
Newsweek
Injuries suffered by migrants scaling the U.S-Mexico border wall have been "devastating," according to a hospital physician within walking distance of an area that many Texans have dubbed a crisis.
Texas has been a national epicenter of the escalating political flap surrounding illegal immigration with Governor Greg Abbott's ongoing feud with President Joe Biden. Abbott and statewide officials have attempted to enact their own legislation, essentially allowing them to subvert the federal government and enforce their own deportation laws.
Billions of dollars' worth of construction continues in Cameron, Maverick, Starr, Val Verde and Webb counties that are directly on the border. Physicians across Texas and extending to California, however, have warned that injuries suffered by migrants scaling 30-foot walls have become serious and more common.
"The injuries from an orthopedic standpoint are what we would describe as devastating for the most part," 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, told Newsweek.
"And it's a very unique social political phenomenon related to the border wall. We don't see this type of injury pattern in this regularity with any other phenomenon—typically high-energy car wrecks or falls from heights. People will get these injuries all over the country, but you don't get this cluster in volume of them."