A woman died on the U.S. border wall in Arizona after she tried to lower herself down using a harness to lower herself down and her leg became entangled, authorities said.
The 32-year-old woman, who had tried to climb a section of fence in Cochise County on April 11, became trapped upside down for a significant amount of time, the local sheriff's office said in a statement.
The woman was not identified. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital and the Mexican consulate was notified, the sheriff's office said.
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Daniels called the death a senseless tragedy and said that we have to do better in finding solutions to the challenges facing our border, and we have to do it for the right reasons. More than 8,000 people have died trying to cross the U.S. border between 1998 and 2020, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Border Angels, a nonprofit group that advocates for the prevention of migrant deaths on the border, says the actual death toll is likely to be higher than CBP data suggests, and human remains often disappear into the harsh environment of the desert.