Migrant woman is impaled on border wall

A Guatemalan migrant fell and was impaled on metal bars last week after she and her children tried to climb a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.

The agency said that “pieces of rebar” had pierced the woman, a 26-year-old who has not been publicly identified, in the side of her torso and in her buttock Friday about a mile from an official border crossing at San Ysidro, California. It released a picture Sunday that showed her lying on her back in the dirt, her face out of the frame, with someone lifting her limp body to reveal a dark pool staining the ground beneath her.

Rodney Scott, the chief patrol agent for the border agency’s San Diego sector, said the woman had risked her life climbing the border wall and could have died.

“Entering our country illegally, particularly over our walls is not only dangerous, but also very foolish,” Scott said in the statement. “This woman placed her own life and her children’s lives in peril.”

Many migrants trying to enter the United States are fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, but they have been seized on by President Donald Trump, other Republicans and conservative news outlets as a national security threat.

The woman was brought to a hospital, where she was treated for nonlife-threatening injuries and her children were evaluated for “potential fall trauma,” the agency said. The children, ages 3 and 5, were later released into the custody of the Department of Homeland Security.

Border Patrol said its agents found the woman and her children Friday about a mile east of the San Ysidro port of entry, the largest crossing between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.