Until now, injustice has impeded serious faults, abuses, and negligence from that night from coming to light. These actions contributed to the fatalities that occurred inside the overcrowded locked cell without fire extinguishers, ventilation, fire sprinklers, and working smoke detectors, a death trap for migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela.
The deadly fire occurred at a time when the United States expanded its efforts to discourage migrants from arriving at its southern border under agreements with Mexican authorities. These laws led to massive concentrations of migrants to temporarily stay in border communities such as Juárez, a hotspot for thousands of deportees from the U.S. and migrants arriving from Central and South America in hopes of advancing north.
Almost a year after this tragedy, an investigation by La Verdad together with Lighthouse Reports and El Paso Matters reveals new details about the chain of events that unfolded that March night at the immigration detention facility located a few meters from the border with El Paso, Texas, where Mexican authorities held migrants who arrived in the city to cross into the U.S.
Exactly. What’s compounding this is US policy has essentially become to pay off the Mexican government to do anti-migrant enforcement for us, so that government takes the checks and then commits as few resources as possible, leading to migrant detention centers that are overcapacity and understaffed, leading to desperate conditions where the guards and migrants are all miserable and start to loathe each other, and ultimately things like this happen and only front line guards will be held accountable (that is, if anyone is held accountable). But there’s a whole system and series of decision-makers that led to this foreseeable result.
e; a pair of related news stories from a while ago showing how the Mexican government is endangering and abusing migrants at the United States’ behest - https://lemmy.world/post/10359493