Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador visited the border city where 39 migrants perished in a fire at a detention center on Friday and expressed regret over the tragedy, but likely made no changes to the country’s harsh immigration policy.
“I confess, it has hurt me a lot, it has damaged me,” López Obrador said before traveling to Ciudad Juárez, bordering El Paso, Texas. “It broke my soul.”
The president said the fire in Ciudad Juárez was the second most painful moment of his government, second only to the fire and explosion of an oil pipeline in 2019 that left 135 dead in the town of Tlahuelilpan, in the center of the country.
However, the most recent incident did not cost him much in political terms.
Many inhabitants of Mexican border cities lamented the death of the migrants due to the flames and smoke, apparently caused by some migrants who set fire to mats to protest because they were presumably going to be deported.
But in Ciudad Juárez, many residents were fed up with migrants, mainly from Central America and Venezuela, begging for money on the streets and obstructing traffic at border bridges. Residents have been calling on authorities to crack down on the migrants, while the United States has urged Mexico to stem the flow.
Ivonne Acuña Murillo, a professor of political science at the Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico City campus, said López Obrador does not have much leeway to change the country’s immigration policy.
“It’s hard. On the one hand, due to the enormous pressure from the United States” to stop the arrival of migrants at the border, Acuña said. “It is difficult based on the president’s own government project … it is a low budget that can be said to be above this situation of migration and shelters and others,” he added.
López Obrador’s visit was marked by anger over the deaths. A group of migrants and their supporters tried to block the passage of the president’s caravan of vehicles, which sparked a struggle on Friday afternoon. Hours earlier, the president had promised to meet with the doctors who care for injured migrants, but it was not yet known if he had done so.
In his desire to curry favor with the United States, López Obrador has made life difficult for migrants trying to cross Mexico to reach the US border. López Obrador ordered tens of thousands of army and National Guard troops to contain the flow of migrants from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua and Cuba, and allowed the United States to return them to Mexico.
But the United States has done little to help Mexico shelter or integrate migrants who have returned to Mexican soil.
López Obrador launched criticism on Friday when he said the United States should channel more money into economic development in Latin America to prevent migrants from leaving their countries instead of sending military aid to Ukraine. He said the United States should deliver cash benefits directly to families in the region.
“What does what the United States government has delivered to Central America have to do with the 30,000 or 35,000 million dollars earmarked for the purchase of arms for Ukraine,” he said.
This deadlock, in which the federal governments of Mexico and the United States abhor touching the immigration issue, often leads to the situation being taken over by local authorities whose constituents consider migrants a nuisance.
The Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, said that the government will close the detention center where the fire occurred.
López Obrador said on Friday that he is going to create a commission to guarantee the protection of the human rights of migrants. He said the commission will be headed by Catholic priest Alejandro Solalinde, who has long been an activist on behalf of migrants. However, the powers that the commission will have are unknown at this time.
For now, “I will be attending to the medical part, basically. What matters most to me is caring for the wounded,” the president said.
Mexico has rejected an offer from the United States to help provide medical care to the injured migrants — most of whom suffered smoke inhalation injuries — because the president says they are too sick to be moved.
Rodríguez said Thursday that 24 migrants remained hospitalized, all in serious or critical condition. Four migrants had been discharged, he noted.
The migrant accused of starting the fire suffered only minor injuries and was released from the hospital, apparently in detained condition.
That migrant, along with three officials from the National Migration Institute and two security guards at the detention center, face charges of homicide and injury.
Video from a security camera inside the Ciudad Juárez facility shows guards walking out when a fire breaks out in the cell where the migrants were being held without making the slightest attempt to free them.
It is unknown if those guards had the keys to the cell doors.
Yet for years there have been complaints about poor conditions and human rights violations in Mexico’s immigration detention centers, including poor ventilation, inadequate food and water, and overflowing toilets.
In addition, there is ample evidence of corruption throughout Mexico’s immigration system, with everyone from lawyers and officials to guards asking for bribes to allow detained migrants to leave.
Little has been done to date to correct this situation.
On Friday, authorities temporarily emptied the country’s largest migrant detention center, near the Guatemalan border, to carry out inspections and detect potential problems.
