Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from the transcript of a Tik Tok video posted by a nurse who works at a San Diego hospital. It has been edited slightly for length and clarity. Her online handle is @travelingnurse.
I just got home from work and I want to talk about the border wall. If you work in healthcare in a border town, you probably know a lot of what I’m about to say, but I just had a shift that kicked my ass. And I am not going to cry on camera, but the shit that people are going through at the US border is insane. It’s inhumane. I don’t even want to talk about Border Patrol and the fact that there have been like 600 cases of sexual assault on minors in the last six years alone by Border Patrol in the San Diego area.
But if we’re just going to talk about the border wall and the public health threat that it creates in border towns, I have had many border wall cases since moving to San Diego. But last night took the cake. The majority of my assignment had jumped the border wall. I had a minor. I had people who were fleeing war-torn countries.. . . And it is absolutely heartbreaking the types of injuries that they sustain if they survive. It’s estimated that anywhere from one in seven to one in 10 people die trying to jump the wall. There’s actually two walls specifically here in San Diego. One is 20 feet, one is 30 fucking feet – a 30-foot drop. And it doesn’t stop people from coming. It literally just permanently disables and disfigures people while they’re trying to get here to make a better life. But there is something so particularly fucked up about having children [suffer] and taking care of children that go through this. And I know I’m not the only one.
The types of injuries that they sustain are awful. Crushing spinal injuries. I’ve had multiple that were quadraplegic and paraplegic after coming to us. I’ve had people with brain bleeds who fall and then smack their head on the back of the wall. Femur fractures, tibia-fibula fractures, and people who were jumping with family members who died. The sheer trauma of what we put migrants through is inexcusable. It is inhumane. And then like Border Patrol will literally come sit in the fucking hospital and I’m like, “Sorry, get the fuck out of my patient’s room. I’m doing an assessment and you’re not welcome in here.” And I’m not nice.
It, is so difficult to take care of these patients. It is so hard. I just feel like this is a part of the border wall conversation that we are not having enough. And I feel like if we spoke up more about the human rights and medical crisis that this wall creates, maybe we could do something about it. Because it’s not the coyotes jumping the wall. It’s not the traffickers. It’s not the criminals. They have their ways around it. The wall is literally not stopping anyone, one, and two, it is permanently disfiguring and killing the innocent people coming here to try and seek asylum. Kids, kids. It’s really frustrating.
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