Joe Biden Called Out Over Perilous California Border Wall

President Joe Biden has been called out over an anti-climbing feature that has been added to sections of California's border wall, as growing numbers of migrants continue to sustain injuries from falls.

Sections of the wall being built at Friendship Park between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, have rooftop-like metal wedges designed to deter illegal crossings.

Eleven people were hurt on Saturday after falling on the San Diego side of a section of wall without the metal wedges, and some migrant rights activists believe the new anti-climb feature will make the fence still more dangerous. That came just days after a man died after falling from the wall in an area west of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.

Injuries and deaths of migrants making the dangerous journey into the U.S. have risen significantly since Donald Trump's administration replaced existing border barriers that were less than 20 feet tall with 30-foot steel bollard barriers.

Pedro Rios, director of American Friends Service Committee's U.S.-Mexico border program, told Newsweek that the anti-climb feature atop the newly installed 30-foot border wall at Friendship Park "will cause more people to fall and injure themselves, as it is meant to prevent apparatuses from clinging on to the top of the wall."

He said: "It's shameful that President Biden's administration would rather spend money on border wall features that will certainly increase suffering instead of committing to respecting asylum processes and ensuring that people can safely present themselves at ports of entry."

Injuries sustained in falls from the border wall "are a public health concern," Rios said. "The authorities have a responsibility to address this so no more people are injured or lose their lives."

Newsweek has contacted the White House and California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office for comment via email.

While barbed wire wrapped along other sections of the wall appears more dangerous than the new anti-climb feature, some say it could be misleading.

"This new anti-climbing feature looks less dangerous than the rolls of barbed wire that one sees elsewhere along the border, so it is a bit deceptive," Peter Andreas, a professor of political science at Brown University, told Newsweek.

"Perhaps that is the purpose of the design—make the border barrier look less menacing even if it is not?"

He added that "one thing is for certain: this adaptation of border barriers will predictably lead to adaptations in finding ways to overcome border barriers."

Michael Dear, emeritus professor at UC Berkeley and author of Why Walls Won't Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide, said building "healthy and prosperous border communities is a more effective way to ensure national security and effective immigration control, and to eliminate cross-border drug- and gun-trafficking."

Adding anti-climb features to a vertical wall would only attract "rock-climbing entrepreneurs who make money from such improvements," Dear told Newsweek.

Higher walls cause more injuries, Dear said. "This is not rocket science, simply gravity," he said. "A 25-foot high fence will soon cause a 27-ft. ladder to grow nearby. Walls don't stop determined migrants from finding ways over, around, under, and through fences."

Immigration has emerged as one of the biggest issues in this year's presidential election, widely expected to be a Biden-Trump rematch, and both men have tried to blame the other for the nation's broken immigration system.

Biden has sought to spotlight the need for a bipartisan border security bill, which included $20 billion for securing the southern border, that Republicans tanked on Trump's orders.

"It's the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country's ever seen," Biden said during a visit to the border last week, as he urged Trump to join him in an effort to pass the legislation.

Trump and Republicans have blamed Biden for record-high illegal crossings, describing it as an ongoing "invasion" along the southern border.

The former president has also espoused rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to claim that migrants are "poisoning the blood" of the U.S. and laid out updated immigration proposals that would be a dramatic escalation of the approach he used while in office. Americans are now more worried about the issue, with a recent poll finding that more than half of Americans support the construction of a wall along the southern border.

Anti-climb barriers have been erected in Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has been engaged in an ongoing feud with the Biden administration over border security.

The Texas Military Department recently posted a picture on X, formerly Twitter, of an anti-climb barrier reinforced with razor wire on social media. The barrier "prevents illegal border crossers from entering Texas from Mexico," the department said in the post.

As part of its efforts to secure the border, the state has also placed a floating barrier in the Rio Grande and stopped Border Patrol agents from accessing a park in Eagle Pass that they previously used to process migrants.

Texas "will continue to defend Texans and Americans from President Biden's border crisis," Abbott said in a post on X on Tuesday.