For thousands of asylum seekers, there are many ways to wait at the threshold of the United States.

Parents and children sleep in tents next to bridges leading to Texas for weeks on end, desperately hoping their names and numbers are called so they can be let in.

Some pay bribes to get to the front of the line; others, determined to enter the country legally, wait patiently.

The Associated Press visited eight cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and found 13,000 immigrants on waiting lists to get into the country — exposed to haphazard and often-dubious arrangements that vary sharply by location.

The lines began to swell in the last year when the administration limited the number of asylum cases it accepts each day at the main border crossings.