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Church Shocked Over Dozens Killed In Mexico Migrant Center

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

MEXICO CITY (Worthy News) – Christians have mourned the death of at least 39 people at a blaze in a dormitory at a Mexican immigration detention center near the U.S. border.

Besides those killed, some 29 people were injured as flames engulfed the locked cells of migrants, according to a leaked video from the facility in Ciudad Juárez.

Catholic leaders and other church workers supporting migrants in the United States, Mexico, and across Central America condemned the March 27 tragedy.

They urged a rethinking of immigration policy that claimed “criminalizes migrants” streaming through Mexico toward the United States.

“The pain and suffering from abandoning their homes is already too much. And we cannot allow their transit through Mexico to become an ordeal for those who leave their family and country searching for a better life,” said the Catholic Mexican bishops’ conference.

“As the church, we will always remain at the side of those who suffer most, of the excluded, of the poor, and the neediest persons.”

FIRE INVESTIGATION

However, those supporting stricter migration policies argue the measures are aimed at limiting uncontrolled migration, which they say has increased violent crime and drugs and human trafficking into the U.S.

The office of Mexico’s attorney general has launched an investigation into the fire, which began in the center’s dormitory and quickly spread through the rest of the building.

Investigators said the blaze began shortly before 10 p.m. local time on March 27 in a section of the center holding 68 male migrants.

The victims hailed from across Latin America, including 28 Guatemalans, 12 Venezuelans, 12 Salvadorans, and one each from Colombia and Ecuador, Catholic sources said.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the migrants had ignited a mattress to protest their pending deportations. “They put mattresses in the shelter doorway and ignited them,” he claimed. “They didn’t imagine it would provoke this terrible accident.”

The president’s comments were condemned by Catholics, who stressed the migrants had been detained and were being blamed for their deaths.

NO SHELTERS

“We do not share the idea that the president calls migrant detention centers ‘shelters.’ We ask that he refrain from using language that distorts reality,” the Mexican bishops’ “migrant ministry” said.

“Enough with the euphemisms. We must not accept nor tolerate soft expressions or decorous words given to what truly constitutes a detention center, which does not offer dignified or safe conditions,” the Guatemalan “bishops’ migrant ministry” added separate remarks.

“Immigration stations are not shelters but detention centers where the human rights of people in forced mobility are violated.”

Catholic migrant aid group the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas, which borders Ciudad Juárez, complained that “Those who blame the victims of the fire obscure the fact these deaths are an indictment of the policies and structures implemented at large by both governments” in the U.S. and Mexico.

The International Organization of Migration says that since 2014 more than 7,000 people have died or vanished on their journey from Mexico and other regional countries to the U.S.

Under U.S. President Joe Biden, laws were imposed in February denying asylum applications to those reaching U.S. soil.

But legal technicalities are not stemming the flow of undocumented migrants, critics say, with more than 200,000 attempting to cross the border annually, causing more human misery.