Washington, D.C. – The deaths of at least 39 people in a fire at an immigrant detention center in northern Mexico has sparked renewed criticism of US policies that make it more difficult for people to seek protection at the US-Mexico border.
Monday night’s fire in Ciudad Juarez, a border town across from El Paso, Texas, comes amid months of escalating U.S. border restrictions that advocates say directly contributed to the tragedy.
“The U.S. has blood on its hands and should bear the moral weight of such behavior,” said Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
Musalo said asylum seekers who have been barred by the US have suffered in “unimaginable ways”, including being targeted by drug cartels and denied access to food and adequate shelter.
Many are trapped in Mexican border towns because of a series of policies aimed at limiting arrivals at the US border, including a new rule that allows Washington to return thousands of people from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua to Mexico each month.
“We can add this needless loss of life to the list of serious harms asylum seekers have suffered as a result of US asylum restrictions,” Musalo told Al Jazeera in an email Tuesday.
Migrants in Mexico
Rights advocates say there has been an increase in arrivals in Mexican border towns, increasing tensions between migrants and authorities.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) only allows people to seek asylum at a U.S. port of entry after making an appointment through a mobile app that immigrant rights groups say is “unreliable.”
Rafael Velasquez, country director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Mexico, said this new CBP app system, coupled with confusion and misinformation about changing border policies, has led to an increase in arrivals in recent weeks. Ciudad Juarez.
Velasquez added that Mexico’s humanitarian infrastructure – including available shelters – is under strain and “underresourced” as more vulnerable people continue to enter the country with the aim of reaching the US.
“We have also seen an increase in detention operations by the Mexican government taking place in hotels, on the streets and even in civil society shelters where people in need of international protection seek refuge and safety,” he told Al Jazeera .
While the details of Monday’s tragedy are still unclear and Mexican authorities say an investigation is underway, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the fire was started by migrants protesting a decision to return them to their homes. deport to homeland.
Citing a statement from the Mexican attorney general’s office, the Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday that the dead and injured were mainly from Guatemala, but also from Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. People are fleeing these countries due to widespread violence, poverty and political instability.
Mexico’s National Immigration Institute expressed regret over the deaths and said it would monitor the condition of 29 migrants also injured in the blaze and offer support to their loved ones. “The National Institute of Migration strongly denounces the actions that led to this tragedy,” it said in a statement, without elaborating further.
Critics have said that evicting people seeking safety without properly assessing their claims is a violation of international rightrecognizing the right to seek asylum.
“Unfortunately, as the United States takes more extreme measures to close the border to asylum seekers, tragedies like this are likely to become more common,” said Victoria Neilson, supervising attorney with the National Immigration Project, a legal advocacy group.
“The United States has essentially closed the border to Venezuelan asylum seekers, leaving them in desperate and dangerous situations in Mexico,” she told Al Jazeera.
Amy Fischer, Americas advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, also criticized both the US and Mexico for their treatment of asylum seekers.
“It is unconscionable that these people who seek safety in Mexico are locked up in detention centers in brutal conditions and are denied asylum in the United States,” she said in an interview. “It’s just a mountain of countries failing to protect people who have a right to be protected.”
‘Asylum ban’
Since taking office, US President Joe Biden’s administration has faced political pressure, particularly from Republican lawmakers, to deter asylum seekers from illegally crossing the US border amid an increase in arrivals.
While Biden campaigned against the strict immigration policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, he pursued a policy of deterrence at the border. In June 2021, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, in a message to would-be migrants from Central America, said, “Don’t come.”
In recent months, the White House has announced a series of measures that would facilitate the return of migrants, including an agreement with Mexico to return as many as 30,000 people per month from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba. At the same time, Washington said it would allow as many as 30,000 people from those countries into the US each month.
The agreement with Mexico expanded what is known as Title 42, a widely criticized pandemic-era restriction introduced in March 2020 that allows U.S. border authorities to quickly deport most asylum seekers arriving at the border.
In February, Washington also proposed a new rule, dubbed by critics an “asylum ban,” that would allow US authorities to return migrants crossing the US border irregularly if they had not sought protection in countries they had previously been banned from. their journey had crossed.
The proposal, which would apply practically to all migrants traveling through Mexico to reach the US border, is expected to go into effect in May when Title 42 expires.
Laurie Ball Cooper, director of legal services for the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) advocacy group, said the fire in Ciudad Juarez is “another heartbreaking tragedy” due to border policies that fail to recognize the human rights of people seeking refuge.
“That it happened just meters from the US border underscores the need for the Biden administration to restore the US asylum system rather than pushing migrants back into unsafe conditions in Mexico,” Cooper said in an email to Al Jazeera.
Political issue
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees US asylum and border systems, did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
US officials have said the Biden administration’s measures are in response to a spike in irregular arrivals at the border, noting that Washington has expanded legal avenues for immigration. They also say they want to protect asylum seekers from dangerous crossings and human trafficking.
Migration remains a hot-button political issue in the US. With a record number of new arrivals at the southern border in the past two years, Republicans often accuse Biden of pursuing an “open borders agenda” and allowing criminals and deadly illicit drugs to enter the country.
However, US border policy did not change dramatically under the Democratic president, who was criticized by progressives for being too restrictive.
“Forbidding people to apply for asylum is a deadly decision. It will endanger vulnerable people again. The Biden [administration] must have policies in place to ensure that all migrants arriving at the southern border have access to asylum,” Congresswoman Chuy Garcia wrote on Twitter last week.
In light of the deaths in Ciudad Juarez, Fischer of Amnesty International USA stressed that border restrictions do not prevent people from seeking protection.
“What’s happening is people are being forced to make increasingly risky choices to find their way to safety,” she told Al Jazeera.
“As long as the US continues to invest in these brutal policies and policies of exclusion, I think we can expect more tragedies like the ones we saw overnight.”