Washington.- The new segments of the wall that the then president of the United States, Donald Trump (2017-2021), ordered to build on the border with Mexico have caused a increase in deaths and hospitalizations of immigrants trying to cross, according to a study published Friday in the medical journal JAMA.
“This probably could have been prevented. There are a lot of people injured or killed that if we had been smarter, it could have been avoided,” the doctor explained in an interview with Efe. Jay Doucetstudy author.
His research looks at the record from the level 1 trauma unit at the University of California San Diego Medical Center.
Doucet collected data from the period from 2016 to 2018 and compared it with the interval between 2018 and 2021, after Trump ordered the replacement of some 640 kilometers of barriers that ranged between 1.80 and 5.18 meters in height with a steel wall of more 9 meters high, which added an additional 78 kilometers.
The study found that hospital admissions for falls from the wall of Trump have increased significantly since 2019, when their construction on the border with Mexico was completed.
More income and for the first time deaths
Hospital admissions multiplied by five, going from 67 between 2016 and 2018 to 375 between 2018 and 2021. In addition, there were 16 fall deaths in that last period, 2 in the hospital and 14 before being able to reach it. Between 2016 and 2018 none had been registered.
Doucet said he has been documenting injuries caused by immigrants falling from the barrier for years, but for decades their severity has remained stable.
“When the 9-meter wall was finished in 2019, we began to see more and more patients falling and their injuries were much more severe. And we began to see deaths, something that we had never seen before,” the doctor lamented.
For Doucet, the key to the problem lies in the inability of government officials to predict the behavior of immigrants who come to the southern United States border.
“Many people thought that increasing the wall to 9 meters would make the problem go away” since people would not try to scale such a high barrier, the researcher said.
The reality on the border, however, is much more desperate.
Doucet spoke about the case of a Cuban dentist, interviewed by The Washington Post for an article about the study, who had no plans to scale the wall until he saw Mexican police on his heels and panicked.
“People have to realize that these people are quite desperate to cross. Sometimes it’s to seek a better life, sometimes it’s to run away from some danger,” Doucet said.
And in other cases those who cross are returning to the country, since they have a US driver’s license or even medical insurance, so the doctor assumes that have made the trip several times.
13 million in hospital expenses
The study focuses not only on the human cost of Trump’s wall, but also on the economic one, noting that the increase in hospitalizations caused a cost of $13 million.
“Caring for these injured immigrants is not just a humanitarian issue, but a public health crisis that worsened access to beds in the trauma center, caused staff shortages and affected the morale of professionals,” the investigation details.
In addition to the trauma unit where Doucet works, Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego has faced a similar problem.
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Scripps Mercy shares care with the University of California at San Diego for immigrants who cross the border, so that they handle their cases in odd months and the educational center in even months.
The hospital has had to deal with the same increase in patients and the severity of their injuries.
Doucet explained that this increase in income added to the tensions caused by the covid-19 pandemicwhich in 2020 began to fill trauma units with people with respiratory problems.
“We were already quite short of ICU beds and then we began to see more of these patients (injured by jumping the wall) in an accelerated manner. It was discouraging,” lamented the doctor.
vare / rcr
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