Mexico immigration agency head arraigned in connection with deadly fire
The head of Mexico’s immigration agency was arraigned Tuesday on charges that he failed to protect those in his custody when 40 migrants died in a fire at a border detention center last month.
Federal prosecutors said there are videos showing that private security guards had asked immigration agents permission to release the migrants when the fire started, but were denied.
Prosecutors presented evidence that Francisco Garduño, head of the National Immigration Institute, was responsible for the safety of the country’s immigration facilities and should have closed those that did not meet safety requirements.
A judge denied prosecutors’ request that Garduño be removed from his position and be barred from leaving the country. His next hearing was scheduled for Sunday.
A migrant allegedly started a fire inside the detention center in Ciudad Juarez on March 27. Security cameras showed smoke quickly filling the cell holding 68 male migrants, but no one with keys attempting to release them. The feeds for those cameras were streamed to a monitoring center in Mexico City.
In Mexico, migrants mourn those killed in detention center fire, angry over treatment as they wait in immigration and asylum limbo at the U.S. border.
In addition to the 40 killed, more than two dozen were injured in the fire.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has voiced support for Garduño, whom he appointed to run the agency in 2019 while under pressure from then-U.S. President Trump to take a more aggressive stance against migrants crossing Mexico.
Garduño had been in charge of Mexico’s prisons.
Prosecutors spoke of nefarious dealings inside the facility; some migrants in their statements said they had been told they would be freed if they paid $1,000.
The highest-ranking official headed to trial is the immigration agency’s delegate in Chihuahua state, retired naval Rear Adm. Salvador González, charged with homicide and causing injury by omission, among other counts.
Prosecutors previously said they identified “a pattern of irresponsibility and repeated omissions” in the immigration institute.
The turmoil in Mexico’s immigration agency comes as several thousand migrants are walking north from near the Guatemalan border in protest of the deadly fire and calling for Mexico to close its detention centers.
Seven of the migrants and activists accompanying them Tuesday sewed their lips shut in protest over the lack of a government response to their request for dialogue.
The migrants walked to the town of Huixtla, some 25 miles from Tapachula where they started their walk Sunday. They are asking authorities to provide them with buses or at least with temporary documents that would give them free transit through the country.
Irineo Mujica of the migrant advocacy group People Without Borders was one of those who sewed his mouth shut.
“It hurts a little, but the injustice toward the immigrant community hurts more,” he said.
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