A two-year-old child from Ghana was dropped over the 18-foot-high US-Mexico border wall by a smuggling cartel, border patrol authorities in the United States have confirmed.

Dramatic video footage taken by the US Border Patrol shows a group of people climbing over the wall along the boundary near Imperial Beach, California, just outside of San Diego, after midnight on Sunday.

Surveillance footage shows several individuals scaling the wall. At one point, a two-year-old child was dangled from atop the barrier.

The child was then dropped into the arms of the father who was at the other end of the border.

After being dropped by the smugglers, she was not injured, but the United States Border Patrol Chief of the San Diego sector, Aaron Heitke, warned, “this could have been catastrophic”.

Eight-year veteran Border Patrol Agent Jacob MacIsaac revealed that the toddler, his father and mother are all citizens of Ghana and were taken into border patrol custody.

Many migrant shelters along the U.S.-Mexico border are extremely overcapacity, as the United States has seen a surge in migrants seeking asylum after President Biden reversed many of former President Trump’s immigration policies that border patrol agents say was successful.

Border Patrol Agent, Moreno explained that this is a very coordinated smuggling effort.

Agent Morena explained, the smugglers, “don’t see these people as human beings, they don’t see them for what they are. They just see them as contraband, they see them as cargo; once they get them across, that’s when they get paid. If they don’t get these people across, they don’t get paid.”

Watch below how the two-year-old was dropped at the US-Mexico border wall