Tents at Mexican migrant camp burn down from Texas border

Mexico City, April 22: About two dozen makeshift tents were set ablaze and destroyed this week at a migrant camp across the border in Texas, witnesses said Friday, a sign of a potential crisis in Mexico as the Biden administration becomes more reliant on the country as a host. People fleeing poverty and violence at great risk. Fires engulfed a sprawling camp of about 2,000 people, mostly from Venezuela, Haiti and Mexico, in the city of Matamoros, near Brownsville, Texas, on Wednesday and Thursday. An immigration advocate said they were doused in gasoline.

“People fled after their tents burned,” said Gladys Cañas, the director of Ayudandoles A Triunfar. “What they said in their testimony was that they were told to get out of there.” There were no reports of death or serious injuries. But in sparsely populated parts of the camp, about 25 rudimentary shelters made of plastic, tarps, branches and other materials burned. Many people who lived there also apparently lost clothing, documents and other mundane items that may have been left inside. Mexico-US border: Fire at migrant facility kills dozens.

Margarita, a Mexican woman living in the camp, said Friday she had seen migrants from Venezuela screaming during the fire the day before. “They’ve got kids and other things that they’ve had access to,” Margarita said. She was on condition that her last name not be released out of fear for her safety. Gangs have recently threatened migrants illegally wading across the river’s border, as well as their guides, Margarita said, but the crossing continues.

Criminal groups routinely prey on migrants in the area and demand money in exchange for allowing them to pass through its territory. However, Juan Jose Rodriguez, director of the Migration Institute of Tamaulipas, a state agency that coordinates with Mexico’s federal government, said he had no information that a gang was responsible for the fires. Northern Mexico immigration institute fire: 39 dead, many injured in fire at U.S.-Mexico border detention facility.

Rodriguez blamed them on a group of migrants and said about 10 tents that had been abandoned had been burned. He added that they set the fire apparently to express displeasure with a U.S. government mobile app that assigns rotations for people to show up at the border and apply for asylum.

Migrants have been applying on the glitch-ridden app CBPOne for the 740 daily slots that allow them to legally enter the United States through official border crossings. The migrants far outnumber available spaces, raising tensions in the Mexican border cities that host them, often in shelters and camps like Matamoros.

Last year, hundreds of migrants blocked a major crosswalk between Tijuana and San Diego until authorities shut down the protest. In Matamoros on Wednesday night, about 200 migrants gathered on the south side of an international bridge and stopped all U.S.-bound traffic, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported.

Vehicles were able to resume crossing the road about two hours later, and pedestrians were allowed to cross the road about four hours later. CBP made no mention of the fire at the Mexican camp in its statement about the bridge closure. The tent fire in Matamoros came on the heels of a 27 March blaze that killed people. 40 men at a Mexican immigration detention center in Ciudad Juárez.

The fire was allegedly started by a detained immigrant to protest conditions at a city facility across from El Paso, Texas. The U.S. government is increasingly turning to Mexico as it prepares to end pandemic-era asylum restrictions, known as the Title 42 authorization, on May 11.

Mexico recently began accepting illegal border crossers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela being turned away by the U.S.

The Biden administration is also finalizing changes to a policy under which asylum will be denied to people arriving on U.S. soil through other countries, including Mexico.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)