A San Diego hospital treated a record number of migrant injuries in February as trauma centers continue to receive people injured while attempting to enter the United States illegally.
The city recently gained attention after 10 migrants required medical attention when they fell from the southern border wall on Saturday near Border Field State Park, a well-traversed corridor for undocumented entrants into the country. The incident, described by the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department as a "mass casualty" event, required six ambulances that sent victims to area hospitals. Some of them suffered broken bones.
The incident is part of what local trauma centers at UC San Diego Health and Scripps Mercy Hospital have identified as a growing trend of migrant injuries attributed to efforts to scale 30-foot walls separating the U.S. from Mexico.
Scripps experienced a drastic uptick in migrant-related injuries in February, treating 41 migrants. The total number of migrant-related injuries every February dating back to 2016 is seven.
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.
Annual border wall trauma cases increased from 34 in 2020 to a high of 239 in 2022 before decreasing to 189 in 2023, according to Scripps. A total of 65 injuries have been treated this year since January.
"Most of the patients arriving at Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego need to be hospitalized for their injuries," Scripps spokesperson Keith Darce told Newsweek. "Injuries run the full range from bone fractures to serious brain injuries."
Asked what happens to the patients when they are discharged from the hospital, Darce said most are released to friends or family members in the U.S.
From January 2016 to October 2022, UC San Diego and Scripps rotated being on call for trauma-related cases 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.
On November 17, 2023, both hospitals shifted schedules once more to take in patients all the time from the assigned trauma catchment area near the border. Different hospitals take in different injured patients based on specific geographic zones along the border.
Darce said that the changing rotations are evident in the data and 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 2024 calendar year will look quite different compared with past years, he noted, because both Scripps and UC San Diego accept patients all the time.
California's illegal immigration numbers have risen for three consecutive years, from approximately 260,000 in fiscal year 2021 to 362,000 and 450,000 in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, respectively, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Numbers this current fiscal year have already exceeded 203,000 in a four-month period, with January showing about an 11,000 decrease in migrants, compared with December—the first decline in months.
As of this March, compared with the period before the wall was raised to 30 feet in 2019, the trauma center at UC San Diego Health has experienced 10 times as many migrants with severe injuries, according to Dr. Alexander Tenorio, a neurological surgery resident at the facility.
Spinal fractures sustained by migrants totaled 12 instances between 2016 and 2020, increasing to over 100 once the wall was raised from 6-foot and 17-foot barriers to 30 feet.
Newsweek reached out to UC San Diego via email for comment.
Lilian Serrano, program director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, told Newsweek that the injuries were "unfortunate." She said she's spoken with local physicians and Border Patrol agents who have recounted instances of migrants entering "vegetable-like" states after attempts at scaling walls.
She said the Trump administration's raising of the wall was aimed at making efforts more difficult overall for migrants seeking a new life in the U.S. However, she said nobody should be climbing a border wall and risking life.
"It's about human rights," Serrano said. "Some have to flee homes and want to arrive to seek safety. Migrants are doing that. Sometimes in our country we view [migration] as a phenomenon, and people are leaving/coming for different reasons.
"When people are exercising their human rights, they shouldn't have to risk their lives to find safety," she said.
Asked about a solution for deterring injuries and increased illegal immigration, she said migrants should not be climbing, swimming or traversing rough terrain. Instead, Serrano said, the U.S. has to continue to address ports of entry and an asylum system that is failing to manage "migration in a more orderly manner that protects people's lives."
Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee's U.S./Mexico border program and a longtime human rights advocate, echoed Serrano's sentiments.
He told Newsweek that when construction of a taller wall was deliberated, a former Border Patrol agent told him that testing showed at what height (18 to 22 feet) a normal person would be disoriented.
"The 30-foot border wall that sits in certain areas of the U.S.-Mexico border makes it much more likely that someone falling will sustain these life-altering injuries, and there's more areas having that border walls," Rios said. "To me, it just indicates that the expectation at that height would result in many more people falling and injuring themselves."
He agrees that the asylum process is broken and called on Biden "to recommit to protecting" it, noting that migrants attempting to come into the U.S. from places like Tijuana cannot get appointments and legal status.
"The idea that people are purposefully choosing dangerous ways to cross into the U.S. on a first attempt [is] misguided," Rios said. "Most people would not want to scale a border wall or walk through the desert or mountains."
John Cihomsky, a spokesperson for San Diego-based Sharp Memorial Hospital, told Newsweek that his facility has not seen the types of increases that the other two hospitals have experienced.
He said Sharp Memorial is better suited to handle these migrant injuries because of the trauma centers' proximity to the border.
Update 3/5/24, 2:15 p.m. ET: This story was updated with comments from Lilian Serrano and Pedro Rios.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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