Small-town firefighters sawed through the Arizona border wall to rescue an injured man who waited 24 hours for help

After a fall off a 30-foot border wall east of Sasabe, a man waited about 24 hours for help until local firefighters sawed through the border wall so first responders could transport him to the hospital in Tucson.

Tangye Beckham, fire chief of the Arivaca Fire District, said that after hours of delays in the remote area and no alternative method for giving the man the care he needed, she ordered the border wall to be cut so he could be pulled through and taken for medical care on the U.S. side.

“I did order [the border wall] to be cut because the patient lost circulation in that extremity and it became a life threat,” Beckham told Arizona Luminaria.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed the Arivaca fire department cut the wall.

On Friday, the man, now in border patrol custody, was in a hospital bed in Tucson after surgery on his ankle. “I’m so grateful to you,” the man told one of the migrant aid advocates who was visiting him. “I’m grateful to everybody.”

He told Arizona Luminaria that he is scheduled for another surgery and a doctor had told him he should be walking again within a month. He asked that his name not be disclosed because of possible legal repercussions.

The rescue was delayed for hours as border authorities argued about who should help.

Beckham said she is concerned that if another migrant or anyone is injured on the south side of the wall, there is no protocol for treating them.

“What plan of action are we going to take?” Beckham asked. “Because what I learned was there was no plan.”

“In the future we don’t want it to take hours. That was ridiculous, everybody passing the buck, saying I can’t do anything about this or this is a Mexican issue and we’re not going to go, and all the while we have a patient needing care.”

The man from Oaxaca, México who is in his 60s had fallen while trying to cross the border late at night on Aug. 27 or early in the morning on Aug. 28 near Sasabe, about 75 miles southwest of Tucson. The incident was first reported in the Tucson Sentinel.

He suffered a compound fracture of his ankle and blacked out. When he woke up, some hours later, the rest of his group was gone and he could see a bone jutting through his skin, according to aid volunteers.

Reflecting on his long wait near the wall, he said when he regained consciousness he heard coyotes howling. “I was scared, but never lost hope,” he said. “It was a lot of pain, but I was OK.”

He said that he crawled a long way to try to get closer to a gate, but found no way through. There are numerous gates along the wall that can be opened by border patrol after heavy rains to avoid flooding or damage. But this gate was locked. After sunrise, he had to crawl again to find shade.

“I saw some people and asked for help,” he said, though he isn’t sure whether they were border patrol or construction workers. He said that someone gave him some water early in the morning and told him that Mexican authorities would come for him. They never did.

In multiple photos shared with Arizona Luminaria, the man has a blood-caked ankle and foot, with a shard of bone clearly jutting through a makeshift bandage.

Volunteers gave first aid

Around 11 a.m. on Aug. 28, three migrant aid workers with Tucson Samaritans, including Gail Kocourek, saw the man while driving the road that runs along the border wall. They stopped and quickly realized he was seriously injured. They gave him Tylenol, water and extra clothes.

The volunteers said despite his pain and bleeding ankle, he was in good spirits and grateful to all the people trying to help.

Kocourek said she called Arivaca Fire and explained the emergency to Beckham, the fire chief. Beckham told Arizona Luminaria that she then contacted Border Patrol because of the man’s location on the south side of the wall.

An ambulance crew from the Arivaca Fire Department was headed out when Border Patrol discouraged them from continuing.

“Border Patrol said I can’t treat the patient because the patient was in Mexico and they would have to contact the federales,” Beckham said. “And I said OK, thinking that was going to be done.”

Beckham said Border Patrol did call Mexican authorities, but they didn’t respond.

Hours later, Kocourek, who had stayed at the scene with the other volunteers, called Beckham again and said nobody had arrived to give aid.

“The injuries that she was describing to me needed immediate attention,” Beckham said.

Beckham said she determined that it was an open fracture and she contacted Border Patrol to say she needed to get the patient out and to a hospital.

The Border Patrol agent in charge arrived on the scene and said they “did not have the authorization to cut the wall,” Beckham said, but that their boss would contact Mexican authorities again to rescue the patient.

Beckham said the agent repeated that they couldn’t authorize breaching the wall.

Beckham said she treated the patient as best she could, giving the man more pain medication, starting an IV, and splinting his ankle. She consulted with the medical director who agreed that he needed to be transported, she said.

Hours later, now past midnight on Aug. 29, firefighters used specialized circular saws used in rescues to cut through the metal border bollards and transported the man by ambulance to a Tucson hospital.

“I did eventually cut the wall,” Beckham said. “The delay in care caused an increased risk of infection due to it being an open fracture.”

Disputed territory

There was a dispute about what territory the man was on. While he fell on the south side of the wall, he was still likely on U.S. soil, as the wall is built slightly north of the official international divide.

The wall is made up of 30-foot high steel bollards, basically giant steel tubes about six inches in diameter, that are partially filled with concrete and placed in a thick concrete footer. The design allows enough space between the bollards to see and to reach through.

“There’s a very good possibility that if they were able to treat him through the wall then he would be on U.S. soil,” Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator at Wildlands Network, told Arizona Luminaria. “The border wall is not the internationally recognized international line.”

Traphagen said that the wall was built typically six feet, or sometimes more, north of the internationally recognized line.

“Especially the Sasabe border wall, if you look at it it’s often offset to account for drainages and terrain,” Traphagen said.

As means of legally migrating for work, as well as legally asking for asylum, are restricted, people continue to attempt clandestine crossings to enter into the United States. Most of Arizona is now walled off from México as the Biden administration fills small gaps left in the border wall that was largely put up under the Trump administration.

As recently as 2023, there were about two dozen gaps in the span of wall east of Sasabe, where the man fell. Most of those gaps have since been sealed off by the Biden administration.

In March, a woman died after falling off the border wall outside of San Diego. In 2022, one San Diego hospital published research noting there had been a five-fold increase in severe injuries from people falling off the higher walls.

The man who fell near Sasabe said he was trying to make it to the United States to look for work and didn’t think there was another way of getting here except by climbing over the wall. He works in construction and specializes in tiling, he said.

“Just wanted to earn some money. There’s not many jobs where I’m from in Oaxaca,” he said.

Nodding to his leg, he said, “It’s going to be harder now.”

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