At least 38 killed in fire at Mexican migrant facility near U.S. border

After migrants in northern Mexico placed mattresses against the bars of their detention cell and set them on fire, guards quickly walked away and made no apparent attempt to release them before smoke filled the room and killed 38 men, surveillance video showed Tuesday.

Hours after the fire broke out late Monday, rows of bodies were laid out under shimmery silver sheets outside the immigration detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, which is across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, and a major crossing point for migrants.

Authorities originally reported 40 dead, but later said some may have been counted twice in the confusion. Twenty-eight people were injured and were in "delicate-serious" condition, according to the National Immigration Institute.

At the time of the blaze, 68 men from Central and South America were being held at the facility, the agency said. The institute said almost all were from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador.

In the video, two people dressed as guards rush into the camera frame, and at least one migrant appears by the metal gate on the other side. But the guards did not appear to make any effort to open the cell doors and instead ran away as billowing clouds of smoke filled the structure within seconds.

Adán Augusto López, Mexico's interior secretary, confirmed the authenticity of the video in an interview with local journalist Joaquín López Doriga.

Guatemala Foreign Affairs Minister Mario Búcaro said 28 of the dead were Guatemalan citizens. "We are going to look to find those responsible for this," he said.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the fire was started by migrants inside the facility who lit mattresses in protest after learning they would be deported.

"They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune," López Obrador said.

Tensions flair between authorities, migrants 

The detention facility is a short walk from the U.S. border and across the street from Juarez's city hall.

Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been running high in recent weeks in Ciudad Juarez, where shelters are full of people waiting for opportunities to cross into the U.S. or who have requested asylum there and are waiting out the process.

More than 30 migrant shelters and other advocacy organizations published an open letter March 9 that complained of a criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers in the city. It accused authorities of abuse and using excessive force in rounding up migrants, complaining that municipal police were questioning people in the street about their immigration status without cause.

The "extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this one," Felipe González Morales, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights of migrants, said via Twitter. In keeping with international law, immigration detention should be an exceptional measure and not generalized, he wrote.

Mexico's immigration lockups have seen protests and riots from time to time.

Earlier this month, hundreds of mostly Venezuelan migrants acting on false rumours that the United States would allow them to enter the country tried to force their way across one of the international bridges to El Paso. U.S. authorities blocked their attempts.

Mostly Venezuelan migrants rioted inside an immigration centre in Tijuana in October that had to be controlled by police and National Guard troops. In November, dozens of migrants rioted in Mexico's largest detention centre in the southern city of Tapachula near the border with Guatemala. No one died in either incident.

Mexico has emerged as the world's third most popular destination for asylum-seekers, after the United States and Germany.

But it is still largely a country that migrants pass through on their way to the U.S. It holds tens of thousands of migrants in an expansive network of detention centres and attempts to closely monitor movements across the country in co-operation with American authorities.

Asylum-seekers must stay in the state where they apply in Mexico, resulting in large numbers being holed up near the country's southern border with Guatemala. 

An estimated 2,200 people are in Ciudad Juarez's shelters, along with more migrants outside shelters who come from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and El Salvador, according to the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin.