A year ago, 40 men died in a detention center fire in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An examination by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica shows that it was the foreseeable result of landmark shifts in U.S. border policies.
By Perla Trevizo, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica
May 1, 2024
5 AM Central
Stefan Arango, a 31-year-old Venezuelan husband and father, felt immediately nauseated by the smells of sweat, urine and feces when Mexican guards ordered him into the cinder block cell in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. The tile floor was strewn with trash, and several men inside lay on flimsy mats that were incongruously covered in rainbow-colored vinyl. The windows were so small that they didn’t allow in much light or air. And, perhaps mercifully, they were so high that the men couldn’t see they were just a short stroll from El Paso, the destination they had risked everything to reach.
It was March 27, 2023, and Arango had been detained by Mexican authorities who had agreed to help the United States slow the record numbers of migrants crossing the border. A guard allowed Arango to make a one-minute call to his younger sister, who’d come to Juárez with him and whom he’d left waiting at a budget hotel nearby. She sobbed, worried that he was going to be deported back to Venezuela. “Don’t cry, everything will be fine,” he assured her. “Whatever happens, don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”
. . .
Forty men were killed and more than two dozen were injured in one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history. Investigators put the blame for the incident on the migrants who set the blaze and the guards who failed to help them. The United States urged immigrants to take heed of the tragedy and pursue legal methods for entering the U.S., without acknowledging that some of those caught in the fire were attempting to do just that when they were detained. However, an examination by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune underscores that it was the foreseen and foreseeable result of landmark shifts in U.S. border policies over the last decade, by which the Trump and Biden administrations put the bulk of the responsibility for detaining and deterring staggering numbers of immigrants from around the world onto a Mexican government that’s had trouble keeping its own people safe.
The bodies in the Juárez parking lot were not only evidence of the tragic consequences of U.S. policies, but they were also graphic representations of the violence and economic upheaval raging across the Americas. The dead had traveled there from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and, like Arango, Venezuela. Over the past decade, growing numbers of people from these countries have traversed Mexico and crossed the U.S. border to file claims for asylum that take years to resolve and allow them to live and work in the United States during that time.
When first running for president, Donald Trump used the scale of the arrivals to jolt American politics, vowing to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. As president, he effectively turned Mexico into a wall, pressuring that country’s president to take unprecedented steps that required nearly everyone applying for asylum to wait there as their cases went through U.S. immigration courts. And citing the pandemic, he ordered border officials to quickly return immigrants to Mexico or to their home countries under a little-known section of the public health code — Title 42 — that allows the government to limit the numbers of people allowed into the country in an emergency.
More:
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/01/us-immigration-asylum-policy-juarez-fire/
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