Devastating border falls are on the rise
Nearby hospitals pushed to brink in migrant crisis
Ambulances rush them daily to hospitals in El Paso, Texas; San Diego; and Tucson, Ariz. — bones poking out of arms and legs, skulls cracked, spines shattered. The men and women arrive on stretchers flanked by an agent in the telltale green uniform of the US Border Patrol.
“One look, and I know it’s another wall fall,” said Brian Elmore, an emergency medicine physician at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso.
The patients are migrants who have crashed to the ground while trying to climb over the wall that separates Mexico and the United States for long stretches of the border.
In a quest to stop unauthorized immigration, the US government has in recent years extended the length and height of the fortifications, and a new stretch has been authorized by the Biden administration. But many migrants have been undaunted by the barriers, and for hundreds of them, the result has been debilitating injuries that require multiple surgeries, according to physicians working in US hospitals near the border.
President Donald Trump, who made “the wall” central to his immigration agenda, ordered construction in California of a double-layered, 30-foot-tall steel bollard barrier to replace more than 400 miles of fencing that ranged from 8 feet to 17 feet in height.
Since the project was completed in 2019, the number of wall-fall patients admitted to the trauma center at University of California San Diego Health trauma center has increased sevenfold, to 311 in 2022. This year, that number is expected to surpass 350, according to the hospital, which said the number of deaths from falls has gone from zero between 2016 and 2019 to 23 since then.
A comprehensive accounting of wall-related injuries and deaths does not exist, but physicians along the border have been stepping up efforts to track and study fall-related injuries and deaths. They say that the increase in recent years is significant, even given the increase in border apprehensions, and that the influx of severely injured patients is straining hospitals along the border.
Caring for the patients can impose a sizable financial burden because the migrants typically lack insurance yet often require multiple complex surgeries and extended inpatient care.
“The problem is getting worse and worse,” said Dr. Jay Doucet, chief of the trauma unit at UC San Diego Health, which is about 15 miles from the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing, “and the hospital system is taking a big hit.”
The cost of caring for migrants at San Diego’s two trauma centers — UC San Diego Health and Scripps Mercy Hospital — has increased from $11 million between 2016 and 2019 to $72 million from 2020 to June 2022, the latest number available.
The current network of barriers dates to the 1990s, begun under President Bill Clinton, and every administration since has erected barriers, with Trump making “the wall” central to his immigration agenda.
President Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020, had derided Trump’s intense focus on the wall. Nevertheless, Biden recently authorized an expansion of barriers in South Texas, saying his administration could not block the use of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress in 2019 for wall construction. But Biden has also been under pressure to take a harder line on unlawful immigration, which has stretched government resources and fueled criticism of the president before the 2024 election.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, and aides who worked with him when he was in the White House have been mapping out a plan to revive many of his administration’s anti-immigration efforts and in some cases to take even more aggressive approaches.