Mexico City, 28 March 2023 (dpa/MIA) – At least 39 people have died and a further 29 injured in a fire in a shelter for migrants in northern Mexico, on the border with the United States, Mexico's INM immigration authority reported on Tuesday.

The migrants at the facility in Ciudad Juárez, which is south of El Paso, Texas, are believed to have started the fire after being informed they were about to be moved to a different location.

"In protest, they placed mattresses in front of the door of the shelter and set them alight," President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily press conference. The fire had then got out of control. Obrador expressed his sorrow at the tragedy.

According to the INM, there were 68 adult men from Central and South America in the shelter on Monday night.

According to media reports, the migrants had been detained at various border crossing points in Ciudad Juárez during the previous day. They were taken to the migrants' shelter ahead of deportation to their countries of origin.

Thousands of migrants fleeing poverty, violence and political crisis seek to reach the US via Mexico. The US border protection agency recorded more than two million attempts to cross the border into the US between October 2021 and October 2022.

They increasingly include migrants from Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba, alongside those from Central America.