by Perla Trevizo

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Stefan Arango, a 31-year-old Venezuelan husband and father, felt immediately nauseated by the smells of sweat, urine and feces when Mexican guards ordered him into the cinder block cell in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. The tile floor was strewn with trash, and several men inside lay on flimsy mats that were incongruously covered in rainbow-colored vinyl. The windows were so small that they didn’t allow in much light or air. And, perhaps mercifully, they were so high that the men couldn’t see they were just a short stroll from El Paso, Texas, the destination they had risked everything to reach.

It was March 27, 2023, and Arango had been detained by Mexican authorities who had agreed to help the United States slow the record numbers of migrants crossing the border. A guard allowed Arango to make a one-minute call to his younger sister, who’d come to Juárez with him and whom he’d left waiting at a budget hotel nearby. She sobbed, worried that he was going to be deported back to Venezuela.

“Don’t cry, everything will be fine,” he assured her. “Whatever happens, don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”

He couldn’t tell exactly how many men were inside the temporary detention center, maybe more than 100, but new detainees were being brought in while others were being taken away. Those milling around him were grumbling. They said they hadn’t been given water for hours. They hadn’t been given enough food. No one was giving them answers. Why were they being held? What was Mexico going to do with them?

At about 9:20 that night, some of the men began banging on the metal bars that ran along the front wall of the cell, demanding to be released. One of them reached up and yanked down a surveillance camera; another climbed the door and pulled down a second camera. Others started to pile the sleeping mats against the bars until they blocked the guard’s view.

At least one of them flicked a lighter. Within minutes, the cell was engulfed in flames and smoke. Arango pleaded with a guard: “Brother, don’t leave us here.” But the guard turned his back, saying, “Good luck, dude,” as he fled.

Arango rushed to a bathroom, now filled with dozens of others, all screaming for help. He turned the shower on to wet his hoodie, thinking it would protect him from the heat. Then the lights went out. Everything stung — his eyes, his nose, his skin. He sat himself down and whispered a prayer. The detainees’ cries stopped, and he could hear the sounds of bodies hitting the floor.

When he opened his eyes, he was wrapped in a mylar blanket, lying in the parking lot amid rows of bodies. Arango pulled the cover off his face, gasped for air and raised his hand, hoping to be seen. He heard a woman’s voice shout, “Someone lives among the dead!”

Forty men were killed and more than two dozen were injured in one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history. Investigators put the blame for the incident on the migrants who set the blaze and the guards who failed to help them. The United States urged immigrants to take heed of the tragedy and pursue legal methods for entering the U.S., without acknowledging that some of those caught in the fire were attempting to do just that when they were detained. However, an examination by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune underscores that it was the foreseen and foreseeable result of landmark shifts in U.S. border policies over the last decade, by which the Trump and Biden administrations put the bulk of the responsibility for detaining and deterring staggering numbers of immigrants from around the world onto a Mexican government that’s had trouble keeping its own people safe.

The bodies in the Juárez parking lot were not only evidence of the tragic consequences of U.S. policies, but they were also graphic representations of the violence and economic upheaval raging across the Americas. The dead had traveled there from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and, like Arango, Venezuela. Over the past decade, growing numbers of people from these countries have traversed Mexico and crossed the U.S. border to file claims for asylum that take years to resolve and allow them to live and work in the United States during that time.

When first running for president, Donald Trump used the scale of the arrivals to jolt American politics, vowing to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. As president, he effectively turned Mexico into a wall, pressuring that country’s president to take unprecedented steps that required nearly everyone applying for asylum to wait there as their cases went through U.S. immigration courts. And citing the pandemic, he ordered border officials to quickly return immigrants to Mexico or to their home countries under a little-known section of the public health code — Title 42 — that allows the government to limit the numbers of people allowed into the country in an emergency.

Democrats denounced the measures as inhumane, and early in his presidency, Joe Biden moved to loosen those policies, only to keep versions of some when the rising numbers of migrants coming into the United States started to cause political repercussions for him and his party.

The Border and the Election Join us May 29 to discuss why immigration is a top issue for voters and the U.S. policies that gave rise to the deadly Juárez fire.

The result was chaos on both sides of the border, although as numerous experts had predicted, the worst of it unfolded in Mexico. Squalid tent encampments sprouted in Mexican border cities that didn’t have sufficient shelters and other resources. Frustrations among migrants fueled protests that blocked major roads and bridges. Mexican officials cracked down harder by rounding up immigrants and packing them into already overcrowded detention centers.

A Biden administration official would not comment on the role U.S. policies played in the fire, except to say that it had taken place in a facility that “was not under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government.” A White House spokesperson expressed condolences to the families of those who died — but also didn’t answer questions about the policies that contributed to the incident and are still in place. Instead, he pointed to the ways that Biden had expanded legal pathways for immigration, calling it the largest such effort in decades.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, was among many legislators who’d warned Washington, and specifically Biden, that such a tragedy was inevitable. “The whole system in Mexico is partly a creation in response to initiatives that the United States began,” he said in an interview. “That’s why we should care, because we bear some responsibility.”

The dangers of outsourcing immigration enforcement to Mexico were clear to experts and political leaders on both sides of the border long before the Juárez detention center erupted in flames.

“Mexico is simply not safe........

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