Ferromex Guards Beat Moroccan Migrant in Northern Mexico

Marrakech – A Moroccan migrant suffered the most severe beating in an attack by private security guards in the northern Mexican city of Torreón, where rights advocates have filed a formal complaint over the incident.

According to multiple Mexican media outlets, the assault took place on the evening of May 26 near the railroad tracks by the Cotton Museum, in the western part of Torreón, Coahuila state. Six migrants were at the site when at least 12 security guards from the railway company Ferromex arrived and ordered them to leave.

Three of the migrants fled. The remaining three – the Moroccan and two Venezuelans – could not escape and were attacked.

Etna Xtabay Muñoz Barbosa, coordinator of the Juan Gerardi Human Rights Center, recounted that the guards directed their violence at the Moroccan, in part because he did not speak Spanish. The two Venezuelans tried to tell the guards he could not understand them, which drew further aggression.

“The one they went after the most was the Moroccan,” Muñoz Barbosa relayed, describing how guards struck his head with batons. When the Venezuelans intervened, the guards fired rubber bullets at them.

The men were then kicked on the ground. One had his head smashed against the pavement and was afterward stepped on. One of the Venezuelans was thrown into a pool of sewage water. One of the migrants later reported feeling dizzy from the blows to his head.

According to the legal adviser for the Centro para Migrantes Jesús Torres, a nearby shelter, the guards also stripped the men of the belongings they were carrying.

The three returned to the shelter, where they were treated and their injuries documented. Staff gathered photographs of the wounds and recorded the names of the victims.

The migrants declined to file a legal complaint. Muñoz Barbosa attributed their reluctance to fear and to their wish to continue their journey, hoping their paperwork would be accepted and grant them a more stable legal status.

“They no longer wanted to stay, and that is also a concern given the physical condition in which they left,” the coordinator noted.

The Juan Gerardi Human Rights Center and the Centro para Migrantes Jesús Torres lodged a complaint with Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) and issued a formal reprimand to Ferromex, calling for urgent changes to its security protocols.

Muñoz Barbosa pointed out that aggressions against migrants by Ferromex personnel occur regularly, though none had reached this level of violence. On March 26, the center documented another case in which a migrant was held at gunpoint with a rubber-bullet weapon after being subdued.

The disclosure came as the Centro para Migrantes Jesús Torres marked its 15th anniversary on May 28. Between May 2025 and April 2026, 1,557 migrants passed through the shelter.