2023-04-22 17:03:45
Many of the residents apparently also lost clothes, documents and other humble belongings that they had inside.
Some 25 makeshift dwellings were intentionally set on fire this week in a migrant camp near the Texas border, according to witnesses, in a sign of the extreme danger of being stranded in Mexico, to which President Joe Biden’s government is increasingly resorting. to welcome people fleeing poverty and violence.
The fires broke out Wednesday and Thursday in a large encampment of regarding 2,000 people, mostly from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico, in Matamoros, a city near Brownsville, Texas.
A pro-migrant activist said the makeshift dwellings were doused with gasoline.
People fled when their stores caught fire, said Gladys Cañas, who runs the group Ayudandos A Triunfar. Those affected say they were told to leave the area, she added.
The press did not report on deaths or injuries. However, some 25 rudimentary shelters made of plastic, canvas, branches and other materials were set on fire in a sparsely populated part of the camp.
Many of the residents apparently also lost clothes, documents and other humble belongings that they had inside.
Margarita, a Mexican woman who remains in the camp, said Friday that she had witnessed migrants from Venezuela screaming during the fire the previous day.
They had children with them and few things, said Margarita, who requested that their last names not be used for fear something might happen to her.
Criminal groups recently threatened migrants who cross the border river illegally, as well as their guides, Margarita said, although foreigners continue to do so.
The thugs often abuse migrants in the area, demanding money in exchange for allowing them to pass through their territory.
The reasons
However, Juan José Rodríguez, general director of the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants, a state agency that coordinates its work with the Mexican federal government, said he had no information that any gang had caused the fires.
Rodríguez blamed a group of migrants for the fire and pointed out that some 10 precarious dwellings already abandoned were burned.
He added that it appears the migrants set the fires to show their frustration with a US government cell phone app that assigns them turns to appear at the border to apply for asylum.
Migrants aspire to obtain one of the 740 places available daily through the CBPOne application, which is not without flaws but which helps them to legally enter the United States at an official crossing.
The number of migrants outstrips available places, exacerbating tensions in Mexican border cities that receive migrants, often in shelters and camps like the one in Matamoros, Tamaulipas state, in northeastern Mexico.
Last year, hundreds of migrants blocked a major pedestrian crossing between Tijuana and San Diego until authorities controlled the protest.
On Wednesday night, in Matamoros, some 200 migrants gathered on the southern flank of an international bridge and paralyzed traffic in the direction of the United States, reported the Office of Customs and Border Protection of that country (CBP for its acronym in English). ). The vehicles managed to resume their traffic following two hours and the passers-by following four hours.
CBP did not mention the fires at the camp in Mexico in its statement regarding the bridge closure. The fires in the precarious dwellings in Matamoros followed the one that occurred on March 27 in which 40 men perished in a migrant detention center in the border town of Ciudad Juárez.
The fire was allegedly caused by a migrant detained in protest of the poor conditions in which they were in the place, near El Paso, Texas.
The US government has turned increasingly to Mexico as it prepares to end, on May 11, asylum restrictions imposed during the pandemic under so-called Title 42 authority.
Mexico recently began to accept people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who cross the border irregularly and are returned to Mexican soil by the United States.
The Biden administration is also putting the finishing touches on a policy that denies asylum to people who cross another country, such as Mexico, to reach US soil.
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