Migrants are facing risks and opportunities at the border.

For many Americans, the scenes that unfold on the US-Mexico border are visceral and chilling. In the dark, a 7-year-old Honduran girl is touring to keep up with strangers. From northern Mexico to Texas, she reached on the dangerous journey. A migrant deported from the United States crying in a park across the international bridge in Mexico. Through customs and border protection agents – and soon after deportation, a group of men stands in the shadow of the border wall.

There are opportunities and risks for those who cross the border, especially children unaccompanied by an adult. New President Joe Biden promised to withdraw the policies implemented by his predecessor Donald Trump on asylum seekers arriving at the southern border. It is unknown precisely who the new government is allowing into the country. Still, thousands of children from Central America and Mexico who have arrived in recent weeks are currently in US authorities’ custody. Some families have been sent to their relatives who live in the United States while they wait for their appointments in the asylum court.

The flow of migrants on the southern border of the United States is increasing for the third time in seven years under Republican and Democratic presidents’ administrations. Unlike the Trump presidency, the Biden government has chosen not to deport 7-month-old Honduran immigrant children, as photographed by the Associated Press in Texas this week., who arrive at the southern border unaccompanied by an adult. And based on the new rules implemented by the Biden administration, some families with “acute vulnerabilities” are being turned over to their relatives in the United States and allowed to apply for asylum, while others in almost identical circumstances have not been authorized.

Migrant children and adolescents who travel from Mexico to the United States face uncertainty, fear, hope, and much waiting. Recently, in a plaza near the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge port of entry, a deported migrant child threw a paper airplane into the air while playing with other migrant children in the city of Reynosa, Mexico.

A day earlier in Brownsville, Texas, a boy grabbed the arm of a migrant woman while they waited for a humanitarian group to process them after Border Patrol agents processed and released them at a bus station. Every day there are similar scenes in towns in Mexico and the United States, images of the different fate of migrants who arrive by the thousands at the border.