León Krauze
On Monday, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, at least 39 migrants died in a fire inside a Mexican government immigration detention center. Surveillance video shows the beginning of the fire inside a holding cell. The flames spread rapidly. Smoke thickened. Indifferent to the despair of those trapped, guards abandoned the facility, leaving dozens locked in.
By nightfall, corpses lay on the street, covered in metal foil. Women wailed for their husbands and brothers. Others banged on the windows of ambulances, hoping to find relatives alive. “We begged for help,” one survivor said. “And they just let us die.” This gruesome event, one of the worst immigration-related tragedies in the history of modern Mexico, did not happen in a void.
On the contrary, it is the predictable result of years of punitive immigration policies that have focused on deterrence. The discovery last June of 53 migrants who died in the locked, sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio was the clearest sign of things to come. But that tragedy and this most recent one have been foreshadowed countless times in past months. There have been clashes in southern Mexico between border guards and migrants. There have been alarming reports of abuse. Thousands have protested their mistreatment. Anguished attempts to cross the border have been amply documented.
The tragedy in Juárez “is the last step in a chain of abuse,” said immigration expert Tonatiuh Guillén, former director of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute. Mexico’s president has reacted to the tragedy with his usual callousness. Despite having the video of what happened just hours after the fire, the administration kept it under wraps. By Wednesday, when the scandal was breaking in the news, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised that no one would escape accountability, while in the same breath accusing the media of “sensationalism” fed by his “adversaries.” A day earlier, he had implied that the tragedy could have been the migrants’ fault for lighting mattresses to protest what they thought were plans to move or deport them.
The protest did happen, but not for the reasons the Mexican president claims. According to activists, immigrants in Juárez had had enough of an impossible situation: inhumane treatment, overcrowding and abuse of authority. “We’re not animals,” one man said. “We have rights.” The reaction in the United States has also been disappointing. Journalist José Díaz Briseño asked State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel on Tuesday whether the Biden administration trusted the safety of facilities in Mexico. “That is a question for the Mexican government,” Patel replied. In fact, it’s not. The US government has relied on López Obrador’s indifference to expel thousands of migrants and delay the entry of thousands more, condemning them to conditions that often lead to tragedy. But deflecting responsibility like this is a dodge at best. The United States was complicit in this outcome.
The Mexican government needs to allocate sufficient sums to the National Immigration Institute and the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, the two institutions in charge of guaranteeing humane treatment for immigrants and, especially, potential refugees. It has done the opposite. The refugee agency’s yearly allocation from the López Obrador government is a laughable $2.6 million. Support for shelters, essential to the safety of migrants, has also dwindled. The US government could insist on establishing a concrete, regional support plan, which could provide essential dignity for thousands of families fleeing authoritarian regimes, violence or extreme poverty.
It has done the opposite, choosing to expel, deter and reject. The result is now plain to see: dozens of families destroyed, in the cruelest way, with loved ones perishing in flames. Hard-line anti-immigration advocates may end up quietly interpreting this unspeakable tragedy as an effective deterrent to future migrants. Such arguments appear whenever Australia’s immigration policy makes headlines. History will judge their lack of humanity. For now, a sense of foreboding is inescapable. Tragedy will strike again if the governments of Mexico and the United States, both supposedly progressive, do not return to the roots of compassion that they once claimed to defend.
The Washington Post
