Forty migrants from Central and South America died after a fire broke out in a detention centre in Mexico on Monday night. The incident happened in a government-run migrant detention centre in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
Source: Facebook
Mexico’s National Migration Institute runs this detention centre. More than 68 men were under the facility centre when the fire broke out. Despite 40 dead persons, more than 28 others were admitted to hospital after being injured in the fire broke out.
According to the news agency AP, the migrants put the mattresses against the bar and through the fire on them. Flames spread after the fire, and the room was filled with smoke, but the security guard walked away and did nothing to release the migrants from the cell.
The authenticity of the CCTV footage was confirmed by Adan Augusto Lopez, Mexico’s interior secretary. Now the video is shared widely on different social media platforms. Andres Manuel Lopez, the Mexican President, said that migrants feared being deported, so they lit the fire as a protest.
A 31 years old Venezuelan lady named Viangly Infante Padron, who is seeking asylum in the United States, told the news agency that there was smoke everywhere. The ones they let out were the women and those (employees) with immigration; the men never took them out until the firefighters arrived.”
Injured and dead immigrants were identified from El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala, as informed by the Mexican attorney general’s office. While Guatemala Foreign Affairs Minister Mario Bucaro said that 28 people were from the Guatemalan nation in this fire incident.
Source: Facebook
Relatives of the immigrants demanded justice after this incident. They all show their anger outside the detention facility centre. A migrant from Venezuela said to the media, “Every migrant has the right to be safe, to be protected, even by migration, because we’re not criminals”.
Public reaction to Mexico migrants fire :
Luceino Onos
To everyone reading this Keep going. No matter how stuck you feel, no matter how bad things are right now, no matter how hopeless & depressed you feel, no matter how many days you have spent wishing things were different. I promise you won’t feel this way forever. Keep going.
Leticia Paniagua Hodges
Praying for everyone!! So sad. But they keep coming when the US can’t support them. Americans are all suffering with s high cost of living conditions.
Michael Smith
Sad that they’re trying to escape mexico to america of all places instead of somewhere welcoming and you know, actually a respectable country.
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