CIUDAD ACUNA, Mexico _ A group of roughly 100 Haitians, Africans and South Americans cross the Rio Grande, just shallow enough for adults to wade despite an overnight storm.
As they wait on the muddy bank near Del Rio, Texas, to surrender themselves to the Border Patrol, the voices of children in the group carry across the river to the Mexican side.
There, in the city of Ciudad Acuna, hundreds of migrants have formed an impromptu refugee camp in an ecological park bound on one side by the river. Just outside the park, the official port of entry to the United States sits at the end of a short bridge.
They've crossed thousands of miles by foot, boat and bus to seek asylum in the U.S., only to find themselves stalled in a purgatory of soggy tents and overflowing bathrooms. Now, they face an uncertain wait prolonged by Trump administration policy.
The temptation to make the risky and illegal river crossing mounts daily.
"If you see people jumping over the river, it is because they are tired of staying here," said one resident of the camp, Luis, who declined to give his last name out of fear for the safety of his family back home.
Home for him would be the West African nation of Cameroon, where Luis was vice principal of a school until he fled last fall. He escaped a widening conflict between the country's English-speaking minority and its Francophone-majority government, which receives security assistance from the U.S.
He was jailed and tortured before escaping to neighboring Nigeria, Luis said. After a trek across three continents, he landed here, where he has waited for six weeks to present himself to U.S. officials at the Del Rio port of entry.
He hopes to join a sister in Ohio.
"At times, it is really disheartening," he said, "so it is difficult to wait."
Headlines from the border in recent months have focused on a surge of Central American families fleeing violence and poverty who have overwhelmed a U.S. immigration system geared primarily to handle single adults.
But reporting along the roughly 400 miles of the Rio Grande from Del Rio to Juarez, Mexico, shows a more complex picture of the kaleidoscope of people seeking shelter in the U.S. _ and the sometimes perverse incentives that encourage them to cross illegally.
Under a Trump administration policy called metering, U.S. authorities allow only a handful of asylum-seekers, if any, to pass through ports of entry each day. Luis had gone initially to Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas. But finding himself number 1,913 on the informal wait list there, he followed a Cameroonian friend to Acuna. Now his number is 315.
"Very few people are taken; others are going illegally," he said. "It is very simple to cross, but we don't intend to ... . We don't want to violate the laws of the United States."
In recent days, the wait list here reached 500, although because it is updated inconsistently, the true total was probably closer to 700 _ Cubans, Haitians and South Americans, as well as those from the conflict-torn African nations of Angola, Congo and Cameroon.
Some have waited upward of six months here and elsewhere to pass through gates like those just outside the camp, cross the international bridge and formally make an asylum claim _ as the Trump administration has admonished them to do.
Borderwide, about 15,000 migrants are believed to be waiting. Roughly 15,000 more have been returned to Mexico by U.S. officials under the administration's "Remain in Mexico" policy. They're required to wait south of the border until their cases wind through American courts _ a process that takes two years on average.
U.S. officials say metering is needed to deal with a flood of asylum-seekers; opponents have sued, saying the policy violates U.S. law that establishes a legal right to asylum.
The metering policy, begun in Trump's first year, when he boasted the lowest number of apprehensions at the border in nearly 50 years, has transformed even smaller Mexican border cities such as this one into overcrowded, fetid refugee waiting rooms, pushing many toward the river.
The pressure has continued to grow: Community leaders in Acuna recently informed the migrants that officials would soon close the camp. Its inhabitants don't know where they will go.
In the camp, those who wait are angry with those who cross for drawing unwanted attention from U.S. and Mexican authorities.
In the camp's two bathrooms, waste oozes out of the floor and sinks. Flies buzz around overflowing trash and unrefrigerated food. Temperatures are now often rising above 100 degrees.
Worst of all, many say, are the mosquitoes.
"Mosquitoes here are the size I have not seen in Africa," Luis said.
Still, he said, they will wait.
"Those of us who have come from Africa, especially from Cameroon, what we have gone through, I'm sure we will continue to wait here, even if it's a year," he said. "It is far better than anything we have seen in our country."
"In our nation, we slept with corpses."
