A fire at the facilities of the National Migration Institute in Ciudad Juárez killed at least 37 people in the early hours of Tuesday morning, a Chihuahuan government source has confirmed. They attribute the accident to a burning mattress. “It’s a tragedy,” he told EL PAÍS. The victims are migrants who were held in the facilities of the federal headquarters. They had been arrested earlier that day in the border town and were apparently in locked rooms, according to this source. There are another 10 people seriously injured.
This Monday, agents from the National Migration Institute arrested more than 70 people in Ciudad Juárez over alleged riots on public roads. They were later installed in several cells on the left side of the building owned by the federal government. A state source has pointed out that it was the migrants themselves who “set fire to the mats that the building has as a sign of protest and spread the fire”. The first images show dozens of bodies piled outside the building, which sits on the Stanton-Lerdo International Bridge. Both the fire department and the National Guard were there to tend to the victims. The public prosecutor’s office took over the investigation.
Ciudad Juárez has become a pressure cooker with the arrival of numerous groups of migrants trying to cross the north or seeking asylum in Mexico in the meantime. The region is experiencing a record migratory flow, with 2.76 million undocumented immigrants detained at the US-Mexico border in fiscal 2022, and according to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the migratory flow into Mexican territory increased by 8%. Last December, every immigration record was shattered: US border officials arrested 251,487 people, an average of more than 8,000 people a day. In the same month, but in 2019, it was just 40,000.
Of those detainees, according to the Customs and Border Control Office (CBP), 202,000 were given what is known as Title 8, allowing them to be deported to their countries of origin, and the remainder, nearly 50,000, were sent to Mexico under the controversial Title 42. That old policy , revived by Donald Trump, allows foreign nationals, including asylum seekers, to be turned away on grounds of health, in this case the coronavirus pandemic. A pretext rejected by human rights organizations and one that the Biden administration has not yet withdrawn. This measure has left thousands of migrants stranded in Mexico with no possibility of refuge or assistance.
In this context, with Mexico as a tense security space and under pressure from the Republican States, with Texas at the fore, Biden announced on January 5 the implementation of a new program to issue 30,000 special permits every month for migrants from Venezuela, Cuba , Haiti and Nicaragua enter the country by air.
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