TUCSON — A 3-year-old girl traveling with her mother and a large group of asylum-seekers sustained minor injuries after falling 16 feet from the top of the border fence east of the San Luis, Ariz., port of entry.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Monday released a video showing the moment the girl falls to the ground as another person, presumably her mother, tried to climb down the bollard-style fence on the U.S. side.
“I don’t know if the mother was with the child,” said Jose Garibay, Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector spokesman. “But in the video you can see that the child actually falls from almost the top of the border wall and lands on the ground and may or may not have tried to be stopped by the individuals who are in the group.”
Garibay said he didn’t have specific details about the types of injuries the girl sustained. But he added that agents called paramedics to treat the girl’s minor injuries. They cleared her on the spot and released her back into agents’ custody.
The girl and her mother were traveling in a group of 49 migrants. With the help of two smugglers, they used a ladder to scale the fence just past midnight on Sunday, about three miles east of the San Luis commercial border crossing.
At the end of the clip, the two presumed smugglers are seen running away from the fence with the ladder in their hands.
‘MEDICAL CRISIS’: Border officials claim crisis over arrival of families at the border
The area has gained notoriety in recent weeks. The site where this group crossed is very close to two other breaches involving large groups of mostly Guatemalan migrants, including a record-breaking group of 376 who turned themselves in to agents on Jan. 14.
Garibay said Sunday’s group was the larger of several other migrant groups that agents encountered in the Yuma border area over the weekend.
According to CBP, agents in Arizona and in south Texas have apprehended and processed 53 groups larger than 100 migrants since October. They’ve also hospitalized more than 2,200 border crossers since December.
Fence-related injuries, not common in the Yuma area, are on the rise, according to sector officials.
On Dec. 7, a 14-year-old girl was hospitalized in Phoenix with several broken vertebrae after falling off the fence and landing on her back. A 17-year-old girl also injured her ankle during that same incident.
Source: Yahoo News
