Migrant disaster at the Mexican border

At least 39 people have died and dozens been injured after a fire ripped through an immigration detention centre in Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the US border.

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Reports in the Mexican press suggested a large number of the victims were Venezuelan migrants, millions of whom have abandoned their economically devastated country in recent years in search of a better life.

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The newspaper El Universal said immigration officials had spent the hours before the fire, on Monday afternoon, rounding up Venezuelan migrants who had been begging for money on the streets of Ciudad Juárez, which is just over the US border from El Paso, Texas. Some of those migrants are believed to have been transported to the immigration centre where the fire broke out.

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No explanation has been given for the cause of the fire but in a cryptic statement the INM said it “energetically rejects the acts which resulted in this tragedy”. The agency did not explain the nature of those “acts”.

  Guardian

We await that explanation.

UPDATE 03/30/2023:

Infante Padrón recounted how she saw immigration agents rush out of the building after fire started late Monday.

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The ones they let out were the women, and those (employees) with immigration,” Infante Padrón said. “The men, they never took them out until the firefighters arrived.”

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Why didn’t authorities attempt to release the men — almost all from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador — before smoke filled the room and killed so many?

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Surveillance video leaked Tuesday shows migrants, reportedly fearing they were about to be moved, placing foam mattresses against the bars of their detention cell and setting them on fire.

In the video, later confirmed by the government, two people dressed as guards rush into the camera frame, and at least one migrant appears by the metal gate on the other side. But the guards don’t appear to make any effort to open the cell doors and instead hurry away as billowing clouds of smoke fill the structure within seconds.

  Politico