The Pan de Vida migrant shelter, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which houses two hundred asylum seekers in a cluster of yellow cabins, is a half-hour drive from the nearest port of entry, in downtown El Paso. The surrounding streets are bare and unpaved, with a few small houses made of cinder block dotting the roadside. When I visited, on a sweltering afternoon in August, none of the residents I met were comfortable going outside, not even in broad daylight. “It’s just too dangerous,” Denis, a thirty-eight-year-old from Honduras, who was with his daughter and son, ages thirteen and seven, told me. A few nights earlier, he said, a truck full of armed men in masks circled the grounds of the shelter a few times, and then left. No one knew who they were, what they were looking for, or when they might return.

Denis was especially nervous. A few months earlier, his wife had left the city of San Pedro Sula with the couple’s two other children, including the eldest, who, at seventeen, was being targeted to join a local gang; after he resisted, gang members began threatening the entire family. Denis stayed behind to earn a bit more money before following with the couple’s other children. His wife arrived at a port of entry in El Paso, and immigration agents allowed her and the children to enter the U.S. while their asylum case was pending. Denis planned to use the same process. But, shortly after he and the two children reached Juárez, in mid-August, a group of local gangsters kidnapped them and held them for five days in an abandoned church on the outskirts of town. They eventually escaped and travelled directly to the U.S. border crossing. “It doesn’t make sense to try to cross illegally,” he told me. “The smugglers will just take your money and then abandon you.”

By the time they arrived in El Paso, the asylum process had changed: Denis and his children were briefly detained, given a court date in December, and then sent back to Mexico to wait, under a U.S. policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (M.P.P.). For Central Americans trying to obtain asylum in the U.S., M.P.P. now requires them to remain in Mexico for the duration of their legal proceedings, which can last several months. When it’s time to appear before a U.S. immigration judge, asylum seekers must travel back to the port of entry and reënter custody; at the end of the day’s proceedings, they’re bused to Mexico, where they must remain until their next court date. Denis didn’t understand all the details, just that he and his family were being shunted back to the place where they’d been kidnapped days before. “I begged them. I said, ‘Put me in prison. Do anything to me, whatever you want. Just let my kids through,’ ” Denis told me. “My biggest fear is that in Mexico they’ll rape my daughter.”

Since M.P.P. went into effect, in January, in Tijuana, the Department of Homeland Security has extended it, city by city, to locations along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. In mid-March, it came to Mexicali and Juárez. In July, M.P.P. was instituted in the state of Tamaulipas, on the Gulf of Mexico, a stronghold for criminal cartels. Close to fifty thousand asylum seekers have now been returned to Mexico, where many of them have faced extreme levels of violence. On August 3rd, cartel members arrived at a shelter in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, demanding that the pastor in charge, Aarón Méndez, hand over a group of Cubans to be ransomed; when Méndez refused, he was abducted, and he hasn’t been seen since. Later in the summer, a few miles away, a dozen asylum seekers who’d just been returned to Mexico were promptly kidnapped. “The people in migration turned us over to the cartels,” one of the victims later told Vice News. “They know what they are doing. They don’t care if you’re killed or not.” According to an analysis by Human Rights First, there have already been three hundred and forty-three reported cases involving the rape, kidnapping, and violent assault of asylum seekers in the M.P.P. program.

Nearly everyone at Pan de Vida had been placed in M.P.P., including a few people who were no longer sure where they stood in the process. Gabriel, a Honduran who was sleeping in the same cabin as Denis, along with fifteen other people, retrieved a small slip of paper from his wallet, an artifact of the period before M.P.P. was instituted in the El Paso area. At the time, Customs and Border Protection agents “metered” migrants at the ports of entry, using an informal system in which migrants were given a number on a waiting list and told to come back when it was their turn. Since March, while asylum seekers from other countries continue on the wait-list protocol, Central Americans have had to go through M.P.P. Gabriel didn’t realize it, but the five-digit number on his slip of paper corresponded to the old system. The next time that he goes to the port of entry, he’ll be put into M.P.P., and the waiting will begin again.

The residential cabins at Pan de Vida are on the perimeter of a large, dusty plot, where a makeshift soccer pitch and playground are hemmed in by a border made of rubber tires. A mess hall with an open kitchen and long tables sits at the front of the compound. Outside, a weathered blue pickup truck was filled with trash bags, which the shelter’s director would soon drive to a nearby dump. I was walking back to the mess hall, preparing to leave, when two women approached me from one of the cabins. “Don’t you want to talk to us, too?” one of them asked. Her name was Dilcea. She was from Honduras and was travelling with her twelve-year-old son, Anthony. The two had been in Juárez since June and had their first court hearing in mid-August. “There were so many people in the courtroom that I wasn’t given a chance to say anything to the judge,” she said. She had wanted to explain to him that she had diabetes and was running out of insulin.

The other woman, Betty, was from Guatemala City. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Marielos, followed quietly behind her. After arriving, in early August, the two of them had been given a court date for late October, but they’d been robbed immediately after returning to Juárez. Betty had kept their court documents and identification in her purse, which was now gone. In theory, she could arrive early on the day of her court date and try to explain the situation to a border agent. But there was an added complication: without identification, how could she prove that she and her daughter were, in fact, related? Marielos would turn eighteen in September, making her a legal adult. Would the government treat her as a minor, based on when she first arrived at the border? Or was there a chance that the government would now split mother and daughter into two separate cases? The only consolation of their long wait to return to El Paso, Betty told me, was that they had some time to try to sort out what to do.