CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — At least 39 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 began when migrants ignited mattresses after they found out they were going to be deported to their home countries. He said most of the dead were from Central and South America.
“They never imagined that it would cause this terrible misfortune,” López Obrador said.
A Mexican federal official with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the migrants were protesting because 68 of them were packed into a cell meant for no more than 50 people and they had no access to drinking water.
The fire erupted at a National Migration Institute lockup about 400 feet south of the Rio Bravo, which separates Juarez from El Paso. It was the deadliest incident in recent memory to take place 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 as they attempt to reach the United States.
Advocates warned that the crises 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.”
On Tuesday, dozens of migrants descended on the site of the still-smoldering holding facility to protest and demand information about loved ones whom 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 the cell’s 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.”
She rushed back to the center as soon as she heard about the fire. She said authorities 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 bus fare to go search for him.
According to the Mexican attorney general’s office, the dead and injured 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 for an appointment.
Tensions have been particularly high in Ciudad Juarez, where shelters housing people hoping to cross into the United States are overflowing and stranded migrants have been begging for food and money in the streets.
“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 been increasingly critical of the migrants, many of whom are forced to beg for alms at major intersections and sleep on the ground near border crossings El Paso.
Juarez Mayor Cruz Peréz Cuéllar recently implored residents not to 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 of migrants 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 when it said police violently and arbitrarily detained migrants in a downtown cathedral as well as another incident the following week when 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 bubbled over a few weeks ago when hundreds of people — mostly from Venezuela — tried to force their way across an international bridge to El Paso before they were stopped by U.S. authorities.
The numbers of migrants in cities such as Juarez are only 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 largely be required to do so using the smartphone app.
Migrant advocates say the new system will strand even more people in Mexico, a country famously unsafe for migrants.
In 2010, members of the Zetas cartel stopped two tractor-trailers packed with migrants and took them to a ranch in the town of San Fernando, which is in Tamaulipas state.
The gangsters asked the migrants to become hit men for their cartel. When the migrants refused, they were blindfolded, tied up and shot. Just one man survived, a young Ecuadorian who played dead and then escaped, walking miles to alert authorities.
The next year, there was an even worse massacre in the same region. Several buses were stopped and nearly 200 migrants were ordered off, killed and buried in graves discovered by police soon after.
Migrants also face abuse from immigration agents, human rights advocates say.
Earlier this year, Mexico’s immigration agency said that 105 of its agents had been reported to the internal affairs office for allegedly corrupt behavior, including demanding bribes.
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 Trump and Biden — strong-armed Mexico to take back U.S.-bound migrants arriving at the international line.
The goal was to prevent the migrants — mostly from Central and South America and the Caribbean — from gaining a foothold in the United States by filing what U.S. officials view as largely bogus claims for political asylum.
The Trump administration persuaded Mexico to accept the so-called Remain in Mexico program. Under that plan, tens of thousands of asylum-seekers were forced to wait inside Mexico as their cases made their way through U.S immigration courts — a process that can drag on for years. The result was a proliferation of makeshift migrant encampments in border towns. The migrants became easy prey for Mexican gangs that specialize in kidnapping would-be border crossers and demanding ransom from their relatives in the United States.
As the flow of migrants continued to grow, the pandemic led to yet another policy twist: The Trump administration employed a little known public health law, Title 42, to expel massive numbers of illegal border jumpers back to Mexico without the opportunity to file for asylum or other possible relief. Biden assailed the policy as a violation of human rights and his administration went to court to end it. But, paradoxically, the administration has continued to expel migrants under Title 42 while proposing what critics call even more odious restrictions on asylum-seekers.
The increasingly strict policies have failed to stop migrants from trying.
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.
The flow of migrants reaching Mexico en route to the United States includes people fleeing war in Ukraine and Russia, repressive regimes such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and China, and hunger in Central America.
“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 are 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.
In 2020, a 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 advocacy group Sin Fronteras wrote on Twitter. It blamed the government for not having proper protocols and evacuation routes in case of fires.
Felipe Gonzalez Morales, U.N. 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.”
(Los Angeles Times staff writer Linthicum reported from Todos Santos, Mexico, and Times staff writer Miller reported from Mexico City. Special correspondent Minjares reported from Ciudad Juarez. Times staff writers Patrick McDonnell and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City and Andrea Castillo in Washington contributed to this report.)
