CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — At least 40 migrants were killed and dozens more were injured Monday night when a fire broke out in an immigrant detention center in Mexico, just south of the U.S. border, authorities said Tuesday.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the blaze in Ciudad Juarez probably began when migrants learned that they were going to be deported to their home countries — and ignited mattresses in protest. He said most of the dead were from Central and South America.
“They never imagined it would cause this terrible tragedy,” López Obrador said.
A Mexican federal official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity offered a different explanation, saying the protest began because 68 men were packed into a cell meant for no more than 50 people — with no access to drinking water.
A surveillance video clip shows flames spreading inside a locked cell as several men plead for help. At the end of the 32-second video, several immigration agents are seen strolling away as black smoke billows.
The fire, which erupted around 10 p.m. at a National Migration Institute lockup about 400 feet south of the river that separates Juarez from El Paso, was the deadliest incident in recent memory at one of Mexico’s notoriously crowded immigration holding centers.
Migrants advocates said the fire is further evidence that Mexico is not equipped to manage and care for the record number of people who have been stranded here while trying to reach the United States.
And advocates warned that the crisis is likely to worsen this summer, when the U.S. implements a new policy to turn back even more asylum-seekers to Mexico.
“As the U.S. continues to implement policies that push asylum-seekers back into Mexico, humanitarian infrastructure in the country is increasingly strained and more people are stuck in highly vulnerable situations,” said Rafael Velásquez of the International Rescue Committee. “Unless political will and resources from within the government and international community are used to face this problem, something like this could easily happen again.”
Rescuers spent hours Monday night and early Tuesday morning pulling remains from the burned building, lining up bodies wrapped in silver thermal blankets on the ground. U.S. border officials said Tuesday that they would be allowing migrants injured in the fire to enter the United States to receive medical treatment.
On Tuesday afternoon, dozens of migrants descended on the site of the still smoldering facility to demand information about loved ones who they feared had perished inside.
“They were left to die!” one migrant shouted at authorities guarding the site.
“Why do they treat us like dogs?” another asked.
Katiuska Márquez, a 23-year-old Venezuelan, was desperately searching for her brother, 30-year-old Orlando Maldonado.
She said that she had been detained Monday along with her brother, her husband and their two young children. Their crime: begging for money for food along a busy Juarez street.
Márquez, her husband and her children were eventually released because the Mexican government is not equipped to detain families. But she said her brother was taken to a room at the center packed with about 200 other men. She said she spoke to him briefly through a set of steel bars.
“I managed to see my brother and he told me, ‘Don’t let me die, get me out of here,’” she said. “But what could I do? My words don’t count for anything here. So I left.”
When she heard about the fire, she rushed back to the center, eager to tell authorities about the tattoo of a crucified Jesus Christ on her brother’s right arm. They said they had no information about her brother, but said that if he survived, he may have been taken to another immigration center or to one of several area hospitals. She said she didn’t have the bus fare to go search for him.
She and other migrants questioned the official account that the detainees were to blame for the fire, noting that when they were admitted to the center all of their belongings were confiscated.
According to the Mexican attorney general’s office, the casualties included 28 Guatemalans, 13 Hondurans, 12 Salvadorans, 12 Venezuelans and one citizen each from Colombia and Ecuador.
It was unclear whether some of the migrants had been previously deported from the United States.
In recent months, northern Mexican cities have been overwhelmed with migrants because of recent Biden administration policies that limit the ability of migrants from four countries — Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba — to seek asylum at the border without first making an appointment via a smartphone application that has been riddled with technical glitches and offers limited appointments that fill up within minutes.
Some migrants have waited months at the border.
Tensions have been particularly high in Juarez, where shelters housing people hoping to cross into the United States are overflowing and stranded migrants have been asking for food and money in major intersections and sleeping on the sidewalk near border crossings into El Paso.
