America should be ashamed of our role in the fiery death of 38 refugees

Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy is dangerous, inhumane, and goes against everything we stand for as a nation of immigrants. My administration will end it.

— Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, posting on Twitter on March 11, 2020

They died just hundreds of yards from their goal after a journey of thousands of miles. They had traveled from their homes in Venezuela or Guatemala or Honduras or elsewhere in Central America — surviving the inhospitable desert and preying human smugglers and other unimaginable hardships, driven by the dream of a better life in the United States. Instead, Mexican agents rounded them up and tossed them in a crowded detention center just a stone’s throw from the U.S. border.

The tense situation in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican metropolis that borders El Paso, was a powder keg waiting to go off — literally, as it turned out. Late Monday night, a fire broke out at the Ciudad Juárez Temporary Shelter on the banks of the Rio Grande where Mexican authorities were detaining undocumented migrants, including dozens who’d been taken off the streets that afternoon. The cause of the fire is not confirmed, as officials probe whether detainees lit mattresses on fire to protest crowded conditions or their possible deportation.

Not much is yet known about the ensuing horror inside the male holding area where 38 died — their bodies laid out Monday night on metallic sheets outside the facility — and another 28 were injured. A closed-circuit video taken as the fire was spreading shows uniformed workers at the detention center — staffed by Mexican government employees and private contractors — walking away from the smoky scene instead of trying to free the trapped men.

Viangly Infante Padrón later told the El Paso Times that she was in a nearby waiting area, after her Venezuelan husband, Eduard Carabello, had been rounded up by Mexican immigration agents while selling roses on a street corner. Infante Padrón, whose husband is hospitalized, pleaded with officials to do something. “I screamed, ‘Open the door!’” she said. “That whatever the case, they are human beings and deserve to live. And they let them burn inside.”

Had this blaze — with its staggeringly high death toll and evidence of fatal neglect by the authorities — taken place just a mile to the north on U.S. soil, it might have dominated the news cycle, rivaling the latest mass shooting in Nashville for attention. Instead, the TV networks and major U.S. newsrooms seemed to treat the tragedy in Ciudad Juárez as “a Mexico story” and gave it surprisingly short shrift.

After the initial reports, some attention has been paid to the alleged misconduct of the Mexican guards and the reaction of the nation’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has flipped from initially blaming the migrants to pledging a homicide investigation. For at least a time on Wednesday, the story had completely disappeared from the homepages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I wonder how much of the American downplaying of this nightmare in Ciudad Juárez is willful ignorance on our part — a refusal to confront our own shameful role in this episode. That’s because the reason that refugees are overrunning the Mexican city — some estimates place the number at 20,000 — is that U.S. policy is forcing these migrants to stay south of the American border, their actual goal.

The gasoline for this fire is President Joe Biden’s immoral continuation of Trump’s same or similar programs to turn away desperate asylum seekers that candidate Joe Biden called “dangerous, inhumane, and goes against everything we stand for as a nation of immigrants” — a broken campaign promise with deadly consequences.

“It’s so much easier to ignore when it’s not on U.S. soil,” Kennji Kizuka, the director of asylum policy for the International Rescue Committee, the New-York-based global refugee relief organization, told me on Wednesday. The International Rescue Committee and other immigrant-rights groups have been increasingly critical of the Biden administration for continuing Trump-era policies that aim to punish migrants in an effort to deter them from coming to the United States.

And the policies don’t work — Central Americans or Venezuelans continue to surge toward the border, driven by factors like political unrest, murderous gang violence, and natural disasters prompted by climate change. “No amount of cruelty is pushing them away,” Kizuka said. “It’s just leaving them in these dangerous situations.”

» READ MORE: President Biden’s ‘mistake’ at U.S. southern border isn’t what clueless pundits, GOP think it is | Will Bunch

Since taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration has uneasily walked a tightrope, seemingly trying amid political and legal restraints to shift gears from the Trump-era policies he derided as inhumane, but ultimately continuing the gist of those programs — loathed by so many of the people who voted for him in 2020.

The Biden administration did officially end Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, but a COVID-19-era restriction on asylum seekers called Title 42 has remained in place until its scheduled expiration this spring. Additionally, refugees have faced long waiting lists and inexplicable delays in getting appointments with U.S. immigration officers — some of them blamed on a glitchy government app called CBP One supposed to ease the problem.

In February, the Biden administration stunned and disappointed many advocates by announcing a new border policy for May’s expected end of Title 42 that is so limiting — with rigid requirements around using the app or seeking asylum in countries along their route, including Mexico — that its many critics call it “an asylum ban.” Administration officials said the restrictions — both similar to Trump policy and containing elements that have been struck down by judges in the past — are needed to prevent chaos on the border.

But with the 2024 campaign approaching, the border moves appear in line with Team Biden’s other right turns on issues such as crime and energy — seemingly to head off negative blasts from Fox News and political carping from his right. It’s even been reported that the White House has discussed bringing back one of the most reviled policies of the Trump years — detention of migrant families — in its desperation to make the border crunch disappear.

“The U.S. border policies have prevented people who are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border from seeking asylum,” the International Rescue Committee’s Kizuka told me, chronicling a history of restrictions that actually started in the mid-2010s with Barack Obama, who imposed a system of “metering” that has been struck down in the courts. “As a result they get caught up in terrible conditions, whether that is the terrible conditions at some of the shelters at the border region or the dangers they face from the cartels but also problems with Mexican Migration [officials] — that’s what happened this past week.”

This isn’t the first time that the deterrence policies at the border — the ones that utterly demolish the welcoming myths of the Statue of Liberty, and that 2020 Joe Biden called inhumane before 2023 Joe Biden boosted them — have killed people, and it likely won’t be the last. These policies lead to smuggling deaths like the 53 migrants found suffocated in a truck near San Antonio just last year. The fiscal year that ended in 2022 was the deadliest ever for migrants crossing the border — including desperate human beings who died of thirst on desert trails or drowned in the Rio Grande.

We can all agree it’s a difficult problem, since the only real long-term solution to mass migration — addressing climate change and poverty and crime, some of that tied to decades of imperialistic U.S. policy, so that folks stay in their native lands — would take years even if we had the political will to act. But while there’s no magic wand, there are many alternatives to the current fiasco — hiring more asylum officers and immigration judges, better shelters and supervision for refugees, including access to attorneys, and better cooperation with Mexico on more humane alternatives for those who remain south of the border.

Could Monday’s horrific news from Ciudad Juárez change anything? Not when we’re barely talking about it. Frankly, I’m more than a little disappointed in the many people I’ve considered allies who spoke out or tweeted frequently during the Trump years about the cruelty of POTUS 45’s border policies and posted photos of crying moms yanked from their kids or masses of humanity held under bridges — yet who are silent today.

Yes, I’m not naïve about the political bind here — that Trump and his clones like Ron DeSantis are threatening America with 21st century fascism, and our best hope for stopping that will be Biden running again at age 82. But Biden beat Trump in 2020 by promising moral and humane policies at the border, so why run in 2024 by shattering that vow in a million pieces?

If you are as heartbroken over the needless deaths of 38 men seeking to breathe our U.S. air, then join me in telling the White House that Americans won’t stand for border policies that are dangerous, inhumane, and go against everything we stand for as a nation of immigrants. And that it’s the same whether that president has a “D” or an “R” after his name.

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