A political storm has broken out in Mexico after a fire at a National Immigration Institute (INM) migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juarez killed at least 39 people on March 27.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the fire was started by migrants who set mattresses ablaze in protest after hearing they were about to be deported. “They never imagined that it would cause this terrible tragedy,” he said at a press conference.
Twenty-eight of the migrants were from Guatemala, 13 from Honduras, 12 from Venezuela, and one each from El Salvador and Ecuador.
A video posted on social media showed harrowing images of guards failing to open the doors of a holding cell full of migrants being engulfed by flames and smoke. Reports suggested that initially only women and INM employees were allowed to leave the facility. (Federal authorities promised a full investigation, and by this newspaper’s deadline, four guards had been detained.)
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