López Obrador visits city where blaze killed 39

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president on Friday visited the border city where 39 migrants died in a fire at a detention center, expressing pain over the disaster, but he was not expected to bring any changes in immigration policies.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he was devastated by Monday’s tragedy in Ciudad Juarez, which is across from El Paso, Texas.

“I confess it hurt me a lot, it damaged me,” López Obrador said before starting out on his trip to Juarez. “It ripped my soul apart.”

The president said the fire was the second-most painful moment of his administration, exceeded only by a 2019 pipeline fire in the central Mexico town of Tlahuelilpan, which killed more than 130 people.

But the detention center blaze hasn’t cost him much politically.

Many residents of Mexican border cities mourned the death of the migrants in the smoky mattress fire, which was set by some migrants to protest perceived moves to deport them. But in Ciudad Juarez, many peope were fed up with migrants largely from Central America and Venezuela begging for change at street corners and blocking border bridges.

They and residents of other cities have been calling for authorities to be tough with migrants, and the U.S. pressures Mexico to curb the flow of migrants.

Ivonne Acuña Murillo, a political science professor at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, said López Obrador doesn’t have much maneuvering room to change Mexico’s immigration policy.

“It would be difficult, on one hand, because of the enormous pressure from the United States” to stop migrants arriving at the border, Acuña Murillo said. She added that “it is difficult in terms of the president’s own policy goals … the budget for migration and shelters and all of that is low.”