Border experts: Immigration politics over humanitarian crisis sparked tragedy

The tragedy inside a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in March 2023 was sparked long before the deadly fire, border lawmakers and immigration experts said.

“It showed the consequences that could come from immigration politics on both sides of the border,” said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight with the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and human rights advocacy organization. “On one end, you had U.S. border expulsion policies and on the other Mexican enforcement policies – both focused on detention and deterrence that historically have not been effective immigration policy.”

The U.S. Border Patrol reported a record 2.5 million migrant encounters at the Southwest border – about427,000 of those in the El Paso sector – in the 2023 fiscal year that ran from October 2022 to September 2023. The sector encompasses El Paso County and New Mexico.

From October 2023 to this January, just under 962,000 encounters have been reported – a decrease of about 9% over the same time the previous year. The El Paso sector saw a 50% decrease in encounters in that time period, with about 96,000 encounters reported.

Much of the influx last fiscal year came ahead of Title 42 expiring in May 2023 as migrants arrived en masse at the border before the pandemic-era public health policy ended. Under Title 42, migrants could be quickly expelled back to their home countries or to Mexico without the steep consequences that Title 8 and other immigration laws carry, including years-long bans on re-entry.

At the same time, hundreds of migrants were stranded in Juárez awaiting the resolution of their asylum cases under the U.S. Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as Remain in Mexico.

In one day alone – Dec. 19, 2022, two days before Title 42 was originally set to end before a federal court order kept it in place – a record 12,000 migrants arrived at the Southwest border without authorization to enter, the Migration Policy Institute reports.

Nearly 10,000 migrants who had made their way to El Paso that week were expelled or sent to other Border Patrol sectors for processing to help the region manage the rapid influx, DHS said in a press statement at the time.

The statement said that the agency had been working with Mexico to “discourage disorderly migration and disrupt criminal smuggling operations.”

That sharp influx of migrants overwhelmed U.S. border communities and Mexico, which was under increased pressure from the United States to hold back the line on migrants making their way north, said Stephanie Brewer, director for Mexico at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Brewer said Mexico’s response to heightened immigration was highly militarized – primarily handled by Mexico’s armed forces rather than the National Migration Institute – and relied on detention to attempt to curb that trend.

Under President Andres Manuel López Obrador, Mexico in 2019 created a new National Guard composed of soldiers as well as federal police to operate under the command of the military. That came as former U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut off trade from Mexico if it didn’t do more to stem the flow of migrants arriving at the border. The Mexican National Guard was deployed to the southern and northern borders to assist in the detention of migrants, Brewer said.

“Migration, like migration without a documented status, is not a crime,” she said, particularly if people are seeking asylum. “International law says detention should be the last resort because people should be able to go through their immigration process as a general rule of freedom.”

Brewer said that Mexico’s immigration issues have been brewing for years with numerous recorded complaints about poor conditions and corruption at migrant detention facilities across the country. A fire in a detention center in Tabasco near the Gulf Coast left one person dead and more than a dozen injured in 2020, she noted. A fire also broke out at the same Juárez center in 2019, though no deaths or major injuries were reported at the time.

The March 2023 fire inside the Juárez center killed 40 migrants and injured another 27. Two migrants are charged with setting vinyl sleeping mats on fire, and nine immigration officials and private security guards are facing an array of charges from failing to perform their duties to homicide.

A months-long investigation by El Paso Matters, La Verdad and Lighthouse Reports discovered a series of failures that made the incident so deadly, including a lack of sprinklers, fire extinguishers and emergency exits.

Security video footage obtained by the investigative media team shows immigration officials and private security guards asking each other who last had the key to unlock the men’s cell – and the immigration official in charge at the time saying in Spanish: “We are not going to open (the cell) for them, I already told those guys” – leaving the men trapped and dying from smoke inhalation.

Tension leads to heated encounters

Months before the fire, however, the migrant influx to the region had created a tense situation on both sides of the border.

