Dozens dead, injured in border fire at migrant detention center in Juárez

JUÁREZ, Mexico – Viangly Infante Padrón watched in fear as the waiting area of a Mexican immigration center where her husband was detained began filling with gray smoke.

Mexican authorities ushered her and other waiting women outside.

Seven hours earlier, she said, Mexican immigration agents began rounding up anyone who appeared to be a migrant, including her Venezuelan husband, Eduard Carabello, who was selling roses on a street corner.

As the smoke choked the waiting room, she begged authorities to do something.

"I screamed, 'Open the door!' " she said. "That whatever the case, they are human beings and deserve to live. And they let them burn inside."

Mexico's National Migration Institute reported at least 39 people died and 29 were injured and were in "delicate-serious" condition late Tuesday. There were 68 men from Central and South America held in the facility at the time of the fire, the agency said.

Guatemalan immigration authorities confirmed 28 Guatemalan nationals were victims of the blaze. The information did not specify if the victims had died or were injured.

It was one of the deadliest incidents ever at an immigration center in Mexico.

Overnight Monday, bodies were laid out under metallic sheets outside the facility in Juárez, near the foot of the Mexican side of the Stanton Street international bridge. Ambulances, firefighters and vans from the morgue swarmed the scene.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at a Tuesday morning news conference in Mexico City said the fire was started by migrants who were protesting after learning some of them would be deported.

The migrants stacked up mats against a door and set them on fire, not knowing it "would cause this terrible disgrace," López Obrador said.

Migrant struggles turn deadly

On Tuesday morning, the charred exit of the National Migration Institute building was all that remained visible of the fire. Mexican National Guard soldiers stood watch as cross-border commuter traffic continued over the nearby Stanton Street bridge to El Paso. 

A group of Venezuelan men gathered across the street.

Daniel Silva, of Venezuela, said he has spent four weeks in Juárez with his wife and children trying to get an appointment through the CBP One app to enter the U.S. without luck. He has been selling coffee on street corners to make ends meet. 

He said he didn't believe the official version of events, that officials couldn't put out a fire started by the migrants themselves. 

"Why would they leave a jail alone? They can't leave detained people alone," he said. 

It wasn't the first time migrants have protested by setting fire to mattresses at the center.

In 2019, a group of Cuban migrants held at the facility set fire to foam mattresses to force their release, but no one was injured. The detention rooms are located behind Mexican immigration offices, where travelers stop to apply for permits and passport stamps.

In official communications, Mexican immigration officials say they don't "detain" migrants but rather "rescue" them. Their temporary detention areas, where they allow migrants to keep cellphones and other belongings, reflect the country's approach to managing migration.

Mexican federal and state authorities said they were investigating the cause of the fire and the governmental National Human Rights Commission had been called in to help the migrants.

Mexican authorities did round up, migrants say

Caraballo was hospitalized in stable condition because of smoke inhalation from the fire. Infante Padrón waited outside the Hospital de la Familia, across the street from the immigration facility that burned.

Infante Padrón said she and her husband and three children have legal permission to be in Mexico.

"All of the migrants they saw on the street, they picked up everyone," she said. "They didn't ask if we were legal, if we had papers. They just said, 'Are you Venezuelan? Let's go.'"

"It's illogical, what happened," she said. 

Since Dec. 28, 2022, the family has waited in Juárez for an opportunity to legally enter the United States. Infante Padrón said she and her children received an appointment through the CBP One app for Saturday. Her husband hasn't gotten an appointment.

The fire was a lamentable tragedy, Juárez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuellar told reporters, but he denied that migrants had been rounded up.

"What occurred on the streets has nothing to do with what occurred there (at the immigration center). They are completely distinct events," the mayor said.

He previously said that Juárez was dealing with complaints of groups of migrants panhandling and harassing drivers at street corners.

Across the city, Venezuelan migrants have been selling candy and washing windows, trying to make ends meet as they await opportunities to migrate to the U.S. and Canada. They often hold signs decorated with the Venezuelan flag.

Local authorities are working to balance the rights of migrants with the rights of residents to be free from harassment, the mayor said.

Immigration center fire in Juárez: 'a horrifying indictment'

Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been running high in recent weeks in Juárez, where shelters are full of people waiting for opportunities to cross into the U.S. or who have requested asylum there and are waiting out the process.

More than 30 migrant shelters and other advocacy organizations published an open letter March 9 that complained of a criminalization of migrants and asylum-seekers in the city. It accused authorities of abuse and using excessive force in rounding up migrants, complaining that municipal police were questioning people in the street about their immigration status without cause.

The high level of frustration in Juárez was evident earlier this month when hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants acting on false rumors that the United States would allow them to enter the country tried to force their way across one of the international bridges to El Paso. U.S. authorities blocked their attempts.

"The 39 lives lost last night in Ciudad Juárez are a horrifying indictment. The systems of enforcement that we have erected to patrol people who migrate are steel hands in velvet gloves, and death is part of the overhead. We are all responsible,” tweeted Dylan Corbett, executive director of the Hope Border Institute, a faith-based El Paso-Juárez border issues community group.

More:'Super-dumb kids.' Teen migrant smuggler accused of murder in deadly West El Paso crash

Mexico's national immigration agency said Tuesday that it "energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy" without any further explanation of what those actions might have been.

In recent years, as Mexico has stepped up efforts to stem the flow of migration to the U.S. border under pressure from the U.S. government, the agency has struggled with overcrowding in its facilities. And the country's immigration lockups have seen protests and riots from time to time.

Mostly Venezuelan migrants rioted inside an immigration center in Tijuana in October that had to be controlled by police and Mexican National Guard troops. In November, dozens of migrants rioted in Mexico's largest detention center in the southern city of Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala. No one died in either incident.

Title 42 expulsions, migrant frustrations

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been expelling migrants from Central America and some South American countries to Juárez, sometimes by the hundreds per day.

A Mexican woman named Gladys waited on a concrete bench outside the immigration center Tuesday afternoon for news of her detained husband, a Honduran national. She saw the news of the fire and said she hadn't heard from her husband since he was detained by Mexican immigration authorities when the couple was expelled by U.S. authorities, after they attempted to cross the border illegally.

"I came to see if they'll give me information, if they were holding him here," she said, asking that her full name not be used. "His phone isn't working. I know nothing. His mother and father, they're also asking."

More:Fire at immigration center in Juarez kills migrants; here's how El Paso leaders responded

The National Migration Institute said authorities were contacting the consulates of different countries to begin the process of identifying the dead.

Even before the deadly fire, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego had expressed concerns about the burden that U.S. immigration policies had placed on Juárez, a city with far fewer resources than El Paso.

"We are saddened by the tremendous loss of lives,” said Samaniego, the county government's top executive. “Lives that were full of hope and faith of the new possibilities their long journey to the U.S. might lead them to. My heart is heavy knowing that each life lost carried so much potential."

Some of the injured might receive treatment in the United States.

“CBP has been in communication with the El Paso Office of Emergency Management and is prepared to receive and process those who were injured in the fire and are being transported via ambulance from Mexican to U.S. medical facilities for treatment," U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said in a statement.

"CBP will parole the individuals into the U.S. for emergency medical services using established protocols to quickly process and admit the injured individuals.”