Thirty-three people attempting to cross the US border drowned in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego after the Trump administration nearly doubled the height of the walls along the southern border, a staggering increase from previous years.
The number of drownings rose by 3,200% from 2020 to 2023, compared to 2016 to 2019, when just one person drowned, according to a study published this week. By 2019 the Trump administration had elevated the barriers around San Diego from 17ft to 30ft.
The expansion has had significant impacts and a major human toll – in addition to the drowning deaths, a 2022 study found an “unprecedented” increase in border wall falls and deaths. Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of “securing” America’s borders (while routinely demonizing immigrants), and work on the border barrier has continued under the Biden administration.
Last year, doctors in San Diego saw more than 400 patients who had been seriously injured at the border wall, a significant increase from 2022. Nearly all of the injuries occurred from people falling off the wall onto the US side of the border.
The authors of the study published in the Jama journal this week suspected that the increased risks associated with the border barrier may have encouraged people to try to enter the US by water, which resulted in more deaths.
They found the significant rise in deaths in San Diego, where the wall stretches across the sand into the water at Imperial Beach, as well as a 30% rise in drowning deaths in canals, and a 133% increase in deaths in all other bodies of water. Drownings along the Rio Grande, where there is largely no wall, remained almost unchanged.
The authors, Anna Lussier, a medical student at the University of California at San Diego, and Peter Lindholm, a professor there, began exploring the issue after Lussier noticed a lack of information on drowning deaths of people trying to cross the border. They had been looking at the occupational health of lifeguards and other workers.
“The lifeguards showed us a presentation on migrant rescues they were performing because of potential human smuggling,” Lussier said in a statement from UC San Diego. “Their stories weren’t showing up in the news, and the numbers struck me as odd.”
Lussier looked for data on the drowning deaths within government datasets, but it was not readily available and missing critical information. She and Lindholm ultimately collected data from the Missing Migrants Project, which included the date and coordinates of drownings as well as the number of people who had died.
The authors plan to expand their research to better understand the rise in deaths, but Lindholm said the increase is unlikely due only to an increase in migration.
“Looking at the numbers, you can see that it’s about the same in the Rio Grande, and it’s a little more but not extraordinarily more in the ditches and canals,” he said. “We don’t have absolute data on how many people migrated, but if the number of drownings was related to the rate of migration, you would probably have a similar increase at all places.”
