On one recent morning, Damaris Girón, 18, shy, in a blue pleated skirt and wearing heavy makeup, was one of many carrying book bags on the bridge. She said that all 25 of her classmates at a Methodist school in El Paso lived in Ciudad Juárez.

“There are more parents who are afraid,” she said. Not that she was especially pleased with the commute. “I get tired,” she added, “with all the back and forth.”

But she appeared to be one of the few unhappy crossers. Alejandra Cabral, 19, beamed when asked about the heavy engineering textbook she carried. Ms. Cabral said that she was in her second year at the University of Texas at El Paso, and that she planned to stay in Ciudad Juárez when she graduated.

“I want to do something like what they do at NASA,” she said.

Most people in line had simpler plans.

Leticia Valenzuela, 53, was on her way to buy special milk and medicine for a child with a severe stomach illness.

Jose Hernandez, 21, was waiting with his skateboard, which he uses to get to work at a hospital in El Paso. Although he is a United States citizen, with an American father and a Mexican mother, he said he was in the slow line because thieves in Ciudad Juárez had stolen his car and his American passport.