At least 38 people died this week in a fire at a migration center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Despite Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s claim Tuesday that the deaths were inevitable because migrants protesting their deportation caused the fire, a surveillance video provided to Telemundo suggests Mexican government officials abandoned those who were locked up and couldn’t escape. The video also causes us to question if migrants even started the fire.
Surveillance video provided to Telemundo suggests Mexican government officials abandoned those who were locked up and couldn’t escape.
By Thursday, the Mexican government had issued six arrest warrants on charges of “intentional homicide,” including three for officials from Mexico’s National Migration Institute, the agency that runs the facility that for the most part is a detention center for migrants waiting to claim asylum in the United States.
“They’re killing us, but they’re also killing us psychologically,” one migrant from Venezuela in Juárez told The Guardian this week. “There’s immigrant children who have been detained more times than any criminal.” It’s “like a jail,” another migrant in Juárez told Telemundo.
While the deadly fire was shocking, it’s not even the deadliest U.S.-border migration tragedy of the past year. In June, 53 migrants were found dead inside an abandoned tractor trailer in San Antonio. As I said then, our enforcement-first immigration policy is designed for people to die.
How then do we fix such a broken system? How do we finally bring the countless examples of migrant tragedies to an end?
We open our borders.
Of course, Republicans love to claim that our borders are open already. “It is open. The border is dangerous,” Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said in February during a Housing Judiciary Committee hearing about President Biden and the border. “Drugs pour across, international terrorists,…
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