By MARÍA VERZA and MORGAN LEE (Associated Press)
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — After migrants in northern Mexico positioned mattresses towards the bars of their detention cell and set them on hearth, guards rapidly walked away and made no obvious try to launch the lads earlier than smoke stuffed the room and killed not less than 40, surveillance video confirmed Tuesday.
Hours after the fireplace broke out late Monday, rows of our bodies have been laid out below shimmery silver sheets outdoors the immigration detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, which is throughout the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, and a significant crossing level for migrants.
Twenty-nine individuals have been injured and have been in “delicate-serious” situation, in line with the National Immigration Institute.
At the time of the blaze, 68 males from Central and South America have been being held on the facility, the company stated.
In the video, two individuals dressed as guards rush into the digicam body, and not less than one migrant seems by the metallic gate on the opposite facet. But the guards didn’t seem to make any effort to open the cell doorways and as an alternative ran away as billowing clouds of smoke stuffed the construction inside seconds.
Adán Augusto López, Mexico’s inside secretary, confirmed the authenticity of the video in an interview with native journalist Joaquín López Doriga.
Immigration authorities recognized the lifeless and injured as being from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, in line with an announcement from the Mexican lawyer basic’s workplace. Guatemala Foreign Affairs Minister Mario Búcaro stated 28 of the lifeless have been Guatemalan residents.
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador stated the fireplace was began by migrants in protest after studying they’d be deported.
“They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune,” López Obrador stated.
The deaths pressured the federal government to hire refrigerated trailers to carry the migrants’ our bodies, Chihuahua state prosecutor Cesar Jáuregui instructed reporters.
The detention facility is throughout the road from Juarez’s metropolis corridor.
At a close-by hospital, Viangly Infante Padrón, a 31-year-old Venezuelan migrant looking for asylum within the U.S. along with her husband and three youngsters, waited for her husband, who was being handled for smoke inhalation. The earlier night, she was ready outdoors the detention middle for his launch when the fireplace broke out.
“There was smoke everywhere. The ones they let out were the women, and those (employees) with immigration,” she stated. “The men, they never took them out until the firefighters arrived.”
She noticed a number of lifeless our bodies earlier than discovering her husband in an ambulance. “I was desperate because I saw a dead body, a body, a body, and I didn’t see him anywhere.”
Earlier, about 100 migrants gathered Tuesday outdoors the immigration facility’s doorways to demand details about family.
Katiuska Márquez, a 23-year-old Venezuelan girl along with her two youngsters, ages 2 and 4, was looking for her half-brother, Orlando Maldonado, who had been touring along with her.
“We want to know if he is alive or if he’s dead,” she stated. She questioned how all of the guards who have been inside made it out alive and solely the migrants died. “How could they not get them out?”
Authorities didn’t instantly reply that query.
Márquez and Maldonado have been detained Monday with the kids and about 20 others. They had been in Juarez ready for an appointment from U.S. authorities to request asylum. They have been staying in a rented room the place 10 individuals have been residing, paying for it with the cash they begged on the street.
“I was at a stoplight with a piece of cardboard asking for what I needed for my children, and people were helping me with food,” she stated. Suddenly brokers got here and detained everybody.
Everyone was taken to the immigration facility however solely the lads have been positioned within the cells. Three hours later, the ladies and kids have been launched.
Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been operating excessive in current weeks in Ciudad Juarez, the place shelters are full of individuals ready for alternatives to cross into the U.S. or for the asylum course of to play out.
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 power in rounding them up, together with complaints that municipal police questioned individuals on the street about their immigration standing with out trigger.
The excessive degree of frustration in Ciudad Juarez was evident earlier this month when tons of of principally Venezuelan migrants tried to power their means throughout one of many worldwide bridges to El Paso, appearing on false rumors that the United States would enable them to enter the nation. U.S. authorities blocked their makes an attempt.
After that, Juarez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuellar began campaigning to tell migrants there was room in shelters and no have to beg within the streets. He urged residents to not give cash to them and stated authorities would take away them from intersections the place it was harmful to beg and allegedly a nuisance to residents.
Migrant advocates who not too long ago denounced extra aggressive ways stated Tuesday that the immigration facility was over capability and that the location of the fireplace was small and lacked air flow.
“You could see it coming,” the advocates’ assertion stated. “Mexico’s immigration policy kills.”
The nationwide immigration company stated Tuesday that it “energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy” with none additional rationalization.
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, stated by way of Twitter. In retaining with worldwide legislation, immigration detention needs to be an distinctive measure and never generalized, he wrote.
Mexico’s immigration lockups have seen overcrowding, protests and riots every now and then.
In October, a bunch of principally Venezuelan migrants rioted inside an immigration middle in Tijuana. In November, dozens of migrants rioted in Mexico’s largest detention middle 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 cross by on their option to the U.S.
Asylum-seekers should keep within the state the place they apply in Mexico, leading to giant numbers being holed up close to the nation’s southern border with Guatemala. Tens of 1000’s are additionally in border cities.
At a Mass celebrated in reminiscence of the migrants, Bishop Mons. José Guadalupe Torres Campos lamented the sudden grief that had descended upon the migrant neighborhood.
“The shout, the cry of everyone is enough, enough of so much pain, enough of so much death,” he stated.
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This story has been right to indicate the age of Viangly Infante Padrón is 31.
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Verza reported from Mexico City. Associated Press videojournalist Alicia Fernández and writers Guadalupe Peñuelas in Ciudad Juarez, Mark Stevenson in Mexico City, Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
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