The border wall Trump called unclimbable is taking a grim toll
The journal JAMA Surgery offers one of the first attempts to measure injuries and deaths resulting from falls along new sections of the wall
AN DIEGO — 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 30-foot 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 miles of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But
new statistics published Friday by University of California at San Diego physicians in the journal
JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.
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.
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 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.
What’s different is that the border wall is a man-made obstacle that poses a lethal danger and public health challenge where one did not exist previously.
Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma division at UC San Diego Health, said injuries along the border wall occurred before its increase in height, but the older, shorter version of the barrier, ranging 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 said. “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.”
At Scripps Mercy Hospital, the other major trauma center for the San Diego area, border wall fall victims accounted for 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher share than gunshot and stabbing cases, according to Vishal Bansal, the director of trauma.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bansal said in an interview. “This is crazy.” His trauma ward treated 139 border wall patients injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020.
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.
When the Trump administration developed a series of wall prototypes in San Diego in 2017, the most difficult to climb featured a rounded, “barrel-shaped” top. But congressional appropriations for the barrier limited development to existing barrier designs, and Trump told aides he preferred the
“spiky” look of the steel bollards, which he considered more intimidating.