MEXICO CITY.- On Monday, March 27, Doralvys got up very early because she had a mission: to buy a birthday cake for her 5-year-old son.
At 6:00 in the morning, she left a migrant shelter with Juan, her husband, and they began to sell candy on the streets of Ciudad Juárez.
"The only thing we wanted was to be able to buy the cake for the child, because he is not to blame for everything we have suffered since we walked out of Venezuela 11 months ago. The children are innocent," explains Doralvys, who is a Venezuelan migrant , a native of Lara state, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.
For hours they sold the sweets in front of a fire station, and Juan cleaned the windshields of some drivers, while the hours passed.
Doralvys bitterly recalls that when they were about to get the 350 pesos (about $19) that the cake cost, a contingent of Mexican police and immigration agents arrived who loaded them into an official van.
"That was at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then they took us to the immigration station that is next to the bridge. I was there, and they mistreated us a lot inside, the immigration people yelled at us, and they handcuffed and handcuffed my husband. They beat him because he didn't want to go where the men were locked up," he says.
Doralvys affirms that she and her husband were held in those facilities from 1:30 pm until shortly after 5:00 pm, hours before the fire started at that station of the National Institute of Migration in Ciudad Juárez.
"
About 5:00 in the afternoon they released us. Luckily, because in Mexico now they burn us alive
," she explains with a broken voice.
Two Venezuelan sisters sit and console themselves in front of the detention center where the fire that killed dozens of people broke out, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Tuesday, March 28, 2023. Fernando Llano / AP
"When we arrived, they separated the men and women. They left us in a separate space, but they locked the men behind a fence. My husband didn't want to be put in there, he resisted a lot and that's why they hit him. They mistreated us terribly, and at five in the afternoon they released us. Later we saw that the men who were there, many died from the fire," explains Doralvys, in an interview with Telemundo News.
Immigration people yelled at us, and they handcuffed my husband and beat him."
Venezuelan Migrant Doralvys
According to the government's version, the migrants set fire to the mattresses in protest after receiving notification that they would be deported.
This Wednesday, the Chihuahua state government raised the number of deceased migrants to 39.
Protest in Mexico over tragedy in Ciudad Juárez migrant center
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More people were released before the tragedy
"We left for the American dream, but we still haven't seen it. We are living a nightmare," says Jeailin Vanessa Vergara Machado, a Venezuelan migrant who was outside the burned-out immigration station on Wednesday morning.
Vergara Machado was also inside those facilities, until a few minutes before the fire started.
She explains that her daughter had a fever and begged to be taken out of the station, which
sparked tensions between immigration staff and the migrants held until she was released.
["This fire is the result of the pressure cooker that Ciudad Juárez has become on the immigration issue," experts denounce]
"We continue with the application, but today it did not open for us. For two months we have tried every day, but it does not work for us," he says about the failures of CBP One, an application launched by the US government to process asylum applications.
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, assured this Wednesday that his administration "does not hide anything" about the fire in the immigration facilities where, at that time, almost 70 migrants from countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela were detained. and Ecuador.
"The immigration station is a place that should have a maximum capacity of 30 people, and it is estimated that there were more than 60," says Emilio López, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua.
Tragedy in Ciudad Juárez was foreseeable, according to activists
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According to official figures, the National Institute of Migration has 35 immigration stations in 26 states that can accommodate 4,300 people.
In the last year, more than 44,000 arrests were registered, 44% more than in 2021.
"Those defenseless people were burned"
Academics like López, activists, and migrants have denounced the poor conditions of the burned-out space where the migrants were held.
[The fire at the Ciudad Juárez shelter started when migrants burned mattresses in protest of being deported: AMLO]
"It is a farce that shelters and spaces worthy of stay for people who are requesting asylum in the US are being created and in reality I think it is a humanitarian crisis," said Alethia Fernández de la Reguera, an academic at the University Autonomous National of Mexico.
"They take everything away from you when they put you in that station, and now they're saying that we set fire to that? That's impossible, they burned those defenseless, innocent people. Their sin was to seek a better life," he asserted. Doralvys, sadly.
Security videos that have been released by the Mexican media show impassive agents while detained migrants asked them to open the door.
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An academic analysis advanced by López, specifies that the incident occurred at approximately 9:00 pm, and caused the mobilization of firefighters, the Red Cross, and municipal rescue and state security personnel.
At that time, Wenceslao Arias had spent the entire day looking for his friend Rannier Edelber Requena Infante, who was detained by immigration authorities on Monday morning.
Both are Venezuelan migrants and they established a great friendship, in the midst of the dangers of the long land journey to Mexico.
[Ciudad Juárez, the land where the dreams of so many migrants die: “Why did they deceive us, why?”]
"I went to the station, but no one knew how to give me news about him. I searched everywhere, and nothing. The authorities did not give me information, and at 8:00 at night they rather wanted to get me inside. Imagine, I would have burned everything," explains the 24-year-old, who is a paramedic by profession, with panic.
At 11:45 pm, the Chihuahua prosecutor's office reported the death of 27 people and dozens of injuries.
Since then, the figures have varied but are close to 40 fatalities.
Arias was eating this Wednesday morning at Casa Betania, the soup kitchen for migrants of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario parish.
Many migrants who do not have financial resources usually gather there and go to the parish charity to eat.
He says the atmosphere was gloomy because many people were exhausted after hours of searching for their acquaintances who disappeared after the fire.
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Reading an official list of victims, Arias began to cry desperately because Rannier, the friend with whom he shared hardships and jokes on his long journey, was burned to death at the station where he had gone to pick him up.
["Those directly responsible" for the Ciudad Juárez tragedy "have been brought before the Prosecutor's Office," says the AMLO government]
"If they had given him to me, he might be alive.
Now I have to call his wife and tell her about this tragedy.
He leaves behind two small children, his dream was to get to the United States to give them a better life. Now he is in heaven, because it was a good man. And we stay in this hell," Arias asserts.