A guard at an immigration facility near the US border where dozens of people were tragically killed this morning refused to open the door and let detainees out despite the menacing blaze burning the building down, it is claimed.
A total of 39 people have been confirmed dead as of now and another 29 are hospitalised, after a fire at a detention centre of Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) in Ciudad Juarez, which is near the US-Mexico border, across from El Paso, Texas.
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed that the detainees themselves started the fire, as an act of protest against their deportations.
A while later, rows of bodies were laid out under shimmery silver sheets outside the facility as ambulances, firefighters and vans from the morgue swarmed the scene of one of the deadliest incidents ever at an immigration lockup.
A police source told El Heraldo de Juarez: "One of the survivors told us that the area where they were was closed and that when they asked the guard to open the eastern door, he refused to do so."
Authorities said that most people died of suffocation and very few died from burns.
It was earlier reported that there was a fight between INM personnel and a group of migrants who were upset by an order given to them by immigration agents.
The source told El Heraldo de Juarez that after the fight, a group of the same migrants set fire to part of the furniture and apparently someone threw a type of solvent on the fire, causing an explosion.
As a result, the building was quickly wrapped in flames and multiple people suffered fatal burns and suffocation.
A hospital in close proximity to the detention centre has been declared in code red as victims of the tragedy arrive.
There were 68 men from Central and South America held in the facility at the time of the fire, the NIM said. A Guatemalan official said many may have been from that Central American country.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the fire was started by migrants inside the facility in protest after learning they would be deported.
“They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune,” López Obrador said, adding that the director of country’s immigration agency was on the scene.
Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been running high in recent weeks in Ciudad Juarez, where shelters are full of people waiting for opportunities to cross into the US 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 on March 9 that complained of the criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers in the city.
It accused authorities of abuse of power 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 Ciudad Juarez was evident earlier this month when hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants acting on false rumours that the US would allow them to enter the country tried to force their way across one of the international bridges to El Paso. US authorities blocked their attempts.
The 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 US border under pressure from the American 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 centre in Tijuana in October that had to be controlled by police and National Guard troops.
In November, dozens of migrants rioted in Mexico’s largest detention centre in the southern city of Tapachula near the border with Guatemala. No one died in either incident.
Mexico has emerged as the world’s third most popular destination for asylum-seekers, after the United States and Germany, but is still largely a transit country for those on the way to the US.
It holds tens of thousands of migrants in an expansive network of detention centres and attempts to closely monitor movements across the country in cooperation with American authorities.
Karla Samayoa, a spokeswoman for Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry, said that Mexican authorities had informed them that more than two dozen of the migrants who died appeared to be from the country.
Asylum-seekers must stay in the state where they apply in Mexico, resulting in large numbers being holed up near the country’s southern border with Guatemala. Tens of thousands are also in border cities with the US, including Ciudad Juarez.
The Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin has estimated there are more than 2,200 people in Ciudad Juarez’s shelters and more migrants outside shelters from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and El Salvador.
