimal height for new barriers, as it balanced cost concerns with US Customs and Border Protection’s willingness to give agents more time to respond, making it difficult to climb, according to design officials.
Five years later, evidence of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano’s jester – “show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder” – is clear from the dusty road that encloses the barrier south of San Diego .
Improvised stairs dot the bushes at the base of the wall between the San Isidro and Otai Mesa crossings. Some are made of segments of metal reinforcement, but more sophisticated versions use lightweight aluminum with sections that fit together like tent poles.
Smugglers hang them on top of the wall and rush migrants 30 feet up, often with little explanation of how to get off. Many of the injuries appear to have occurred when migrants tried to get off.
Videos posted on social media show athletic young men ascending sailly and grabbing the poles like fire poles to fasten on the other side. But this type of skilled maneuver is beyond the reach of many migrants, who usually try to climb at night to avoid detection.
“One thing I’ve noticed is that people who fall aren’t as athletic as you think they would be to go up the ladder like that,” Dusset said. “They are middle-aged and quite a few women, even pregnant.”
Those who fall back while trying to slide down may land on their heads and necks.
Some of the dead are recent deportees, with homes, jobs and families from the American side, such as 56-year-old Efren Medina Villegas, killed in a fall last year near the Otai Mesa checkpoint in San Diego. “He was trying to return to his family,” said son-in-law Reynaldo Medina, who was contacted by phone.
The Trump administration has built a 450-mile new fence along the Mexican border for about $ 11 billion, mostly replacing older, smaller barriers with three-story steel poles anchored in concrete. Biden halted construction after taking office, but his administration has developed plans to close the gaps, especially in Arizona.
Where Trump’s border wall has left deep scars and open gaps, Biden plans repair work
Republicans forged Biden’s decision to halt construction by campaigning ahead of November’s by-elections calling for the structure to be completed.
Ronald Vitielo, a former head of the border patrol, said the large number of migrants released in the United States at Biden had created an incentive and made increasingly risky attempts to cross. “More traffic equals more misery and death, for whatever reason,” he said.
In places where gaps remain in the barrier, injuries and deaths appear to be less common. But in border areas with new, continuous segments of 30-foot fences, such as the deserts west of El Paso, in eastern Arizona and along the Imperial Valley of California, crash incidents have risen.
UC San Diego Health has turned the postpartum wing into a makeshift rehabilitation unit for border wall patients, many of whom require multiple, phased surgeries and long-term rehabilitation, but lack insurance.
Dr Amy Lippert, director of emergency surgery at UC San Diego Health, said the hospital was seeking help after spending at least $ 13 million on patients on the border wall alone. “We need policies that fund the care that is provided to ensure that we provide access to our other populations in need of trauma care,” Lippert said.
Lippert said the volume of casualties from the border wall puts a strain on San Diego’s entire trauma system. “This means that trauma surgeons, medical teams, the intensive care unit, therapists and others have significantly increased workloads,” she said.
Almeida, a Cuban dentist who broke his leg, said he was knocked down from the top of the wall when others in his group rushed to climb a single ladder as Mexican police approached from the south. He managed to partially catch the bollards and slow down his fall, saving a worse injury.
Some smugglers use ropes and belts to safely drop US customers, but the technique has also proved dangerous. Earlier this month, a Mexican woman wearing a belt got stuck while descending a wall near Douglas, Arizona, and died of suffocation after hanging upside down for several hours.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they are stepping up their security warnings and stepping up efforts to target smugglers. “There are not strong enough words to describe the actions of these smugglers, who are personally responsible for the deaths and injuries they cause to many vulnerable groups,” said Patricia McGurk-Daniel, deputy head of the San Diego Border Patrol. interview.
She and other border patrol officials say the barrier remains a key tool for border security, but not impossible to climb. “The infrastructure itself was never meant to be a stop for everything,” McGurk-Daniel said. “We need a multi-level approach that includes technology, boots in place and comprehensive immigration reform.
In traumatology, a fall from a height of 40 feet is considered 50 percent fatal, meaning only half of patients survive their injuries, according to Dusset. Bansal described it as “like hitting a car at a moderate speed”.
Reports from San Diego medical experts describe indescribable injuries. Amet Garcia Mendes, 31, of Mexico, fell 35 feet to the ground last March, where he was found dead by agents. He died of fractures of the skull and chest, with multiple perforated organs, the autopsy showed.
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