In February 2017, Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, a Mexican man in his mid-40s, killed himself by jumping off of a bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, which lies directly across the border from San Diego, California.
The suicide took place just minutes after Olivas Valencia had been deported from the United States for the third time. Symbolically, he jumped holding the plastic bag that had been issued to him by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for his belongings, as CBP customarily does for deportees.
Now, nearly five years later, US border policy continues to destroy lives – and Tijuana continues to serve as an epicentre of destruction.
The Joe Biden administration has just reinstated the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) – the criminally euphemistic Donald Trump-era policy that saw Tijuana and other Mexican border cities converted into holding pens for asylum seekers in the US. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.