On March 28, forty migrants died in a fire at a migrant detention facility operated by the Mexican National Immigration Institute in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The deaths of these migrants—who came from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and other Latin American countries—are the latest of recent tragedies to impact people en route to the United States.
A Mexican judge has ordered the arrest of three immigration agents and one private security guard on homicide charges after video leaked of them refusing to open the locked door to let migrants out as the victims scrambled to flee the flames. The judge has also ordered the arrest of a Venezuelan migrant accused of starting the fire on homicide charges.
The tragedy is the result of decades of the deadly politics of deterrence that the United States has implemented along the border and exported south. And as Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants, so too has criticism of its detention facilities.
Over the last two decades, Mexico has taken steps to militarize its own borders under pressure from the United States. Immigration officials board buses and demand identification from passengers, checkpoints line the highways, and detention facilities have been built across the country to hold migrants before they are expelled. Now, those facilities are filling up with increasing numbers of people from Central America making their way north.
The tragedy is the result of decades of the deadly politics of deterrence that the United States has implemented along the border and exported south.
“The situation in the immigration stations in Mexico has been [plagued] by the same problems for a long time,” Gretchen Kuhner, the director of the Mexican organization Institute for Women in Migration, tells The Progressive.
According to Kuhner, the organization has documented overcrowding, a lack of food, and in Ciudad Juárez, a shortage of water and mattresses.
“There are reports after reports and complaint after complaint,” she explains. “The National Institute of Migration should not be detaining [migrants], that should be the last resort according to the law.”
The use of problematic detention centers has increased following pressure from the United States to expel migrants and asylum seekers in the last few years, creating a humanitarian crisis along the border.
“The United States has expelled many people,” Kuhner says. “[Migrants]continue to arrive at the shelters, and they are full. The shelters are from civil society, they are from the churches, they sometimes receive support from the Red Cross or International Organization for Migration.”
Measures originally implemented by the Trump Administration—such as the so-called Remain in Mexico policy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42, intended to contain the COVID-19 pandemic—have been upheld by the courts and even extended by the Biden Administration. The measures have also forced tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers to stay in Mexico. While Title 42 first applied to Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans, the Biden Administration’s expansion also includes Nicaraguans, Cubans, Haitians, and Venezuelans.
Amid the massive expulsion of migrants back into Mexico, Kuhner points out, “the Mexican government has never had an immigration policy to receive all these people.”
Title 42 is set to be removed in May 2023 with other COVID-19 measures, according to the White House.
The lack of any resettlement or humanitarian response to the number of migrants and the massive ramping up of detention is directly tied to tragedies like the one in Ciudad Juarez.
“Mexico has become a very dangerous territory for migrants,” Ursula Roldán, a migration researcher and the director of the Institute for Research on Global and Territorial Dynamics at the Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala City, tells The Progressive. “Especially because there are criminal structures linked to human trafficking.”
According to media reports, the fire in the detention facility happened when migrants began protesting their immediate deportation from Mexico. There were more than 310,000 migrants detained by Mexican immigration agents between January and October in 2022, with more than 83,500 migrants being deported from Mexico in the same period.
Between January 1 and March 31, 2023, Mexico deported 10,950 Guatemalans, both by land and chartered flights, according to the Guatemalan Immigration Institute. This is nearly equal to the number of Guatemalans deported from the United States in the same time frame: 11,424.
But new barriers are being put in place further down along the migratory route. Guatemala, for example, has become a country that seeks to make the journey more difficult, and as a result more dangerous.
The Central American country now detains and expels migrants from its national territory, which it began doing in 2022. On April 4, the Guatemalan newsite La Hora reported that 68 migrants from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Haiti, Ecuador, and Brazil were detained by police.
But these deportations do not mean the end of migration to the United States, especially as domestic conditions continue to drive people from their homes.
“Migratory flows in the end are not the biggest problem,” Roldán says. “But the environmental crisis, the political crisis of democracy, [are].”