Local firefighters in Southern Arizona found themselves in a tough spot recently: A man trying to climb the 30-foot border wall had fallen on the Mexico side. He was injured, but Mexican authorities had not responded to help him. Hours ticked by as border authorities argued about who should help him.
Finally, after 24 hours, the Arivaca Fire Department Chief ordered the wall cut. Firefighters used specialized circular saws used in rescues to cut through the metal bollards of the border wall and took the man to a hospital in Tucson.
Border Patrol officials told them they didn’t have authorization to do it but, the fire chief felt the injury had become a threat to the man’s life. John Washington reported the story for the Arizona Luminaria and joined The Show to talk more about this.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, John, thanks for coming back on The Show.
JOHN WASHINGTON: Good morning. Good to be here.
GILGER: All right.So tell us first about this man. You don't name him in your reporting, but tell us you know why he was there, right?
WASHINGTON: So I was able to track him down and actually visited him in the hospital, a couple days after his fall, and he was a migrant from Oaxaca. He told me that he was coming to look for work, that there's little work in Oaxaca and that there's no legal or viable means of getting to the United States in any legal manner to try to find that work. So he took the route that a lot of people are doing now and he climbed over the wall or tried to climb over the wall.
When he was about at the top, he fell off and that is all he remembers for a number of hours probably. He lost consciousness and woke up and saw his ankle bone actually sticking out of his skin and his foot and ankle just covered in blood. There's one important slight correction here is that he did fall on the south side of the wall, but he was very likely still on U.S. territory. And that is because the wall is built not directly on the international divide, but depending usually a few feet or a little bit more north of the actual international borderline. So he was very likely on U.S. soil.
GILGER: Right. And that brings us to some of the jurisdictional issues here. The things that came up, you write about how officials were sort of arguing about who should help this person calling Mexican authorities. They were not responding. It was volunteers who found him, right and tried to kind of help him through the wall. Who is responsible though, in a situation like this, John?
WASHINGTON: Well, that's a question. And when I talked to the fire chief, there was the Arivaca fire chief Tangye Beckham about this. She lamented that there is no protocol in place to respond to these kinds of emergencies. So, you know, previously, even in just the last couple of years, there were a lot of gaps in this span of the border wall. This is just east of Sasabe, sort of west of Nogales. And there was about 20 gaps that people could pass through, either to respond to some emergency call or for whatever reason. And those gaps have been filled in by the Biden administration.
So right now, there's no real way to get around the wall unless you go over it. There are doors in, in parts of the wall, they are like flood control doors, but a lot of those have actually been sealed over as well. So even if you have a key, which border patrol does, the key won't actually work. You actually still need to make the cut.
GILGER: So tell us about her decision there to cut through the wall. Border patrol had told them they didn't have the authority to do that?
WASHINGTON: Right. So, there, there's a number of steps that happened here. She originally got the call from some humanitarian aid volunteers late in the morning. I think it was on August 28th and she headed, she, one of her crews headed out towards the wall and they contacted border patrol because this is the standard protocol there. Border patrol said that she wouldn't have access to the person. He was on the south side of the wall. So they stopped her from proceeding.
And they told her that they were in contact with Mexican officials that were going to respond hours later. At this point, it had been over 12 hours and the man had been bleeding and suffering in pain on the south side of the wall. No one had responded. So they called the fire chief again. And this time they decided that they had to go and, and actually see what was going on. They saw him and they actually treated him initially through the wall.
So the wall is made up of these steel bollards with about a, you know, a few inch gap between each of them and they were able to give him an IV, give him some pain meds and actually splint his foot or his ankle through the wall. They were still at this point waiting for Mexican officials to actually execute the rescue.
And when our kept on dragging on, when border patrol kept on saying that they couldn't authorize cutting through the wall. She said that she had to make a decision. He was losing a feeling and circulation in his extremity and she decided to actually make the cut, which was at that point about 24 hours give or take after he had fallen.
GILGER: This is not the first time we've seen people get severely hurt trying to climb the border wall. This has become more common it seems recently as we've seen more sections of wall be built and, and it's 30 feet high. Tell us a little bit about how common this is, how dangerous it is.
WASHINGTON: It, it's, it's extremely dangerous. So, you know, I used to be an EMT myself and any fall that is three times your height is potentially a very severe injury and should be treated as a traumatic injury. So the wall used to be anywhere between about 6 and maybe 15 feet. And then, in 2017, the Trump administration just after taking office, issued this executive decree saying that it's going to be replaced by a 30 foot wall. And then there's actually gonna be additional miles of wall built, usually about 30 feet high.
So, no, either local or federal agency actually tracks wall falls. They will track deaths. But some researchers out of San Diego looked into this and they found a five fold increase in traumatic injuries or deaths due to wall falls from the period before 2017 to the period after the wall was actually built.
What they explain is that it's, it's more than just treating these individual issues that is also a public health crisis because they're very complicated injuries. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of money to actually treat them and they detract from other, other sorts of issues that they can be addressing.
