CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) \u2014 When smoke began billowing out of a\u00a0migrant detention center\u00a0in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Venezuelan migrant Viangly Infante Padr\u00f3n was terrified because she knew her husband was still inside.<\/p>\n
The father of her three children had been picked up by immigration agents earlier in the day, part of a recent crackdown that netted 67 other migrants, many of whom were asking for handouts or washing car windows at stoplights in this city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.<\/p>\n
In moments of shock and horror, Infante Padr\u00f3n recounted how she saw immigration agents rush out of the building after fire started late Monday. Later came the migrants\u2019 bodies carried out on stretchers, wrapped in foil blankets. The toll: 38 dead in all and 28 seriously injured, victims of a blaze apparently set in protest by the detainees themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was desperate because I saw a dead body, a body, a body, and I didn\u2019t see him anywhere,\u201d Infante Padr\u00f3n said of her husband, Eduard Caraballo L\u00f3pez, who in the end survived with only light injuries, perhaps because he was scheduled for release and was near a door.<\/p>\n
But what she saw in those first minutes has become the center of a question much of\u00a0Mexico is asking itself: Why didn\u2019t authorities attempt to release the men \u2014 almost all from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador \u2014 before smoke filled the room and killed so many?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was smoke everywhere. The ones they let out were the women, and those (employees) with immigration,\u201d Infante Padr\u00f3n said. \u201cThe men, they never took them out until the firefighters arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey alone had the key,\u201d Infante Padr\u00f3n said. \u201cThe responsibility was theirs to open the bar doors and save those lives, regardless of whether there were detainees, regardless of whether they would run away, regardless of everything that happened. They had to save those lives.\u201d<\/p>\n