Photo credit: Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
M.G.B. is a historian of U.S. immigration politics and international migration.
“We’re not going to open [the door] for them. I told them already.” The words decisively uttered by a Mexican immigration agent lingered in the air as an overflowing detention center in Ciudad Juárez caught fire. The evening of March 27, 2023 marked the “worst tragedy in a government-run migrant detention facility in Mexico’s history.”[1] Forty Central and South American male migrants died, and nearly thirty others sustained severe injuries leading to comas, amputations, permanent lung and brain damage, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
As they looked for fire extinguishers and gathered the migrant women locked in another designated area of the building, National Institute of Migration officials obstructed the emergency evacuation of nearly seventy male migrants despite rising flames. Survivors and family members of the deceased did not receive adequate explanations about why dozens were left to suffocate for over half an hour as the center’s cell “filled with toxic smoke.”[2]
Christian barely survived the Ciudad Juárez fire. The 23-year-old Honduran migrant underwent emergency intubation and remained under an induced coma as his parents and pregnant wife mourned his likely death. After over a month in Juárez and El Paso hospitals, Christian was eventually discharged. “Why not me? Why was I saved?” the Central American asylum seeker wondered.[3] Amidst mass deaths and significant property destruction, the detained migrants of Ciudad Juárez were swiftly blamed for the lethal fire. Despite insufficient evidence, Mexican investigators quickly determined that detainees had set the blaze by lighting mattresses on fire, likely as a means of protesting the substandard and unsanitary conditions under which they were being held indefinitely. Joining the Mexican official response, American officials urged surviving migrants and others to “take heed of the tragedy” and “pursue legal methods” for entering the United States. Neither Mexican nor U.S. authorities acknowledged that many of those caught in the fire “were attempting to do just that when they were detained.”[4]
Mexican immigration authorities’ conscious and deadly abandonment of Juárez’s detained migrants also faded from view fairly quickly. The sparse federal and state investigations that resulted from the tragedy didn’t materialize into formal sentences. In January 2025, a federal judge suspended criminal charges against former head of the National Migration Institute (INM) Francisco Garduño, marking the quiet acquittal of the highest-ranking government official charged with wrongdoing for the fire. After a seven-hour hearing, Judge Víctor Manlio Hernández Calderón suspended Garduño’s charges under the condition that he “take courses in human and civil rights […] and issue a public apology to survivors and families of those who died.”[5]
Continued invocations of generalized chaos and unfortunate, yet unclear circumstances enabled an increasingly hazy memory of the Ciudad Juárez fire. Negligence became a big part of the story, as did isolated manifestations of “bad blood” against Central and South American migrants. The evil guards who wouldn’t let them out despite rising cries for help. The indifferent officials who didn’t look for the cell keys hard enough. Journalistic and watchdog investigations added texture to these accounts, revealing gross instances of institutional neglect such as empty fire extinguishers, nonexistent emergency exits, and overall hazardous detention facilities sanctioned by Mexican government authorities.[6]
Rather than an isolated or inexplicable “incident,” however, the Ciudad Juárez fire embodied a broader and longstanding tradition of diffused, extra-legal, and surreptitious violence, which since the 1980s, has shaped the experiences of millions of transborder crossers. Much like the faceless flames that engulfed the detention center, violence against migrants in Mexico has shocked and harmed those who experience it, while leaving little to no trace in the official record. While horrifying and deeply impactful, these quotidian forms of forgotten violence have emerged as one of the most prominent tools of social control available to criminal, capitalist, and government actors alike.
Historian Ana Minian accounts for this pervasive violence in their renderings of what many scholars have termed the “vertical” Mexican border, which has preceded crossings into the United States for growing numbers of non-Mexican migrants over the last half century.[7] “Violence and human rights abuses against refugees in Mexico became widespread as the border zone materialized and began to stretch into the interior of the country,” Minian notes, illustrating an increasing tolerance for official and unofficial violence by Mexican and U.S. immigration authorities across new vertical borders.[8] In the early 1980s, Mexican authorities entered a “Faustian bargain” to “suppress Central American migration into and through Mexico” in exchange for U.S. inaction about Mexican unauthorized immigration, as well as increased U.S. aid and trade opportunities.[9]
This recent history of Mexico’s transformation into a deadly “buffer zone” in which unremembered violence expels and eliminates migrants by the thousands manifested in the Ciudad Juárez fire.[10] The tragedy unraveled in the context of an increasingly lethal and uncrossable invisible Mexican border stretching across the entire nation. Today, Mexican hot zones are prone to heightened violence, with the U.S.-Mexico and Mexico-Guatemala borderlands leading the charge for indiscriminate killings, rapes, and other crimes and human rights violations against non-Mexicans by a diverse array of state and nonstate actors. In turn, increasingly consolidated systems of bribery, government corruption, and concentrated criminal activity have rendered safe passage in cold zones (particularly in the interior of the country) a function of how much money a migrant has to pay off criminal groups, kidnappers, local police, and immigration officials along the journey.
Unsurprisingly, remembrance and redress efforts of the Ciudad Juárez fire have been led by the migrants for whom violence is not forgettable, and for whom Mexico increasingly represents a source of unacknowledged but extremely real harm.[11]
Christian doesn’t remember how the fire started or who got him out of the detention center after he passed out from the heavy smoke. When he woke up, he was at El Paso’s University Medical Center, where he had spent two weeks following a month at the General Hospital in Ciudad Juárez. Christian’s brother Exequiel, who also survived the fire, says Christian shows signs of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. “He appears to be OK, but he’s not the same as before. […] He doesn’t want to talk about the incident but we know it haunts him everyday.”[12]
[1] “Smoke and Lies,” Lighthouse Reports, La Verdad, and El Paso Matters. March 19, 2024. https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/smoke-and-lies/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ramirez, Cindy. “Death Trap: Misplaced fire extinguishers. No sprinkler system. A key missing in plain sight. How a Juárez migrant detention center fire turned into a death trap.” El Paso Matters, March 19, 2024. https://elpasomatters.org/2024/03/19/juarez-migrant-detention-center-fire-investigation-anniversary/
[4] Trevizo, Perla. “How shifting U.S. policies led to one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history.” The Texas Tribune and Propublica. May 1, 2024. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/01/us-immigration-asylum-policy-juarez-fire/#:~:text=The%20dead%20had%20traveled%20there,and%2C%20like%20Arango%2C%20Venezuela.
[5] Carmona, Blanca. “Charges against top Mexican immigration official suspended in Juárez migrant detention center fire case.” La Verdad Juarez, January 28, 2025. https://kvia.com/news/border/2025/01/28/charges-against-top-mexican-immigration-official-suspended-in-juarez-migrant-detention-center-fire-case/
[6] For more on journalistic accounts of the El Paso fire see “Smoke and Lies;” “Death Trap;” and “How shifting U.S. policies led to one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history.”
[7] Minian, Ana. “Offshoring Migration Control: Guatemalan Transmigrants and the Construction of Mexico as a Buffer Zone.” The American Historical Review, vol. 125, no. 1, 2020, pp. 89-111.
[8] Minian, p. 97. Emphasis mine.
[9] Id., p. 92.
[10] Id., p. 89.
[11] Boudreaux, Corrie. “Mexico to compensate families of migrants killed in Juárez detention center fire.” El Paso Times, August 16, 2023. https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/juarez/2023/08/16/mexico-to-pay-families-of-migrants-killed-in-jurez-fire/70598305007/
[12] “Death Trap.”
