HOUSTON, April 18, 2023 (BSS/AFP) - A Texas-based NGO called Monday for Mexico to end all immigration agreements with the United States after documenting hundreds of cases of abuse which it said occurred amid a "militarization" of Mexican policy toward migrants.

The Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR), based in El Paso, Texas, documented 202 cases of alleged abuse perpetrated against 56 migrants since 2022, according to its annual report released Monday.

More than half of the cases occurred under Mexico's National Migration Institute (INM), although abuses involving the Mexican National Guard, Police and Navy were also identified.

The report's release comes weeks after 40 migrants died after a fire broke out at an INM facility in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso.

Mexican authorities have accused the people in charge of the facility of doing nothing to evacuate the migrants, who were locked in their cell during the blaze.

Such facilities are ostensibly temporary service and accommodation centers for foreigners who cannot prove their legal stay in Mexico, but rights groups -- as well as individuals who have stayed there -- describe conditions more similar to prisons, with frequent overcrowding.

Fernando Garcia, BNHR's executive director, said at a press conference on Monday the INM "has to go."

"This is not only because of what happened in Juarez, but because this is systemic, it's happening elsewhere, everywhere," he said.

Some anonymous accounts of abuses were read at the conference, such as those of a Cuban who accused the Mexican National Guard of shooting at a vehicle in which he was traveling with others in Chiapas in 2021, killing one of the migrants and then trying to plant a gun to accuse them of a confrontation.

A 39-year-old Ecuadoran, interviewed in October 2022, said he had been detained for more than a month in an INM facility, and that at night they put padlocks on the doors of the rooms where they slept.

The United States has for years pressured Mexico to take further steps to limit the number of migrants illegally crossing its southern border.

"In the current immigration policy agreements between Mexico and the United States, it has become clear that Mexico is subjugated to the inhumane and erroneous practices of militarization, detention, and deportation used in the US," the report said.

It urged Mexico to "review and terminate all agreements made with the United States on migration policy, especially those that have led to the militarization of migration strategy and the overcrowding of migration and refugees in detention centers."

According to Amnesty International, in 2022 authorities detained at least 318,660 people in immigration facilities and expelled some 106,000, including minors.