Severe injuries from falls skyrocket since taller border wall installed

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The number of serious injuries stemming from falls from the border wall has risen dramatically in the past three years, a Texas Tech surgeon says. So has the severity of the wounds resulting from said falls, according to a soon-to-be-published study based on emergency room and hospital data.

“The main point of our article is (that) in the past three years, we are seeing more numbers of persons brought to our centers after a fall from the border wall compared to the years before 2019,” said Dr. Susan McLean, professor of surgery at Texas Tech University. “There was a wall prior to 2019, but it was shorter, and we saw five to 10 patients a year. For the last two years, we have seen around 250. So, there are more patients, and the injuries are more severe.”

Border wall construction and replacement became a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s deterrence strategy against illegal immigration. Trump bragged about building hundreds of miles of new border wall, in most cases replacing 18-foot wire mesh with 30-foot-tall bollards with a 5-foot steel plate on top.

McLean said victims of falls often come into hospital rooms with lower extremity fractures – sometimes with bone protruding from the skin. Those are easy to spot, but what often requires the use of a CT scan to be detected are spinal fractures.