“We have exceeded our capacity to provide attention,” said Miguel Angel Gonzalez, president of a church-based network of shelters in Juarez. He said his network’s 15 shelters have been completely full for the last six months.
City officials have publicly criticized the migrants, with Juarez Mayor Cruz Peréz Cuéllar recently imploring residents to not give migrants money, insisting that they can find work.
In a March 9 letter, several dozen migrant advocacy groups urged the city to investigate abuses by police and immigration officials. They said that during arbitrary detentions, officials have questioned migrants about their legal status, extorted and stolen money from them and destroyed their documents.
The letter described an incident in early March in which it said police violently and arbitrarily detained migrants in a downtown cathedral as well as another incident the following week in which members of the army, the national guard and the city police swarmed a hotel where migrants were staying, sending “a clear message of intimidation.”
Tensions boiled over a few weeks ago when hundreds of people — mostly from Venezuela — tried to force their way across an international bridge to El Paso, Texas, before they were stopped by U.S. authorities.
The numbers of migrants in cities such as Juarez are expected to grow this summer as the Biden administration prepares to implement a new policy that would further restrict access to asylum at the border.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, federal officials have used a public health measure called Title 42 to prevent migrants from seeking asylum at the border and to quickly expel those who attempt to enter the United States.
With that border policy set to expire in May, the Biden administration last month unveiled a new plan that would make migrants ineligible for asylum if they enter the U.S. without permission and fail to apply for protection in another country on their way.
Some could still request asylum at an official port of entry, but would generally be required to do so using the smartphone app.
Human rights advocates say the new system is likely to strand even more people along Mexico’s famously treacherous migrant trail.
In recent decades, migrants trying to cross Mexico have died at the hands of organized crime, while riding atop cargo trains and while packed into overcrowded trailers lacking ventilation.
They have also faced abuse from immigration agents, advocates say.
Mexico’s immigration agency said this year that 105 of its agents had been reported to the internal affairs office for corruption.
The deadly fire was the most dramatic illustration to date of the crisis that has engulfed Mexican border cities and towns since successive U.S. administrations — under Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden — strong-armed Mexico to take back U.S.-bound migrants arriving at the international line.
Despite U.S. efforts at deterrence, migrants have not stopped trying to reach the border.
Panama’s government said last week that 50,000 migrants entered the country from Colombia through a treacherous stretch of jungle known as the Darien Gap in the first two months of 2023, five times more than in the same period last year.
“Mexico is the last mile for people facing humanitarian crises around the world,” said Velásquez, of the International Rescue Committee.
Protests over conditions in Mexico’s migrant detention centers have become common. Last year, riots broke out at a detention center in the norther border city of Tijuana and another in the southern city of Tapachula.
A 2020 fire at a migrant facility in the town of Tenosique killed one migrant and injured 10 others.
Advocacy groups said the Mexican government has not adapted to accommodate rising numbers of migrants.
“This was not an accident, this could have been avoided,” the group Sin Fronteras wrote on Twitter of Monday’s blaze. It blamed the government for not having proper protocols and evacuation routes in case of fire.
Felipe Gonzalez Morales, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, also blamed government policies.
“The extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this,” he wrote on Twitter. “The immigration detention of adults, in accordance with International Law, should be an exceptional measure and not a general one.”
At a special Mass held in Juarez Tuesday for victims of the fire, Bishop José Guadalupe Torres Campos implored his parishioners to remember that a migrant “is a person, not a statistic ... a child of God who must be treated with dignity, respect and love.”
“Enough,” he said of policies that dehumanize immigrants. “What is happening to us? What have we become?”
(Los Angeles Times staff writers Linthicum and McDonnell reported from Todos Santos, Mexico, and Ciudad Juarez, respectively, and special correspondent Minjares from Ciudad Juarez. Times staff writers Leila Miller and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City, Andrea Castillo in Washington and Hamed Aleaziz in Healdsburg, Calif., contributed to this report.)
