Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today is the second in a two-part series about the health of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Dr. Alexander Tenorio is a neurological resident at the University of California, San Diego,

and a first-generation American born to Mexican immigrants.

He studies the serious neurological injuries that occur when people try to climb over the border wall and fall to the other side.

Let's listen.

Dr. Alexander Tenorio, thank you so much for joining me on Public Health On Call to talk about neurological injuries at the U.S. southern border.

But before we get right to that topic, it would help if you introduced

yourself to our audience. Hi, Josh. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. So currently,

I'm a fourth-year neurological surgery resident at UC San Diego Health. You know, a lot of my work,

as you mentioned, has been studying the

increase in neurological traumatic injuries at the U.S.-Mexico border. And a lot of that, you know,

my passion and interest for this topic stems from my childhood. I am first generation Mexican

American, both my parents migrated from Mexico, really close to the same area where a lot of our patients are coming into that Sanisidro Tijuana border here in Mexico.

I grew up in a largely impoverished immigrant community in South Los Angeles.

You know, but a lot of my childhood was spent selling clothing on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. So I was the first

one in my family to go through, you know, college and medical school and neurological surgery

...