The border wall Trump called unclimbable is taking a grim toll
In the
trauma wards of this city’s major hospitals, patients from the border have arrived every day with gruesome injuries:
skull fractures, broken vertebrae and shattered limbs, their lower extremities twisted into deranged angles.
The
patients have fallen from new 30-foot segments of President Donald Trump’s border wall, a structure he touted as a
“Rolls Royce” that
“can’t be climbed.” His administration built more formidable barriers in the
San Diego area than anywhere else along the southern border, with miles of double-layer steel fencing, but that has not stopped more and more migrants from trying to scale it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say they do not tally deaths and injuries resulting from such falls. But new statistics published Friday by UC
San Diego physicians in the medical journal
JAMA Surgery provide one of the first attempts to measure the toll.
