Watch: In a Mexican border city, some migrants give up on asylum

Dozens of migrants sent back across the international bridge into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, by U.S. officials were offered a free bus ride to the Mexican interior, where they could find transportation back to their home countries. Many of them took it.

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

The migrants, most of them from Central American countries like Honduras and El Salvador, said they thought they could claim asylum in the United States to escape the violence and political instability in their home countries. They were confronted by new U.S. policies that either forced them to wait to cross the bridge and claim asylum, or sent them back to Mexico as soon as they had made their asylum claims — and then forced them to wait weeks or months for their court dates so they could argue their cases to U.S. judges.