His name was Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas. He was Mexican, was 32 years old and was declared dead on August 31, while he was arrested at the Central Arizona Correctional Complex in Florence. Batrez joins an infamous list. Since 2019, 69 migrants have died while they were in custody of the United States Immigration and Customs Control Service, ICE for its acronym in English. Only since Donald Trump won the elections in November 2024 are 14 people dead in ICE centers, three of them Mexican.
Lorenzo called him Lenchito. According to a fund collection page that his family in the United States has organized to move his body and organize his burial, he died alone and probably due to complications derived from the COVID-19, without receiving “the medical care he deserved”. “No family should ask if the life of his loved one could have fought more compassion, more care or more justice,” the text wishes.
His name adds to those of Chaofeng Ge, Tien Xuan Phan, Isidro Pérez, Johnny Noviello, Jesus Molina Vey Amechand Migrants from Mexico, Guyana, Canada, Ukraine, Ethiopia, China, El Salvador or Haiti, from 27 to 75 years, many with decades by calling the United States.
This is the case of Isidro Pérez, a 75 -year -old Cuban citizen, who after entering the country in 1966 was arrested last June 5 in Cayo Largo (Florida) and transferred to a center in Miami. In less than a month, he died of what is described as a heart attack. Also of the Mexican Jesús Molina Veya, who at 46 had already been expelled twice from the United States and, after being arrested in April in Atlanta, committed suicide on June 7.
“We are facing a policy and pedagogy of cruelty, which although it has been 35 years old, it seems that one of the edges of the government in the United States is the logic of spectacularizing this cruelty and uses, as distribution artists, to migrants in an irregular situation,” explains Amalela Varela, migration studies and professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico City. “And, although there are nuances, it is the same policy with the Republicans and the Democrats; Trump did not invented it, he is just making it more cruel.”
Since 2019, 69 people have died in Custody of ICE, according to the agency’s data. Only 2020, the last of Donald Trump’s first stage as president, exceeds the beginning of his second term. In that fiscal year, which goes from October 1 to September 30, 21 migrants died to which the United States authorities should have protected.
The wide and length of the United States there are more than 200 detention centers for migrants. These include public and private prisons and right now they have 61,000 people retained, almost twice the 37,000 that were when Trump returned to power. 70% have no sentence and, of which they are convicted, a significant number is for minor crimes to skip traffic standards.
It cannot be said that Trump is not fulfilling his promises. One of the pillars of its electoral platform was to offer an iron policy against migration. “The first day I will launch the largest deportation program in the history of the United States to get criminals,” he said in his campaign closure. As soon as he swears the position, he signed an executive order that declared the border with Mexico in national emergency; He closed the entry into his territory to asylum seekers, announced a physical wall again and sent agents of the law to be a human barrier; He ordered the arrests of all the migrants in an irregular situation and present against them criminal charges, in addition to seeking a legal path to remove citizenship by birth to their children …
Since then, it was declared hunting season of human beings. ICE agents monitor areas near schools, secondary and work centers throughout the country to find victims; There were police charges against day laborers while collecting the crops of the US fields – they had a Mexican worker – federal operations have been announced in the cities and jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with these policies … The list is too long, but the irony arrived last June, when Trump acknowledged that mass deportations were affecting sectors such as agriculture and hospitality, which depends just on the migrant labor force.
“Trump is on the other side of the wall, but the United States migratory policies have been exporting to Latin America based on blackmailing the governments of any political sign,” Varela academic reflects. Mexico, one of the most busy migrant corridors on the planet, crossed by thousands of them around the world who seek to reach the United States, is no exception.
With President Enrique Peña Nieto, the South Frontera program was established, which sought to stop migrants as soon as they entered Guatemala and, although Andrés Manuel López Obrador began his sexennium (2018-2024) with the promise of a more humanitarian treatment towards the “migrant brothers”, Trump threatened to impose tariffs if Mexico did not meet their demands. The country went from arresting 180,000 migrants a year in 2018 to 1.2 million in 2024. In addition, the inhuman treatment in the detention centers of Mexico became evident with the death of 40 people during a fire in a immigration station in Ciudad Juárez. It remains to be seen how Claudia Sheinbaum’s six -year term, but for now there is a decrease in these figures.
In the United States, every time a migrant dies in an ICE detention center, the agency sends a statement. All close with the same mention: “ICE maintains its commitment to ensure that all people under their custody reside in safe, protected and human environments.” They do not seem that they are fulfilling that work.
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