Migrants falling off the U.S.-Mexico border wall are sometimes found to have used padding on their shoes in attempts to mitigate injuries, according to an orthopedic surgeon close to the scene.
Operation Lone Star was instituted by Texas officials in 2021 to deter migrants through physical barriers like razor wire, floating barriers in the Rio Grande, and walls as high as 30 feet in counties ripe with illegal immigration.
The joint operation between the Texas Department of Public Safety and the state military to curb illegal immigration along the southern border has drawn pushback from critics including the Biden administration and civil rights groups, with the former engaging in litigation against the state for practices they claim should be handled by the federal government due to traditional immigration law.
On Tuesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delayed Texas' implementation of Senate Bill 4 until 5 p.m. on March 18. If enacted, S.B. 4 would grant local and state law enforcement the authority to arrest, detain and remove individuals suspected of entering the state illegally from other countries.
"Some people will come over the wall with well-padded shoes with literal Styrofoam painted to the bottom of their shoes, understanding the consequences of their falls," Rajiv Rajani, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) in El Paso, told Newsweek.
"We hear stories of coyotes bringing people across [the border] and using one of these patients—one of these people they're using to take advantage of. They will intentionally push that person off the wall so that Border Patrol has to provide healthcare, so the remaining individuals can scramble and get away more freely."
Earlier this year, officials in Laredo, Texas, said that a group of migrants attempting to evade law enforcement like the National Guard used anti-tracking techniques after successfully entering the U.S. illegally.
Those migrants were described as wearing foam blocks on the bottoms of their shoes to hide their tracks in the sand.
"It makes it easier for them to escape, because a lot of the time they don't leave any tracks whatsoever behind when they use [foam blocks]—which can allow potentially dangerous individuals to enter this country and evade arrest," specialist Carson Lampkin of the Alpha Company with the Task Force Center in Texas, said in January.
Lampkin added: "I believe that we're making a huge difference here in Laredo. Personally—me, myself, and my teammates—we have caught many pedophiles and actual murderers that were wanted in other countries."
Rajani, who is located some four minutes from the southern border, said that about three-quarters of the injuries his hospital experiences related to migrant border wall falls are lower extremity injuries. About 15 percent were upper extremity injuries, while head and/or spinal injuries comprise about 6 percent.
Those lower extremity injuries tend to affect younger individuals more than older ones, he added, with treatment necessary for pilon fractures—where the tibia or shinbone breaks near the ankle.
Aside from short-term care to heal wounds and fractures and to avoid infection, the falls can induce life-altering physical changes like post-traumatic arthritis that can then impede normal actions like walking or working.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Nick Mordowanec is a Newsweek reporter based in Michigan. His focus is reporting on Ukraine and Russia, along with social ... Read more
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