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In February 2017, Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, a 40-year-old Mexican man, killed himself by jumping from a bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, directly on the border with San Diego, California.
The suicide occurred a few minutes after Olivas Valencia was expelled from the United States for the third time. Symbolically, he jumped on a plastic bag sent to him by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for his belongings, as CBP usually does for deportees.
Now, almost five years later, U.S. border policy continues to destroy lives, and Tijuana continues to be the epicenter of destruction.
The Joe Biden administration has recently reinstated the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) – the criminal euphemistic policy of the Donald Trump era, which turned Tijuana and other Mexican border cities into pens for U.S. asylum seekers.
According to a 2019 U.S. Department of Homeland Security release, the MPP took “unprecedented action” that would “help restore a safe and orderly immigration process … and reduce threats to life, national security, and public safety by ensuring that populations are vulnerable.” . receive the support they need ”.
In reality, of course, the organization made the most vulnerable populations even more vulnerable, forcing asylum seekers trapped on the border to face various risks of extortion, kidnapping, sexual violence and life-threatening – in other words, the same type. many of which first escaped the environment.
The whole setup was even more barbaric, of course, given the historically significant role the U.S. has played in helping to create the physical and economic violence that makes people’s homelands inanimate, from Honduras to Haiti and beyond.
As the MPP program takes on a new life, the lives of the people who go to Tijuana remain at stake.
The Coronavirus pandemic has provided an additional useful excuse for the U.S. government to briefly violate international law on expelling asylum seekers, even though U.S. citizens are allowed to cross the U.S.-Mexico border as many times as they want, whether they get vaccinated or not.
And yet, aside from the pandemic and the MPP, the US is constantly dispelling the asylum principle. The U.S. Immigration Council’s website states that while U.S. law clearly states that “anyone physically present in the U.S. or” reaching the border “should be allowed to seek asylum, CBP officials have ruled out the port of entry. thousands of people coming through, among other things, through a practice called ‘measurement’ ”.
This particular practice began in 2016, “especially at the port of entry in San Ysidro,” at the border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego.
I visited Tijuana in November of this year and received a personalized visit from the psychological torture of migrants in the backyard of the US, an immigrant rights activist living in Tijuana who prefers to identify only as Cris.
Warning of the US’s “violations of the asylum process”, Cris stressed that waiting at the border for asylum seekers was “unthinkable” five years ago, and that its normalization shows how “many basic legal concepts are being violated.” take ”(and limit).
Passing through the iconic “Monumental Arch” of Tijuana, which marks the entrance to the city center, Cris described the arch as symbolic of corporate capital, thanks to “free trade” agreements, while asylum is allowed to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. the applicants remain trapped underneath.
Appropriately, Cris said there was a “Welcome to Tijuana” sign under the arch, but it was removed on the day a group of activists launched a migrant rights organization in the city. They replaced it with a giant TV screen.
Our trip to Tijuana also included the El Chaparral migrant camp near the border, a sad and cold agglomeration of tents recently fenced off by city officials, which prompted a quote from a San Diego Reader camp resident: “These are. ».
The feeling of oppression there was probably not helped by the helicopter that was flying over it, and Cris said it brought back memories of November 2018, when U.S. law enforcement and asylum seekers pledged to pile up tear gas at the San Ysidro Passage.
How is this to protect vulnerable populations?
A few days before the US, Mexico and Canada signed a new and improved free trade agreement, tear gas, capital, you know, continued to rise.
After passing through El Chaparral, Cris and I walked across the bridge to San Diego, not far from where Guadalupe Olivas Valencia committed suicide in 2017.
On the bridge, we spoke to a middle-aged man from Michoacán, Mexico, who lived in Tijuana for four years after being deported from the U.S. and with an American accent that spoke mostly to us in English.
While it was usually dedicated to selling flowers crafted from palm branches, it has now expanded into thread-based designs, giving me a pink and blue ring with a protruding ring. I asked him what it was, and he laughed, “Who knows.”
He was regularly arrested by the Tijuana Police, who, despite being in contact with local methamphetamine distributors and the like, were reluctant to arrest people, especially asylum seekers and deportees, on suspicion of drug-related offenses. crimes.
Each arrest lasted 36 hours, which in itself made it difficult to do other things in life.
Cris and I were returning from the bridge in the direction of the arch, and Manu Chao’s song “Welcome to Tijuana” inevitably came to my mind, with the following rhyming lyrics: “Tequila, sexo y marijuana”.
And while these lyrics certainly have a more appealing ring than “suicide, animal cages, and the elimination of human rights,” another line of the song is true for many of the city’s migrant captives: “Welcome to Death” – “Welcome to Death”.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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