Casualties at US-Mexico Border Are Rising

Migrant drownings in the Pacific Ocean have increased 3,200 percent since the height of the U.S.-Mexico border wall was increased in 2019, according to a new study.

A total of 33 drowning deaths off the San Diego coast occurred between 2020 and 2023, University of California, San Diego researchers found, according to a study published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Dating to 2016, there had been one drowning death before the wall height was raised from 17 feet to 30 feet during Donald Trump’s presidency.

The study’s release comes after 10 migrants were injured this month while scaling the bollard-style wall in what authorities dubbed a “mass casualty” incident. Local medical centers in San Diego have increasingly treated with more migrant injuries, ranging from broken bones to severe brain trauma, in the past four years as illegal entry attempts have become more prevalent.

“I think in general the numbers surprised me in that they were higher than I expected,” study co-author Anna Lussier, a doctoral student at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “And I think I was most surprised by how much they have increased in the ocean in four years.”

Lussier and the study’s co-author, Peter Lindholm, a professor in UCSD’s Department of Emergency Medicine, correlated the drowning increases to the border wall height being raised, affecting about 400 miles of structure.

They made their hypothesis by analyzing data between 2016 and 2019, and then the four years after the wall height was raised. Deaths were also compared to areas that mostly contain no walls as deterrents for illegal immigrants, such as by the Rio Grande.

Data was compiled by the Missing Migrants Project, using the international organization’s mortality reports of migrants, refugees and asylees who go missing or die during migration. Lussier and Lindholm filtered the reports to North America, specifically focusing on drowning deaths in particular bodies of water, including the Pacific Ocean in the San Diego region, canals in southern California, and lakes, streams and draining ditches.

Along with the 3,200 percent increase in Pacific Ocean drowning deaths, they discovered a 30.6 percent increase (49 deaths to 64 deaths) in canal drownings. Also, drowning deaths in all other bodies of water rose from 15 to 35—a 133.3 percent increase.

Drowning deaths in the Rio Grande decreased by about 1 percent between 2016 and 2023—from 97 to 96.

“Looking at the numbers, you can see that it’s about the same in the Rio Grande, and it’s a little more but not extraordinarily more in the ditches and canals,” Lindholm told the Times of San Diego. “We don’t have absolute data on how many people migrated, but if the number of drownings was related to the rate of migration, you would probably have a similar increase at all places.”

Attempts to scale the high border wall have strained local health systems that have seen drastic upticks in migrants requiring medical attention. The recent case in San Diego involving 10 migrants, age 18 to the mid-40s, resulted in broken bones. But hospitals have seen much worse.

Local trauma centers at UC San Diego Health and Scripps Mercy Hospital have reported increases in migrant treatments. From January 2016 to October 2022, the centers took turns being on call every other month.

The schedule changed on November 15, 2022, when Scripps shifted to two weeks on and six weeks off with UC San Diego. But as the calls persisted, another schedule change occurred on November 17, 2023, resulting in both hospitals shifting schedules to take in patients all the time from the assigned trauma catchment area near the border.

Scripps experienced an increase in migrant-related injuries in February, treating 41. The total number of migrant-related injuries in previous Februarys dating to 2016 was seven.

Scripps spokesperson Keith Darce told Newsweek that the full data presentation “is just not apples to apples” because both hospitals have adjusted how often they treat patients within their geographic areas.

The 41 trauma-related injuries are also the third-highest monthly number going back some eight years, exceeded only by 55 injuries in September 2022 and 44 in November 2021—all while President Joe Biden was in office.

Different hospitals take in different injured patients based on specific geographic zones along the border. Darce said injuries run the full range from bone fractures to serious brain injuries.

The total cost burden for Scripps treating migrant-related injuries remain unknown.

“We are not able to run these types of numbers accurately, so we have never been able to share these types of numbers with reporters,” Darce said.

Dr. Alexander Tenorio, a neurological surgery resident at UC San Diego Health, told KFMB in San Diego this month that his hospital’s trauma center has experienced 10 times as many migrants with severe injuries than before the border wall was raised.

Between 2016 and 2020, Tenorio said, the trauma center treated 12 spinal fractures suffered by migrants scaling the wall. Once the wall was raised from 6-foot and 17-foot barriers to 30 feet, spinal fractures increased to more than 100 over a two-year period.