This was announced by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador last Tuesday: “About 9:30 at night, a fire broke out in a migrant shelter on the border, in Ciudad Juárez (…) 39 migrants lost their lives . (…) they found out that they were going to be deported, mobilized and, as a protest, they put mattresses from the hostel at the door of the shelter and set them on fire. They did not imagine that this was going to cause this terrible misfortune.
What the 68 foreigners who were locked up in that place did not imagine either is that none of their guards would open the doors for them so they could escape the flames that killed 40 of them.
It will be the FGR that clarifies what happened, although it is likely that we will not be given the full version of the case since since Tuesday the main officials in charge of the immigration issue politicized it by trying to exculpate themselves, throwing the ball at others.
AMLO blamed, first, those who set fire to the mats and, later, journalists who “are very interested in this, more because of the pain it can cause them, because of the sensationalism. I’m looking at the social media thing, all our adversaries and most of the media are against us.”
The Secretary of the Interior Adán Augusto López Hernández, interviewed by Joaquín López Dóriga in Grupo Fórmula, blamed Marcelo Ebrard when he said that “there is an agreement within the government and it is Marcelo, the Secretary of Foreign Relations, who is in charge of the immigration issue.” , while he limited himself to responding via Twitter that “I leave any consideration of a political nature for other times. Each one must do what corresponds to him in this hour”.
The “internal government agreement” that López Hernández used to hold Ebrard accountable is the decree issued by AMLO in September 2019 that created the Inter-Ministerial Commission for Comprehensive Care in Immigration Matters, dependent on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose purpose is ” act as a coordination body for the policies, programs, and actions that the agencies, decentralized administrative bodies, and entities of the Federal Public Administration have in immigration matters, for the fulfillment of the objectives, goals, and coordination strategies established by the Commission in said matter”.
However, the current Migration Law indicates that the Ministry of the Interior is responsible for “Fixing and suppressing the places destined for the international transit of people” and that the National Institute of Migration (INM), which is a decentralized administrative body of said secretariat , it corresponds to “Present people in immigration stations or in places set up for this purpose” and that “For the presentation of migrants, the Institute will establish immigration stations or enable provisional stays in places of the Republic that it deems appropriate” .
Based on the foregoing, it is to be assumed that the INM manages the Ciudad Juárez immigration station in accordance with the “policies, programs, and actions” coordinated by Foreign Relations.
AMLO would do well to clarify this point in order to establish responsibilities.
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