SAN DIEGO – In the ward wards of this city’s major hospitals, border patients arrive daily with horrific wounds: skull fractures, broken vertebrae and broken limbs, their lower limbs twisted at distorted angles. Patients fell from new 30-foot-long sections of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a construction advertised as a “Rolls Royce” that “can not climb.” His government has built more formidable barriers in the San Diego area than anywhere else along its southern border, with miles of double-glazed steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more immigrants from trying to escalate it. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not take into account the deaths and injuries caused by such falls. However, new statistics published Friday by UC San Diego doctors in the medical journal JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure toll. Since 2019, when the height of the barrier increased to 30 feet along much of the California border, the number of patients who arrived at the UC San Diego Medical Center trauma ward after falling from the structure has increased fivefold to 375, the researchers said. doctors. Deaths from falling at the dam rose from zero to 16 during that period, according to the report, citing records kept by the San Diego County Medical Examiner. “I never expected that we would have to climb the wall,” said Hector Almeida, a 33-year-old Cuban dentist who is recovering this week in the wound ward at UC San Diego Health. He broke his left leg on an autumn Monday. The smugglers led his team to the wall with a ladder and told them to climb and slide on the other side, said Almeida, who said he saw a woman fall and break both legs and an elderly man seriously head injury. Falls are a subset of the growing number of injuries, deaths and rescues across the southern border, where migrant arrests have reached an all-time high under President Biden. Immigrants trying to escape capture drowned in Rio Grande, died from exposure in South Texas and Arizona and disappeared in the Pacific Ocean during smuggling attempts at sea. What is different is that the border wall is a man-made barrier that poses a deadly danger and challenge to public health where it did not exist before. Trump’s border wall breached more than 3,000 times, according to CBP records Dr Jay Doucet, head of the trauma department at UC San Diego Health, said the injuries along the boundary wall occurred before the height increase, but the older, shorter version of the barrier, which ranged from 9 to 17 feet, they were not deadly. “When you exceed 20 feet and up to 30 feet, the chance of serious injury and death is higher,” he said. “We see injuries we have never seen before: pelvic fractures, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries and many open fractures when the bone passes through the skin.” At Scripps Mercy Hospital, another major San Diego-based trauma center, casualties at the border walls accounted for 16 percent of the 230 patients treated last month, a higher rate than shooting and stabbing, according to the Injury Director Dr. Vishal Bansal. . “I have never seen anything like it,” Bansal said in an interview. “This is crazy.” His injury ward treated 139 patients who were injured by falls last year, up from 41 in 2020. Those injured by falls often require complex intensive care and multiple, gradual surgeries, according to San Diego doctors. In the absence of health insurance, many are not eligible for physiotherapy and rehabilitation programs, so they stay longer in hospitals, which absorb millions of non-refundable costs. When the Trump administration developed a series of wall prototypes in San Diego in 2017, the hardest to climb had a rounded barrel-shaped top. However, congressional appropriations for the dam limited development on existing dam plans, and Trump told aides that he preferred the “sharp” appearance of the steel columns, which he considered more intimidating. The 30 feet was determined to be the optimal height for new barriers because it balanced cost concerns with the desire of US Customs and Border Protection to give agents more time to respond, making climbing more difficult, according to planning officials. Five years later, evidence of Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano’s mockery – “show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot staircase” – is clearly visible along the dusty road that closes the dam south of San Diego. Improvised stairs fill the brush along the base of the wall between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa intersections. Some are made of metal reinforcement parts, but the more advanced versions use lightweight aluminum with parts that fit together like tent poles. Smugglers hook them to the top of the wall and rush the migrants 30 feet high in the air, often with minimal explanation of how to get down. Many of the injuries appear to be happening as migrants try to get off. The videos posted on social media show young athletic men going up and down and grabbing the columns like fire poles to zip up on the other side. But this type of maneuvering is beyond the capabilities of many migrants, who usually try to climb at night to avoid detection. “One thing I have noticed is that people who fall are not as athletic as you think they would be if they climbed a ladder like that,” Dausse said. “They are middle-aged, and quite a number of women, even pregnant women.” Those who fall backwards while trying to slip can land on their head and neck. Some of the dead are recent deportees, with homes, jobs and families on the U.S. side, such as Efren Medina Villegas, 56, who was killed in a fall last year near the Otay Mesa crossing in San Diego. “He was trying to get back to his family,” said his brother-in-law, Reynaldo Medina, with whom he spoke by telephone. The Trump administration has built 450 miles of new fencing along the border with Mexico at a cost of about $ 11 billion, mostly replacing older, smaller barriers with three-story concrete columns anchored in concrete. Biden stopped construction after taking office, but his government has developed plans to close the gaps, especially in Arizona. Where Trump’s border wall has left deep scars and open gaps, Biden plans to repair Republicans have forged Biden’s decision to halt construction in the run-up to the November midterm elections with calls for the structure to be completed. Ronald Vitielo, the former head of Border Patrol, said the large number of Biden’s immigrant releases in the United States had created an incentive and led to increasingly dangerous transit attempts. “More movement equals more misery and death, of all causes,” he said. In places where gaps remain in the dam, injuries and deaths appear to be less common. But in border areas with new, continuous 30-foot fences, such as the deserts west of El Paso in eastern Arizona and along California’s Imperial Valley, falls have skyrocketed. UC San Diego Health has transformed a postpartum ward into a makeshift recovery ward for border wall patients, with many requiring multiple, gradual surgeries and long-term rehabilitation but no insurance. Dr Amy Liepert, director of acute surgery at UC San Diego Health, said the hospital was seeking help at a cost of at least $ 13 million from patients with border walls alone. “We need policies that fund the care provided to ensure that we provide access to our other populations in need of injury care,” Lippert said. Lipert said the mass of casualties from the border wall is straining the entire San Diego injury system. “It means that trauma surgeons, medical teams, ICUs, therapists and others have greatly increased their workload,” he said. Almeida, the Cuban dentist who broke his leg, said he was hit from the top of the wall when others in his team rushed up a single flight of stairs as Mexican police approached from the south. He was able to partially catch the pillars and slow down his fall, avoiding a worse injury. Some smugglers use ropes and straps to lower customers safely to the US side, but this technique has also proven dangerous. Earlier this month, a Mexican woman wearing a leash got stuck going down the wall near Douglas, Ariz. 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 enough words to describe the actions of these smugglers, who are personally responsible for the deaths and injuries they cause to very vulnerable populations,” said Patricia McGurk-Daniel, deputy chief of the San Diego Border Patrol. Diego. interview. She and other Border Patrol officials say the dam remains an essential border security tool, but not a non-climbing one. “Infrastructure alone was never meant to be an obstacle to everything,” McGurk-Daniel said. “We need a multi-layered approach that includes technology, boots on the ground and comprehensive immigration reform.” In wound medicine, a fall from a height of 40 feet is considered to be 50 percent fatal, which means that only half of patients survive their injuries, according to Doucet. Bansal described it as “similar to hitting a car at a moderate speed”. San Diego medical examiner reports describe unspeakable injuries. Amet Garcia Mendez, a 31-year-old man from Mexico, fell 35 feet to the ground last March, where he was found dead by agents. He died of fractures in the skull and chest, with multiple perforated organs, the necropsy showed. Marifer Jimon Rojas, a 19-year-old from Mexico, died in 2020 from a broken neck and multiple fractures to the skull and chest. In 2019 a future mother fell from …
