Mexico opens homicide probe, names 8 guards as suspects in fire that killed 39 migrants

Mexican authorities said Wednesday that the deaths of 39 men in a fire inside an immigrant detention center here are being investigated as homicides and that they were planning to arrest eight guards.

Three of those guards are government employees and five are members of a private security company, said Rosa Icela Rodríguez, Mexico’s secretary of security and citizen protection.

Rodríguez accused the guards at the detention center in Ciudad Juarez of failing to release dozens of desperate migrants who remained locked behind bars Monday night as smoke billowed and flames spread.

“There is obviously a grave crime,” Rodríguez said. “These were human lives. It’s unforgivable.”

Authorities said they also plan to arrest a migrant suspected of starting the fire.

The migrants being held at a federal detention facility, just steps from El Paso, had been detained earlier in the day on the streets of this industrial border city, Rodríguez said.

She said they had been rounded up after neighbors complained that migrants were begging for money in the streets.

The migrants had been waiting for hours in a cramped holding cell when, she said, several of them began burning mattresses in protest.

Surveillance video from inside the detention center showed several staffers making no effort to help the detainees as the fire grew. One detainee kicks the bars in a futile attempt to force the door open.

The fire, the deadliest incident at a Mexican immigration facility in recent memory, has called into question the Mexican government’s ability to manage a growing number of migrants in cities across its northern border even as U.S. authorities prepare to roll out new policies likely to strand even more migrants here.

And although Rodríguez and other officials, including Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, have sought to attribute the tragedy to the bad actions of a few low-level guards, human rights advocates contend that an interlocking network of anti-migrant policies on both sides of the border are also to blame.

The fire was “a consequence of the restrictive and cruel migration policies shared by the governments of Mexico and the United States,” Amnesty International said in a statement Wednesday.

Even before the fire, tensions over immigration were running high in Ciudad Juarez, a bustling manufacturing hub across the Rio Grande from El Paso, as the U.S. government continues to pressure Mexico to help stop migrants from illegally crossing into the U.S.

It was not publicly known whether any of the dead or injured had been turned back by the United States under Title 42, a public health law invoked during the COVID-19 pandemic that has been used to expel tens of thousands of border crossers back to Mexico while denying them a chance to apply for political asylum or other potential relief in the U.S.

The law and related policies have caused a major bottleneck at the border in recent months, with shelters in Juarez and similar cities overwhelmed and many migrants forced to sleep on the sidewalk.

Migrants here accuse Mexican officials of harassing or needlessly arresting them, sometimes raiding hotels and hostels or detaining them on the streets, where many sell trinkets, food and other items. Migrants not only face deportation, they said, but are often bused south — sometimes to Mexico’s border with Guatemala, almost 2,000 miles away — in a bid to frustrate their efforts to enter the U.S.

“They just come and take us away for no reason,” said Paola Aliendres, 29, a mother of two from Venezuela. “We are just trying to make a living and survive and hopefully one day fulfill our dream to get to the United States.”

Aliendres was among dozens of migrants who gathered outside the charred detention facility here late Tuesday.

“We’re all very frustrated; we don’t know what happened to our friends — who lived, who died,” Aliendres said. “It seems like they want to blame us for everything.”

News of the fire set off panic in communities across Latin America as relatives of U.S.-bound migrants rushed to check on them.

Mexican authorities have added to the confusion by reporting the names of the dead and the injured without specifying who fell into which group. An original list, released late Tuesday, included 68 migrants, but an updated list held 66. All were men: 28 from Guatemala, 12 from Venezuela, 13 from Honduras, 12 from El Salvador and one from Colombia.

The death toll rose from 38 to 39 on Wednesday. Of the victims who are hospitalized, 17 remained in critical condition, nine were listed as “delicate” and two as stable, authorities said.

Migrants and activists here say they want more details about the cause and demand to know why authorities at the lockup were unable to douse the flames or free prisoners trapped behind bars.

It is also unclear whether the facility had a working fire alarm or sprinkler system.

López Obrador told reporters Wednesday that the tragedy would be thoroughly investigated.

“There is no intention to cover up what happened, no intention to protect anyone,” the president said. “In our government we don’t permit violation of human rights or impunity.”

The migrant detention center, situated about 100 yards from the Rio Grande separating Mexico and the U.S., is one of many across the country run by the Mexican government’s National Immigration Institute.

Migrants have long complained about mistreatment and overcrowding at the federal lockups.

The fire was the latest in a series of tragedies that have cost the lives of hundreds of migrants in recent years.

In June, 53 people from Mexico and Central America perished in a sweltering tractor trailer abandoned in San Antonio.

In December 2021, 55 migrants, mostly Guatemalans, were killed when the truck ferrying them in southern Mexico’s Chiapas state crashed.

In 2010, authorities said, members of a Mexican drug cartel kidnapped and killed 72 migrants, mostly Central Americans, in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Officials say the migrants were killed after refusing to work for the criminal gang.

McDonnell reported from Ciudad Juarez and Linthicum from Todos Santos, Mexico. Special correspondents Gabriela Minjares in Ciudad Juarez and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.