The day was cold and utterly still, only occasionally interrupted by the horns of passing cars in solidarity. The five-star blue and white flag of Honduras fluttered in the wind, one of many symbols commemorating the deaths this week of 39 immigrants trapped in a fire at a detention center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

“It was a state,” read one poster in Spanish.

“No man is illegal,” read another text raised by a Mexican immigrant.

A small but passionate group of demonstrators took a stand Friday afternoon in front of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles to protest what they condemned as the inhumane immigration policies of the governments of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and President Biden. Immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, who gathered on Park View Street, expressed their emotions about the tragedy.

Indignation. sadness rage fears Pain.

“It’s a shame,” Francisco Moreno, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Council of Mexican Federations, lamented the fire that killed 18 Guatemalans, seven Salvadorans, seven Venezuelans, six Hondurans and one Colombian. More than two dozen other immigrants were injured in the fire, the cause of which is under investigation. On Thursday, a Mexican court issued arrest warrants for six people in connection with the fire, with no impact on the activists or families of the victims.

Moreno was born in Michoacán, in west-central Mexico, and is a veteran of the protests against former President Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. Now he condemns the López Obrador administration for what he sees as the implementation of the Biden administration’s directives, in the same way that former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, according to Moreno, conceded to former President Obama.

“The guilty must fall, and not just the jailers, the politicians must fall, the people in charge of immigration policy in Mexico, because it is unfair,” he said.

Calling for justice, demonstrators gathered around a bronze statue of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, whose assassination during mass in March 1980 sparked an unprecedented wave of migration from the Central American country to the United States.

Among the protesters was Salvador Sanabria, a Salvadoran activist and director of El Rescate, who arrived in Los Angeles seeking asylum just days after the archbishop’s assassination.

Leoncio Velasquez of Los Angeles (center) takes part in a demonstration in memory of the people who died in a fire at the US-Mexico border detention center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

(James Carbone/Los Angeles Times en Español)

“It makes me angry and horrified,” Sanabria said. “I wonder what mentality the people in charge did it with when it could have been avoided?”

Activists and scholars say the tragedy in Ciudad Juarez is linked to the violence that has swept across the border in recent years as drug cartels and organized crime have turned into vast human smuggling networks, leading to shootouts between rival gangs, kidnappings and torture. people traveling north. During this time, successive US administrations increased pressure on Mexico to crack down on migrants and prevent them from entering the United States.

A small group of people from Central America and Mexico hold the flag of Honduras during a demonstration in front of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles on Friday in memory of people killed in a fire that broke out in a detention center on the US-Mexico border. in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

(James Carbone/Los Angeles Times en Español)

“Mexico has become the new wall,” said Sanabria, who said last week’s deaths would be a deterrent to others contemplating the hard way.

“That means they don’t make it to the northern border of Mexico, because if they cross the border and get arrested in the United States and deported to Mexico, what will happen to them?” Sanabria said, referring to the fire in the detention center.

Since the summer of 2014, due to pressure from President Obama, Peña Nieto’s government implemented the Southern Border Program, a move that increased militarization and surveillance along the border, resulting in 93,613 arrests in the first 12 months.

This policy subsequently encouraged smugglers known as “coyotes” to take more dangerous routes to the United States.

“Most of the migrants have to cross Mexico because that’s the route we have to get here,” said José Bautista, a Honduran, although he said it meant risking his life.

Another demonstrator, Juanita Calel, who fled war-torn Guatemala for Los Angeles in 1996, said people looking for better opportunities will keep trying to get on the road, no matter the smuggler debts they accumulate or the dangers they face. face.

“What happened really saddens me,” the Huehuetenango native said, adding that “I am more saddened by their relatives who stayed in our country of origin and the debt they left behind.”

When the protest ended, a few participants were left to roam, play and – in some cases – sleep among tents used by homeless people who live in MacArthur Park.