As white smoke and orange flames began to fill the cell, a man tried to escape by frantically kicking the cell door. Another tried to protect himself from the heat by pouring water from a toilet over his body. The guards, meanwhile, appeared unconcerned on security camera video of the incident, walking out of the burning building as screams rang out on the street in downtown Ciudad Juárez.
Thirty-nine migrants died locked in that cell while the immigration detention center burned down on the night of March 27, and another died later in the hospital. At least one migrant in the cell allegedly set the fire in protest that guards had not given him food or water for 10 hours.
Survivors claim that those who died did so for a reason: they could not or did not pay a $200 bribe to security guards to be released.
Three survivors and two guards from the facility told VICE World News that the immigrant jail at the center of the tragedy was a de facto “extortion center,” where only immigrants with the means to pay were released. The others were to remain in jail and be sent to Mexico City or deported to their country of origin.
“If by chance you were arrested and held in this jail, there were only two ways out. Either you transfer $200 or they send you back to your country,” Joan, a Venezuelan migrant who said he paid to get out of the detention center, told VICE World News. She asked that her last name not be disclosed for fear of retaliation.
Joan, 28, was locked up at the center for four hours on the day of the fire, he said. He escaped death because his family in Venezuela transferred the money before 7 pm That is the deadline that, according to him, the guards gave him to deposit the money or be deported the next day.
“I’m only alive because my family paid,” he said, holding on to the bars outside the detention center a day after the fire, amid a crowd of migrants who had survived the fire or were still searching for their loved ones.
With information from VICE World News
