By MARÍA VERZA (Associated Press)
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Migrants fearing deportation set mattresses ablaze at an immigration detention heart in northern Mexico, beginning a hearth that killed at the very least 40 folks, the president mentioned Tuesday, in one of many deadliest occasions ever at a Mexican immigration lockup.
Hours after the hearth broke out late Monday, rows of our bodies had been laid out beneath shimmery silver sheets exterior the power in Ciudad Juarez, which is throughout from El Paso, Texas, and a serious crossing level for migrants. Ambulances, firefighters and vans from the morgue swarmed the scene.
Twenty-nine folks had been injured and are in “delicate-serious” situation, based on the National Immigration Institute.
At the time of the blaze, 68 males from Central and South America had been being held on the facility, the company mentioned.
Immigration authorities recognized the useless and injured as being from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, with Guatemalans being the most important contingent, based on an announcement from the Mexican legal professional normal’s workplace.
Many of them could have been from Guatemala, based on a Guatemalan official.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador mentioned the hearth was began by migrants in protest after studying they’d be deported.
“They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune,” López Obrador mentioned, including that the director of the nation’s immigration company was on the scene.
The detention facility is a brief stroll from the U.S. border and throughout the road from Juarez’s metropolis corridor.
Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been working excessive in current weeks in Ciudad Juarez, the place shelters are full of individuals ready for alternatives to cross into the U.S. or who’ve requested asylum there and are ready out the method.
More than 30 migrant shelters and different advocacy organizations revealed an open letter March 9 that complained of a criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers within the metropolis. It accused authorities of abusing migrants and utilizing extreme drive in rounding them up, together with complaints that municipal police questioned folks on the street about their immigration standing with out trigger.
The excessive degree of frustration in Ciudad Juarez was evident earlier this month when a whole bunch of principally Venezuelan migrants tried to drive their method throughout one of many worldwide bridges to El Paso, performing on false rumors that the United States would permit them to enter the nation. U.S. authorities blocked their makes an attempt.
The nationwide immigration company mentioned Tuesday that it “energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy” with none additional clarification.
The “extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this one,” Felipe González Morales, the United Nations particular rapporteur for human rights of migrants, mentioned by way of Twitter. In protecting with worldwide legislation, immigration detention ought to be an distinctive measure and never generalized, he wrote.
As Mexico has stepped up efforts to stem migration to the U.S. border beneath stress from the American authorities, the company has struggled with overcrowding in its services. The nation’s immigration lockups have seen protests and riots occasionally.
Mostly Venezuelan migrants rioted inside an immigration heart in Tijuana in October that needed to be managed by police and National Guard troops. In November, dozens of migrants rioted in Mexico’s largest detention heart within the southern metropolis of Tapachula close to the border with Guatemala. No one died in both incident.
Mexico has emerged because the world’s third hottest vacation spot for asylum-seekers, after the United States and Germany. But it’s nonetheless largely a rustic that migrants go via on their strategy to the U.S.
It holds tens of 1000’s of migrants in an expansive community of detention facilities and makes an attempt to intently monitor actions throughout the nation in cooperation with American authorities.
Asylum-seekers should keep within the state the place they apply in Mexico, leading to massive numbers being holed up close to the nation’s southern border with Guatemala. Tens of 1000’s are additionally in border cities with the U.S., together with Ciudad Juarez.
An estimated 2,200 persons are in Ciudad Juarez’s shelters, together with extra migrants exterior shelters who come from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and El Salvador, based on the Strauss Center for International Security and Law on the University of Texas at Austin.
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Associated Press writers Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
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