Doctors at the University of California, San Diego’s health’s trauma center (UCSD) have treated 455 patients with serious injuries sustained while trying to cross the US-Mexico border in 2023, a marked increase from the year before.
Ninety-seven per cent of the injuries, or 441 of them, occurred when people fell off the wall on the US side, said Alexander Tenorio, a resident neurosurgeon at UCSD who treats brain and spinal cord injuries.
The number captures just a part of people injured while trying to cross the US-Mexico border near San Diego. The center is one of two major trauma centers in the region. Migrants with injuries perceived as less severe may not make it to a hospital. And children aren’t included in the dataset.
Still, they highlight the extensive, and growing human toll of the border crossing. Last year, the trauma center recorded 311 injuries related to people scaling the wall. In 2021 it recorded 254, in 2020 there were 92 and in 2019 there were 42.
“A lot of these [patients] come with fractures all over their body, unfortunately, and that’s what you would expect if someone falls 30ft. It’s like a three-story building,” Tenorio said.
Tenorio said the patients arrive at the trauma center with broken limbs, abdominal organ injuries, facial injuries, and spine fractures. “A lot of these injuries unfortunately don’t heal on their own because they’re so severe and extensive,” Tenorio said, adding that a significant number of patients end up undergoing emergency craniotomies or spinal cord surgery. Of the patients who underwent these spinal cord surgeries, Tenorio said, only 14% came back for a clinic visit, making long-term outcomes difficult to assess.
In 2023, Tenorio said, the center for the first time saw more women than men admitted to the hospital for border related injuries, including falls.
The construction of a more robust border barrier began in 2017 under Donald Trump and has continued under the Biden administration. In many areas, the construction replaces existing barriers with 18 to 30ft steel pillars.
Meanwhile, the number of encounters between federal agents and people trying to cross the US-Mexico border has increased each fiscal year, according to government data. In the San Diego sector, border patrol registered 230,941 encounters with migrants trying to cross by land between the ports of entry in fiscal year 2023 (October 2022-September 2023). Experts say global migration to rich countries is at an all-time high.
UCSD is one of many healthcare institutions along the southern border studying the increase in number and severity of injuries resulting from crossing the border, particularly those associated with the increased height of the wall. Tenorio says his institution’s tally of border-related injuries in the region likely doesn’t capture the full scope of the injuries.
Volunteers in border camps at the US-Mexico border in California have been sounding the alarm about a lack of medical attention in the open-air detention sites in San Diego county.
Volunteers say the type of care migrants receive from injuries sustained during the journey, including falling off the border wall, often depends on the assessment of individual border agents as they triage injuries and decide when to call emergency medical services.
“Treatment for the migrants is agent by agent,” said Lynn, a volunteer at the open-air detention sites in San Ysidro who the Guardian is identifying by an alias because she fears retaliation (Lynne says she has received death threats related to her humanitarian work).
She described one recent incident in which a woman arrived at the encampment limping, her white pants covered in blood. “She had probably a 4in gash on the inside of her thigh, right by the crease of her knee, and another 3in gash on the top of her calf on the same side, probably razor wire. You could see the muscle.” A volunteer nurse on-site helped bandage the injury, while Lynne says she ran to a border patrol agent to plead for emergency medical services.
In a statement, Customs and Border Protection, the law enforcement agency within which border patrol operates, said: “CBP’s message for anyone who is thinking of entering the United States illegally along the southern border is simple: don’t do it. When migrants cross the border illegally, they put their lives in peril.”
Nina Douglass hands out food and water several times a week at the outdoor detention site in San Ysidro. Last fall, a Colombian family with a 14-year-old boy approached volunteers to ask for pain medicine, saying the boy had hit his head on his way down the wall.
As Washington remains divided about increased border security measures, Douglass said the US should add capacity to process people at legal ports of entry.
“People like to politicize border infrastructure and border policies,” said Tenorio. But, he argued, the data shows that the increase in border injuries is a humanitarian issue. He will keep speaking up about the border related injuries he sees in his surgery room, he said.
