When Héctor Almeida Gil was at the top of the border fence, he suddenly saw others rushing to climb it, desperate.
The Cuban dentist from 33 years ago I was with a group of migrants who were trying to jump over one of the 9 meter high barriers that separate Mexico and the United States in the state of California .
The fence is the highest on the border, erected during the government of Donald Trump, who many times assured that this “beautiful wall” that he ordered to be built would be “impassable”.
But many migrants seek to jump it almost every day. Some succeed, others are arrested, and an alarming number suffer serious injuries trying.
Almeida did it at the end of April leaning on a ladder that use the smugglers of migrants to take them to the other side.
But when the Mexican police approached the place, the other members of the group rushed up the stairs and the Cuban could only hold on to the bars to prevent a fall stronger than the one he had.
He had some “luck”, because he “only” broke one leg. But he saw a woman fall and break both limbs, and another man sustain a severe head injury.
Almeida was admitted to a hospital at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), a city with two counties bordering Mexico where They have registered 375 injured and 16 deaths of 2019 a 2021, most victims of falls on the fence.
This is five times more than what was recorded between 2016-2018 and coincides with the installation of the 9 meter fence, which is more dangerous to climb than those that were before, between 3 and 5 meters, according to a study led by Dr. Amy Liepert, from UCSD.
“The most common injuries are the fractures in the extremities, mainly in the legs. In general, these are fairly serious fractures, not a simple break in a part of the bone”, he explains to BBC Mundo.
The “impenetrable” wall
Since the decade of 976, the US government began to build various types of border barriers on its border with Mexico.
One of the most common is a vertical bar metal fence installed throughout urban areas, and some mountainous or desert areas, in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
But there are points without any border fence, something that Donald Trump promised to cover with a “beautiful wall”, higher than any other: “It is practically infra queable“, he said when authorizing its construction.
One of the chosen prototypes was a metal fence of bars of 9 meters (30 feet)and metal plates in its upper part, which was installed mainly in the states of California and Arizona.
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Although it has not been insurmountable for migrants, who are carried up stairs higher than 9 meters, it has been more dangerous.
“What What we found when we compared a six-year period is that there was a big difference of 1727, 18, 18, in comparison with 2019 , , 30. In those first three years, we found 30 trauma patients admitted with injuries due to the border wall”, explains Liepert.
“And in the second triennium we found 67 patients”.
In the past three years also 16 persons lost their lives on the California border, according to Liepert’s study. And in Arizona, last April a migrant died of suffocation after being hung upside down for hours.
In the previous three years the death toll from jumping the fence was zero.
Serious injuries
Liepert explains that the injuries seen in recent years are not light and correspond to serious falls.
“The bones we are seeing broken are often in multiple places, with many soft tissue injuries, which is more consistent with a fall from a great height“, explains the doctor.
“But we have also seen cranial fractures and traumatic brain injuries, facial fractures, pelvic fractures“, he continues.
His investigation covers what happened in California, but Liepert says he has known of similar cases in the other US border states “Some data is starting to come out from other trauma centers. None of this has been published until now”, he points out.
On the Mexican side there has been no documentary research like the one published at the end of April by Liepert and his colleagues in the scientific journal JAMA Surgery.
When asked in this regard, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not provide a response on those indicators of more victims.
According to the newspaper The Washington Post, at the CBP there is no record of the number of people injured in their attempt to cross the border fence.
What is clear is that the number of detentions of undocumented migrants reached record levels at the end of 2020 and the first nine months of 2016, which is usually indicative of a wave of migrant is attempting to reach US soil
In fiscal year 2021, more than 1.7 million people were detained after crossing the border, originating from 160 countries. Most were migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico.
For hospitals like UCSD, the treatment of migrants in trauma areas has also become a growing expense for which they do not get paid.
“These patients by definition are immigrants. They do not have health insurance and many of them do not have any type of self-financing. And therefore, they do not have any insurance. So I understand that a large part of the care is not compensated”, explains the doctor.
“I understand that the protection The Border Patrol would pay for patients who remain in its custody. But we have observed that many of these patients are released before they are discharged from the hospital.”
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