At least 38 migrants died in a fire Monday at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Texas border, the Mexican government announced. It’s one of the deadliest incidents in immigration detention in recent history, and it’s evidence of the Mexican government’s limited capacity to care for and process migrants who have been shut out of the US through years of restrictive border policies.
In a news conference Monday night, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador claimed that the migrants, after finding out that they were going to be deported, had put mattresses at the door of the shelter and set them on fire in protest. “They did not imagine that this was going to cause this terrible misfortune,” López Obrador said.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for a “thorough investigation” of the tragedy. And immigrant advocates have raised concerns about security footage obtained by El Universal that shows a security guard and another man in a National Institute of Migration uniform leaving the scene of the fire without releasing migrants from their cells. A local journalist, Joaquín López Doriga, confirmed that the video was authentic in an interview with Adán Augusto López, Mexico’s interior secretary.
“Mexican officials and others are blaming the victims without any evidence,” Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of the advocacy group Haitian Bridge Alliance, said in a statement. “We hope that immediate steps are taken, including criminal penalties if warranted, to prevent another tragedy like this.”
In addition to those who were killed, another 30 migrants were injured and sent to nearby hospitals. On Tuesday, Mexican immigration authorities managed to identify the victims who died or were injured in the blaze, which included 28 Guatemalans, 13 Hondurans, 12 Salvadorans, 13 Venezuelans, a Colombian, and an Ecuadorian.
Protests in immigration detention aren’t uncommon. Hunger…
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