In Juárez, a number of heated encounters between migrants and law enforcement officers were reported, including in November 2022 when Mexican authorities dismantled a Venezuelan make-shift camp set up along the Juárez side of the Rio Grande.

In early March 2023, officials with the National Migration Institute, Mexican National Guard and Juárez municipal police conducted migration control operations on the riverbank and raids in hotels and churches.

On the day of the fire, Juárez municipal authorities, including police and personnel of the city’s office of human rights and social assistance for families agency, accompanied INM agents to sweep up migrants from the streets and took them to the provisional migrant center.

The El Paso-Juárez area became the focal point of the migrant humanitarian crisis, though the influx of migrants was impacting all of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Immigration: Political battleground

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said the bigger picture is a broken immigration system in the United States – as well as in Mexico and across the globe.

In the U.S., Congress has for more than 30 years failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform, she said. In fact, the last comprehensive immigration reform was approved during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Since then, various administrations have implemented band-aid policies to address immediate challenges rather than seeking long-term reforms, Escobar said.

A bipartisan immigration reform bill she proposed with a Republican congresswoman from Florida last year didn’t advance, but Escobar said she hopes to reintroduce it with more bipartisan support.

Earlier this year, proposed bipartisan immigration legislation tied to additional aid for Ukraine fell apart – Republicans arguing it didn’t meet their demands for heightened border security measures and Democrats contending it didn’t do enough to protect migrants.

Human rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union called the plan punitive because it would increase detention, restrict access to asylum and close down the border.

Immigration has long been a hot political topic during elections, Brewer said, often leading to rhetoric over action.

As the U.S. and Mexico are in a presidential election year, immigration will remain at the forefront of political discourse.

In Texas, immigration has become a political battleground as Gov. Greg Abbott criticizes and challenges the Biden administration’s policies, increasing Texas National Guard presence along the border, installing barriers along the Rio Grande and continuing to bus migrants out of the state under the controversial Operation Lone Star.

Border lawmakers and human rights organizations have criticized Abbott’s tactics and rhetoric on immigration, saying they put migrants in danger.

The Texas Legislature last session passed an array of border security bills aimed at deterring migrants from entering the country illegally. Among them is a state law that increased the minimum sentence for people convicted of smuggling immigrants or operating stash houses from two to 10 years. Another makes it a state crime to cross into Texas from Mexico illegally, which was set to begin starting March 5.

The constitutionality of the latter, part of Senate Bill 4, was challenged in the courts by the ACLU and the El Paso County government, among others. The law has been making its way through the courts, with a federal judge in Austin issuing a preliminary injunction halting its enforcement and a New Orleans-based appeals court reversing that decision. The U.S. Supreme Court on March 4 halted the law, issuing a temporary stay until it considers it.

Leaving the homeland: Global migration

The migration phenomenon is not just impacting Mexico and the United States.

“This is not just an issue that America is facing; this is a hemispheric issue,” Escobar said. “And we are seeing the movement of tens of thousands of people who are leaving their homeland for various different reasons.”

Among those factors are natural disasters such as hurricanes and the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic – and the inability of some South and Central American countries to recover from either, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank.

Spontaneous migration has become the “new norm” across the Western Hemisphere, “reflecting growing displacement that is fueled by political instability, violence, slow post-COVID-19 economic recovery, human rights abuses, poverty, and climate events,” the MPI states in its report, “Shifting Realities at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” released in January.

Escobar said that in the discourse about the movement of people, migrants’ home countries are often overlooked.

“The home country for each migrant is also to blame,” she said. “The rise of authoritarianism, the decline of democracy in many of these countries and the corruption in others, leaders of those countries where migrants are leaving – they truly shoulder a big part of the blame because they have created an environment hostile to their own citizens. And we don’t talk about that enough.”

This special investigation was a joint project by Rocío Gallegos, Blanca Carmona and Gabriela Minjáres of La Verdad; Cindy Ramirez of El Paso Matters; and Jack Sapoch, Monica C. Camacho and Melissa del Bosque of Lighthouse Reports.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Immigration politics over humanitarian crisis sparked tragedy, experts say