Immigrant deaths and injuries surging along US-Mexico border wall
Kevin Martinez
Physicians at the University of California at San Diego released a study last week in the journal JAMA Surgery documenting the number of immigrants who have died or been injured attempting to scale sections of the new US-Mexico border wall. The study is the first to record the casualties along the structure Donald Trump boasted “can’t be climbed.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it does not tally such deaths or injuries.
A U.S. Border Patrol vehicle drives along the border fence at the U.S.-Mexico border wall, on Dec. 15, 2020, in Douglas, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin,File)
According to the report, the number of patients arriving at the UC San Diego Medical Center’s trauma ward after falling off the structure has increased five-fold since 2019, when the border wall’s height was raised to 30 feet. Since then, the number of deaths has gone from zero to 16, according to records from the San Diego County medical examiner. Wounded patients are now arriving every day in the region’s hospitals.
The report comes at a time when President Biden has continued the anti-immigrant policies of his Republican and Democratic predecessors and set all-time high records for immigration arrests along the southern border. Title 42, which denies migrants the right to asylum and mandates that they be summarily expelled, using the pandemic as a pretext for denying any form of due process, has been used first by the Trump and now the Biden administration to compound a humanitarian catastrophe for immigrants fleeing from poverty and violence in their home countries.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/04/hqfo-m04.html
