Did 2 migrants scale border wall using ladder? We investigated

In June 2026, a video circulated online that purported to show two migrants using a ladder to scale the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

The footage showed two people in dark clothing scaling a ladder that a third person held up against the border wall, eventually climbing over the top, dropping down and running away on the U.S. side.

The political commentary account Wall Street Apes posted the video on X and wrote (archived):

As you can see, California does nothing to stop them and actually this has been encouraged for decades. Anyone in Southern California knows illegals pour into America at this location.

The video also circulated on Instagram (archived) and Facebook (archived).

It appeared to originate from an Instagram account (archived) that posted it June 3, claiming the border crossing happened that day.

An account that belonged to U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego commented on the video, "For those wondering, we got them," appearing to acknowledge that the video showed a real crossing and that federal immigration authorities had detained the migrants who entered the U.S. 

Snopes contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol's parent department, to confirm the authenticity of the events in the video and for more information about the people it allegedly detained. While we await a reply, we withhold judgment on whether the video is authentic.

We also contacted the Instagram account that posted the video on June 3 to ask who recorded it and whether the person or people behind the account could provide an original file with intact metadata. We await a reply to our query.

The video appeared authentic, meaning not generated or edited using artificial intelligence or other digital editing tools. It appeared to have been recorded at the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico.

The footage showed the border wall, which at that point stretches into the Pacific Ocean. A photo from the reputable photo agency Getty Images from December 2025 showed the same white, slanted covers at the top of the fence that the video showed. The photo also showed that some sections of the fence were left uncapped, which was also the case in the June 2026 video.

The beach in the video is on the recorder's right side, suggesting the video was recorded looking north from Mexico into the U.S.

Without reliable metadata for the video, Snopes could not independently verify the date of recording. The earliest version of the video we found online was from June 3.

Common ways to evade border wall

Securing the southern border using a wall was one of U.S. President Donald Trump's central promises during his first campaign for the presidency, which he won in 2016. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 25, 2017, that called for the construction of a "secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier" at the U.S. southern border.

Physical barriers along portions of the U.S.-Mexico border have existed for more than a century. Before Trump, presidents including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also worked to expand and fortify those barriers.

Reports and research suggest that migrant deaths and injuries from attempts to climb over or swim around the border wall rose as the structure grew taller and covered more of the southern border during and after Trump's first administration.

Peer-reviewed research published in April 2022 by doctors at the University of California, San Diego, found hospital admissions due to border wall falls quintupled from 2016-18 to 2019-21.

Similarly, peer-reviewed research published in 2024 that used data from the International Organization for Migration's Missing Migrants Project found that drowning deaths increased across the southern U.S. border as border walls grew in height and covered more miles.

KPBS, a public media organization in San Diego, reported in 2024 that lifeguards in Tijuana, Mexico, where the video of the two people climbing the fence appeared to have been recorded, had carried out significantly more rescues of migrants as the administrations of Trump and former President Joe Biden expanded the border wall.

According to the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, which cited numbers obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP, the number of breaches of the border wall (which does not include climbs) steadily rose between 2018 and 2022 as the Trump and Biden administrations built more miles of wall.

In sum, reports and research suggest that, while shocking, the video of migrants scaling the border wall in Tijuana, Mexico, showed a somewhat commonplace occurrence along the southern border. 

For further reading, Snopes routinely investigates rumors about the U.S.-Mexico border wall.