Fire at migrant detention facility in Mexico kills 39 men

Al Jazeera :
Dozens of people have been killed and injured after a fire broke out in an immigration detention facility in northern Mexico near the United States border.
The blaze – one of the deadliest incidents ever at an immigration lockup in the country – occurred late Monday at a facility in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Images from the scene showed ambulances, firefighters and vans from the morgue around the smoke-covered facility with rows of bodies lying under shimmery silver sheets.
At least 39 people died in the fire and 29 injured people were taken to hospitals, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said in a statement. The facility was holding 68 adult men from Central and South America, it said.
Mexico’s attorney general’s office launched an inquiry and has investigators at the scene, according to media reports.
Vinagly, a Venezuelan woman, stood outside the immigration centre, desperate for information about her 27-year-old husband detained there.
“He was taken away in an ambulance,” she told the AFP news agency. “They [immigration officials] don’t tell you anything. A family member can die and they don’t tell you he’s dead.”
The national immigration agency said it “energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy”, without any further explanation of what those actions might have been.
Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been running high in recent weeks in Ciudad Juarez, where shelters are full of people waiting for opportunities to cross into the US or who have requested asylum there and are waiting out the process.
Mostly Venezuelan asylum seekers rioted inside an immigration centre in Tijuana in October that had to be controlled by police and National Guard troops.
A month later, dozens of people rioted in Mexico’s largest detention facility in the southern city of Tapachula near the border with Guatemala. No one died in either incident.
More than 30 migrant shelters and other advocacy organisations published an open letter March 9 that complained of a criminalisation of migrants and asylum seekers in Ciudad Juarez.
It accused authorities of abuse and using excessive force in rounding up migrants, complaining municipal police were questioning people in the street about their immigration status without cause.
The administration of US President Joe Biden has been working to stem a record tide of people undertaking often dangerous journeys to get to the US in search of protection.
Many are fleeing gang violence, systemic poverty and other socioeconomic problems in their home countries across South and Central America, and they say they have no other choice but to try to make it to the United States.
While Biden promised to reverse some of the most hardline immigration policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, he also has maintained deterrence as a key plank of his administration’s approach to migration.
In February, Biden proposed new restrictions on asylum seekers, hoping to stifle the rush of people to the border.
The new rules say those who arrive at the border and cross into the US will no longer be eligible for asylum. Instead, they must apply first for asylum in one of the countries they pass through to get to the US border, or apply online via a US government app.
Migration rights groups have denounced this policy as an effective “asylum ban”.
On Monday, the United Nations’ refugee agency urged the Biden administration to reconsider its plan. “UNHCR is particularly concerned that … this would lead to cases of refoulement – the forced return of people to situations where their lives and safety would be at risk – which is prohibited under international law,” it said.
About 200,000 people try to cross the border from Mexico to the US each month.
A recent report by the International Organization for Migration said since 2014 about 7,661 people have died or disappeared en route to the US, while 988 died in accidents or while travelling in subhuman conditions.