Early Friday, May 6, Gerardo Ávila and five other migrants climbed the US border wall from a Mexican highway, located about half a kilometer west of the Otay Mesa port of entry in San Diego.Ávila was deported to Mexico weeks ago after three decades of living in the United States, so he was trying to return to his family to celebrate Mother's Day with them, his relatives narrated.As he climbed the towering 16-foot-high wall, the bright lights of a border patrol vehicle flashed in that direction, illuminating the misty night sky.The agents heard a scream and saw Ávila fall, according to a statement from the agency where he identified himself as a "male citizen of Mexico."Ávila, 47, was pronounced dead at the scene, while other migrants were taken to hospital.His death adds to the surge in cases along the US-Mexico border, which broke records last year.In a segment that stretches from the highways of San Antonio, Texas, where 53 migrants died last month in the suffocating bed of a trailer, to the Rio Grande River, the heat of the Arizona desert and the wall that former President Donald Trump touted as "inescalable," 1,000 deaths have occurred since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.Last year was the deadliest for migrants who crossed the border, with 728 recorded deaths, according to data from the United Nations, which has documented these cases since 2014. The UN recorded 340 more deaths this year, which is at the same rate. than the grim record of 2021.In Arizona, deaths last year were the highest in four decades, according to local coroners.In San Diego, Scripps Mercy hospital reported a roughly fivefold increase in wall-related injuries after Trump ordered it raised, data shared with Reuters show.The Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, for its acronym in English) of the United States acknowledged in a statement an "increase in the number of deaths" and blamed human traffickers for not having "consideration for human lives" when leaving to migrants in remote and dangerous areas.Following congressional mandates, CBP last year changed the way it documents migrant deaths along the border to include only those who die in custody, during arrests or when officers were nearby.The agency told Reuters there were 151 "CBP-related" deaths in fiscal year 2021, a number not previously reported.Bodies discovered by CBP or others are not currently included in the agency's data.Avila's death, which is being investigated by local and federal authorities, would likely be counted under the new methodology because CBP agents were present when he died.The main fence from which Ávila fell is double the height, about 5.5 meters bequeathed by the Trump era, whose campaign cry for the presidency in 2016 was "build the wall."A secondary fence of 9 meters was built in that same section.One morning in May, Vishal Bansal, chief of trauma surgery at Scripps Mercy, and his team saw three borderline patients, two new arrivals with lower extremity fractures, one with a head injury, unresponsive for weeks and dying. gave him a 50/50 chance of survival."We have seen a huge increase in the number of patients from the end of 2021 to now," Bansal said.While the hospital treats migrants injured at sea or in crashes after high-speed chases with border patrol, most are injured "falling off the border wall," he said.The four injured in the same incident when Avila died were rushed to Scripps Mercy, which has recorded 209 border wall falls between 2019 and 2021, up from 43 documented in the previous three years, according to data shared with Reuters.Marcos Ortiz, a Mexican migrant, died with the dream of lifting his family out of poverty once he managed to climb the border wall to reach the United States."I begged him not to go but he told me he wanted to make me my little house, get the family out of poverty but he came back dead," said Guadalupe Guadalajara, Ortiz's wife, crying.Sick, Guadalajara was left in charge of three children and dragging a debt of 2,000 dollars that she had to raise to complete the total cost for the repatriation of the body of her 41-year-old mother, Ella Ortiz, in February.Gerardo Ávila also took a lot of risk by climbing the wall, but unlike Marcos Ortiz, he just wanted to go home to his family.Avila first came to the United States as a teenager in 1990, according to court records, "via the hills."He, his mother and nine of his brothers settled in the country.He worked in construction and made a life in Perris, California, with his wife and five stepchildren, according to his sister, Elisa Sandoval.Ávila spent years fighting to stay in the country, before losing his last appeal last year.In immigration court, prosecutors from Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave him a 2006 conviction for drunk driving and hit-and-run with injuries as a reason why his clemency application should be denied.Avila told the court that he checked out the driver he rear-ended and gave him his insurance information before continuing.However, he was arrested shortly after leaving the scene, records show, and sentenced to 20 days in jail and three years on probation.On March 16 of this year, Avila was arrested by a Border Patrol criminal detection team at a Home Depot in Perris and deported through the San Ysidro port of entry that same day."He was desperate to get back," his sister Sandoval said. Instead, he was buried in California on his 48th birthday."I think the wall is silly. Trump is to blame for all these deaths," he added.When asked about the wall's role in injuries and deaths, a Trump spokesman blamed Biden's policies for "chaos" at the southern border.One of Trump's signature policies that Biden has so far not overturned allows border agents to expressly expel migrants across the border into Mexico.An unintended consequence: many simply cross over and over again, often making increasingly risky decisions to avoid detection.Brothers Mariano, 32, and Begai Santiago, 33, who are from a small town in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca where most speak the indigenous Chinantec language, were on their way to Atlanta, Georgia, in job search.Twice they were turned away by US officials, but they kept trying to cross the border."He told me they were going to try one last time, the third time," Mariano's wife, Estrella Cuevas, told Reuters.The third time they crossed undetected and then took a tractor-trailer packed with dozens of other migrants headed for San Antonio.Mariano died, one of 53 victims of the June 27 Texas trailer tragedy, the deadliest human trafficking incident in recent US history.Begai survived to recover at a San Antonio hospital.The brothers were identified in part because US authorities had records of their previous crossings.Since 2020, when the so-called Title 42 was implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the Trump era, some 2 million migrants have been immediately expelled to their nations or to Mexican territory.Francisco Garduño, director of Mexico's National Migration Institute (INM), said Mexican migrants now try to cross an average of four times, and some more than a dozen times.An injured migrant cannot be expelled under Title 42 as they are considered vulnerable, said the Mexican consul in San Diego, Carlos González, who has admitted that the increase in deaths trying to cross the wall has been increasing.Tighter measures on asylum claims eventually led Guatemalan Sandy Montufar to venture deeper into the Arizona desert.Montufar first fled central Guatemala in 2018 after an assault left her unconscious for more than a week, her mother, Teresa, said.She left for the US-Mexico border with police reports detailing the assault, so she thought it would give her hope for asylum."She didn't have a chance," Teresa commented, "They deported her."CBP did not respond to requests for comment on the case.At the time, the Trump administration was making asylum deliveries difficult, arguing that most were baseless.Still at home, where most of her relatives make a living from farming, she was afraid, Teresa said, but earlier this year, at age 23, she tried again.Around 5 pm in September, Montufar called her mother to tell her that she was going to cross the border.The next thing Teresa heard was from a person traveling with her daughter, who said that the group left her in the desert because she was too weak to continue.She had her phone and some rosary beads, a parting gift from her mother.Her relatives in Arizona went looking for her, Teresa said, but it was too late.Her remains were found Sept. 16 on Tohono Oodham Nation land, according to data compiled by local coroners from the Arizona-based Humane Borders initiative.The cause of death was listed as undetermined, the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office said.Agent rescues along the southwest border have exceeded 14,000 since the start of fiscal year 2022, more than recorded for the entire fiscal year 2021.A Border Patrol agent, Jesus Vasavilbaso, said emergency calls in the Tucson sector are up more than 25% compared to the same period last year."We're getting about 16 calls a day," he said."Every day".Teresa said her family paid thousands of dollars for the trip, but smugglers stopped answering calls after her daughter disappeared."They wash their hands, they leave people as if they are worthless," she said.Connect with the Voice of America!Subscribe to our YouTube channel and activate notifications, or follow us on social networks: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.