Migration is a never-ending, often deadly and shocking tragedy. At least 40 migrants were burned to death Monday night in a fire caused by burning mattresses at a detention center at the National Migration Institute (INM) in Ciudad Juárez, on Mexico’s northern border, official sources said.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador blamed the fact on the migrants themselves, since they were the ones who set the fire in a protest riot against their planned deportation to their countries of origin.
“They didn’t think” that their action would cause a terrible misfortune, said the Mexican president. And he added that most of the dead migrants came from Central America and Venezuela. Later, the Government of Guatemala pointed out that 28 of the dead came from that country.
A spokesman for Civil Protection pointed out that, in addition to the 40 dead, 29 other people had been injured, six of them seriously due to third degree burns.
Some of the migrants had been arrested throughout Monday in the border city with El Paso (USA), while others had been returned from the north side. According to official reports, they were all confined in locked rooms.
The presence of migrants on the border between Mexico and the US, especially in and around Ciudad Juárez, has been increasing alarmingly for months. First it was following the announced end of Title 42, promulgated by Donald Trump two years ago to slow down immigration under the pretext of avoiding a multiplication of contagions in the midst of the pandemic.
Title 42 was to cease to apply on December 21 by a court order. But on the 27th of that month, the US Supreme Court considered the demands of 19 republican states that asked to maintain the precept despite the overcoming of covid.
Then, in January, President Joe Biden approved a carrot-and-stick plan to toughen policies against illegal immigration and facilitate legal entry from countries in crisis and authoritarian regimes. The resolution allows up to 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti to enter the US each month, after processing applications online, if they have a “sponsor” to support them. In addition, those who are in Mexico and wish to opt for legal entry can register through an application created to process an entry appointment and request for asylum at any border center.
The trade-off is that those who cross the border illegally can be sent back under another new rule that strengthens the application of “expedited repatriations” with a ban on re-entering the US for five years.
In the last fiscal year (October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022), the migratory flow broke records, with 2.76 million undocumented people detained at the US border with Mexico.
