A woman was pronounced dead in San Diego on Thursday night after falling from the 30-foot-high southern border wall.
At approximately 10:33 p.m. local time near Britannia Court, U.S. Customs and Border Protection discovered the woman and reported the incident to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, department spokesperson Mónica Muñoz told Newsweek on Friday. Crews responded and reported the incident to San Diego Police. The victim did not survive.
Multiple emergency vehicles and San Diego Fire-Rescue were called to the scene, according to local ABC affiliate 10 News San Diego.
It remains unclear whether the woman, whose identity and nationality remains unknown, was found dead by federal agents or succumbed to injuries after being discovered. Muñoz said she had no additional information to provide.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are reportedly investigating the incident.
Newsweek reached out to San Diego Police via email for comment.
The woman's death follows multiple wall-related incidents that occurred earlier this month.
On March 2, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department declared a "mass casualty" incident near Border Field State Park involving 10 individuals aged between 18 and 45 who were later treated for various injuries, the most serious being a broken leg.
About one week later, 16 migrants in total were found by local authorities and treated at hospitals after attempting to scale the tall structure.
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond said those involved in that incident were trying to "cut to the front of the line," adding that the illegal migrant issue has been exacerbated and is "unsustainable."
"In the past 16 days, [the number of] migrants just being dropped off at the Iris Avenue station is over 11,000," Desmond told Fox 5 on March 10. "Since September that's about 108,000 people just dropped off here in the streets in San Diego County."
Injuries from border wall falls have escalated across the entirety of the border shared with Mexico, stretching from San Diego to El Paso, Texas.
Local trauma centers at UC San Diego Health and Scripps Mercy Hospital, as well as other physicians who treat migrants who often don't stay in hospitals very long, have linked the wall scaling to an increase in migrant-related injuries.
Scripps experienced a drastic uptick in migrant-related injuries in February, treating 41 migrants. The total number of migrant-related injuries every February dating back to 2016 is seven.
The 41 trauma-related injuries are also the third-highest monthly number going back some eight years, exceeded only by 55 injuries in September 2022 and 44 in November 2021—all while President Joe Biden was in office.
In cities like El Paso, where physicians are within minutes of dealing with such incidents, they see copious numbers of lower body injuries. Some get hurt even though they wear materials intended to mitigate the height of the falls.
"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, previously told Newsweek.
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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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