Refugee and Migrant Cases

Description

Migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border suffer from some of the most insidious health crises imaginable. This year alone, an underestimated 136 people died in the desert on the U.S. side of the border from heat-related injuries, wall-falls, and drownings in the Rio Grande, an 87% increase from last year (“Migrant Death Toll” 2023). These deaths exclude the lives that were lost on the Mexican side of the border, including the 40 people killed by intentional neglect when a fire broke out in a detention facility in Juarez (Romo 2023), and the 53 people who were killed while being trafficked by coyotes through Laredo (Dobbins 2022). Notably, these deaths also exclude the living. They exclude the hundreds of people who suffer from razor-wire gashes as they make their way through Eagle Pass (Garcia 2023), the hundreds of people who sustain life-long ankle, foot, and hip injuries from border wall falls (Miroff 2022), and the dozens of people who still cough up ash-tinged sputum from the fire (Romo 2023). They exclude the thousands who continue to suffer from infectious disease due to overcrowded detention facilities and shelters, malnourishment and dehydration related disease from homelessness, and orthopedic injuries from kidnapping, assault, and labor-trafficking (Dreier and Luce 2023). They exclude the hundreds of thousands who are burdened with mental health crises because of their experiences (American Psychiatric Association 2023). Currently, upwards of 200,000 people cross the southern border each month, dispersing to cities and towns across the United States (Gramlich 2023), carrying with them pathologies originating from complex sociopolitical origins. And thus far, medical education has failed to equip healthcare professionals with the tools to treat them. In medicine, we often laser-focus on biological explanations of pathology: how bodies respond to injury, how microorganisms invade and attack the immune system. Too often, we forget to look upstream at the reasons why hundreds of thousands of people suffer from the same types of injuries, illnesses, and disease. This workshop, based on the Trauma Informed Care model (Gerber 2019), seeks to equip healthcare professionals with the tools to guide impoverished patients along meaningful paths of healing, treat them with dignity, and advocate for them beyond the confines of the doctor’s office.