Border Wall Falls Causing Traumatic Injuries

Heightened walls along the California-Mexico border are causing an increasing number of traumatic head injuries, local surgeons have said.

In an interview with news channel KGTV on Thursday, Dr. Joseph Ciacci, a neurosurgeon at UC San Diego Health, said that in 2023 the hospital dealt with 500 head injuries from migrants falling from the wall, with many requiring surgery.

“I can’t remember a week where we haven’t had an injury from a border wall incident for years and years,” he told the outlet, adding that an increasing number of the patients are women. “It’s particularly striking when you’re taking care of a severely injured patient that’s shackled to the gurney that they’re coming into the operating room on. It’s a visual that affects you.”

Earlier in March, Dr. Alexander Tenorio, a neurological surgery resident at the same hospital, told CBS 8 that it had been treating 10 times as many migrants with severe injuries compared to 2019.

“Not only are the numbers going up, but the severity of these injuries—it’s much, much worse,” Tenorio said.

Another San Diego hospital told Newsweek at the same time that it had seen a spike in border wall fall injuries in the past few years, which ranged from broken bones to brain injuries.

The height of the border wall near San Diego was doubled in 2019 under former President Donald Trump, who sought to deter undocumented migration, which has risen again since the coronavirus pandemic.

However, medics and emergency responders say that migrants are still scaling the walls, and are susceptible to graver injuries if they fall. Local activists have called on President Joe Biden to act.

“We’re talking about 30 feet,” Ciacci told KGTV. “That’s a significant height to fall from. If you look at the structure of the wall, it was not designed in a way where climbing should be easy.”

At the start of March, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department declared a “mass casualty” incident at the border, with at least 10 migrants injured—eight of whom had fallen from the border fence. The most serious injury in that incident was a broken leg.

The following week, emergency officials said that more than two dozen people had required medical treatment after attempting to climb the wall.

Ciacci also said that treating severe head injuries is expensive, and that the cost is ultimately being covered by the taxpayer.

In the year to September 2023, there were nearly 2.5 million migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border, almost 413,000 of which occurred along the Californian section, U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show. Since then, nearly a million undocumented migrants have been recorded along the southern border.

In the San Diego section specifically, there were over 362,000 migrant encounters in the year to September, and since then there have been almost 183,000.

Newsweek approached Ciacci and the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department via email for further comment on Monday.