There was a fire at a detention center in Mexico, causing 39 migrants to die. It is currently being investigated as a homicide because of video evidence that shows that there was no action taken in terms of evacuating the migrants. There are 8 people who were identified as allegedly responsible for the failure. The fire is believed to have been started by migrants to protest deportations. A lot of migrants spent the night outside the National Migration Institute waiting to receive information about their friends and families. There was a false rumor circulating on social media that migrants who surrendered at a specific part of the border, could freely cross into US territory. This caused 100s of migrants to line up. Two dozen migrants were interviewed many of them saying that they were fleeing violence and discrimination in Mexico. One person even said when referring to the detention center “they treat us like criminals.”
The central message of this article was focused mainly on the migrants. Letting the people who were impacted by this fire tell their story was clearly a priority. I think this was the main thing that influenced the overall tone of the writing. The article started with more focus on the legal repercussions for the lack of action taken during the fire and by the end it was much more focused on the experience of immigrants who were trying to cross into the US. As well as immigrants who were coming directly from that detention center. Immigrants in general were painted in an overall positive light.
Their honestly was not a lot of quantitative evidence. Numerical evidence was at least somewhat prevalent. The two numbers that were the most important in this article were 39, which was the number of people who died in the fire, and 200,000 which is the number of migrants who try to cross the border into the US every month. Both statistics were only mentioned one or two times. It was clear that it was not the main point of the article. I think that the author could have done more with those numbers. I do wish there had been some more quantitative evidence. Maybe some information about how many people were at the detention center at the time of the fire to get an idea of the percentage of people who died. It would also have been interesting to know about the number of people who were injured because that is something that was mentioned briefly but not really covered in the article. We know that people were injured but we have no idea how many.
This article was filled with qualitative evidence. Mainly in the form of quotes. In the beginning of the article the quotes were more focused on the specific event (the fire) and what happened. A lot of these quotes came from Sara Irene Herrarías who is a prosecutor specializing in human rights. At the end of the article there were quite a few quotes from migrants about why they were fleeing in the first place and how scary it was to do. There were also some personal accounts from the migrants who were able to flee the fire about how they were treated in the facility. These quotes were coming more from the migrants themselves.
I think that there was a good amount of evidence in this article. Even though I wish that there was more quantitative evidence I think that the qualitative evidence carried the piece well. The article was simple and easy to read. The information that was given mostly focused on the migrants. I wish that there had been a bit more focus on the homicide investigation that was mentioned a few times towards the beginning of the piece. One thing that really stood out to me was the fact that they mentioned title 42 which is something more specific that we have discussed in class. Overall, I think that this article was very related to class themes in multiple ways.