Every day feels like a bad dream to Timoty Correas. He spent five months in a jam-packed tent camp before moving weeks ago to a roach-infested hotel full of migrant families in a neighborhood, blocks from the US border where, he said, during the night local crime cartels would load crowds of smuggled people in and out of houses used as hiding places.

Like thousands of other people here, Correas and his eight-year-old son are stranded at the US border, always hoping that hardline pandemic-related restrictions will cease and the processing of asylum seekers by the US will resume.

Correas, a vegetable seller, fled Honduras to try to find his parents in Houston, Texas, after gang members took over his house with death threats in May. He planned to seek asylum in the US.

Correas traveled a month with smugglers through Mexico alongside a tide of other northbound migrants and reached Reynosa, across from Hidalgo, Texas, towards the eastern end of the US-Mexico border, in June.

But he and his son found the border essentially closed to asylum seekers.

Then, when he recently heard on TV news that the US would begin processing asylum cases through a reboot of former president Donald Trump’s controversial Remain in Mexico program, known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), he was hopeful.

Although the program would promise a further six-month wait, it was the best news he’d gotten since the summer.

“As I understand it, MPP will apply to families,” he said. “They’ll give us an opportunity to speak with a judge. It feels like a big help, a big step toward entering the US legally.”

Immigration advocates, however, are fiercely critical of the court-ordered reinstatement this month of the immigration policy that Joe Biden campaigned to repeal, after Trump forced migrants to wait in Mexico, typically in squalor and danger, while their cases wound interminably through a dysfunctional US system.

It was one of the final chapters of Trump’s harsh approach throughout, leaving migrants in limbo and greater numbers risking – and losing – their lives to cross anyway via border desert or river.

But for thousands of asylum seekers stranded for months on the border with no end in sight, MPP feels like a sign of movement and better than nothing from the US government, which has been expelling migrants under a rule known as Title 42 and blocking most asylum claims under public health grounds since March of 2020.

The latest iteration of MPP has kicked off slowly, enrolling 80 people in its first six days in El Paso, Texas, according to the publication Border Report.

The US plans to eventually offer MPP at seven ports of entry across the south-west border, although authorities haven’t given a firm timeline.

At a muddy tent camp in Reynosa, aid workers said it remained unclear exactly who would qualify for MPP, how many people it would eventually process or how strictly the government would adhere to humanitarian guidelines it set for itself.

“Everyone is real excited about it,” said Felicia Rangel, co-director of the Sidewalk School, an aid organization founded when migrant populations first began to accumulate in this area in 2019. “But it’s not a good thing.”

Until Trump brought in MPP in 2019, having already tried to block many asylum claims, those fleeing violence who hoped for political asylum were granted refuge in the US and allowed to join relatives in the country, who act as their sponsors, while their cases were heard.

Biden repealed MPP upon taking office but continued Title 42, summarily expelling migrants without a chance to make their case.

Up to 2,000 such people are living in a camp six blocks from Reynosa’s city center. An additional 1,150 are in tents in a shelter space supervised by the Pathway of Life church and hundreds more are in other shelters, crowded nearby houses or rooms rented by local charities.

“Ninety percent or more don’t plan to return to their country,” said Isaac Castellanos, pastor of the Shaddai Ministry church, which offered to host 125 people in tents on its property in late October as the local migrant population began to overwhelm the city.

“The option they are waiting for is through MPP.”

He said the city has been discussing a large, federally funded shelter for months, but without progress, forcing small private charities to assume support for the humanitarian debacle.

At the camp in Reynosa’s plaza, 35-year-old Belen Dubon keeps an “information desk” at a bench on the road to the bridge to Texas, where new arrivals come daily, expelled from the US after crossing the Rio Grande.

Dubon, a nurse from Guatemala City who has lived in this camp for almost six months, said newcomers are easy to recognize because US authorities remove their shoelaces before expelling them and because they are covered in dust.

Every day more than 100 people arrive, she said, escorted across the nearby bridge by US border patrol, then released on Mexican soil.

Dubon helps them find food at community kitchens in the camp and space on the crowded ground to sleep for their first night. But this camp and surrounding shelters are full, so many people seek a place elsewhere.

“Their guides who brought them come back and pick them up,” she said, referring to human smugglers. “I don’t know where they go.”

Most people here see no option to give up on waiting, she said, because they spent thousands of dollars of mostly borrowed money to pay smugglers to get them here.

Others, like Correas and his son, can’t return home because their houses were taken over by gang members. Others have sent their children across the border unaccompanied, in hope they would be able to apply there to stay, despite the prospect of being detained.

Some of those children’s parents in Reynosa told the Guardian they’ll wait as long as they must to reunite.

Parents such as Iris Betancourt, 36, who fled Honduras with her husband and three children in August after a local gang boss tried to make her 13-year-old daughter his wife and wound up at the camp in Reynosa.

Dangerous and unsanitary conditions kept the three kids mostly penned up in the tent, she said, while Betancourt’s sister in Houston encouraged her to send them to live safely with her.

On 31 October, Betancourt and her husband took the kids out for ice-cream, hugged them close all night then paid smugglers $500 per child the next morning to sneak them into the US, where they expected to be apprehended, and would give authorities the contact information for their aunt in Houston.

The kids spent a month and seven days in a secure New York City shelter under the US Office of Refugee Resettlement, then arrived in Houston this month, Betancourt said.

“I don’t know when I’ll see them again. I don’t know if I’ll wait here for years,” she said, crying. “I wonder every day, will I get in or not? Will the wait be worth the sacrifice?”

Aid workers say thousands of children have been similarly sent over by parents in recent months. Figures from US Health and Human Services show more than 13,000 unaccompanied children in government custody as of 10 December, with roughly 500 discharged each day to sponsors across the country.

Yet the parents who stay behind at the border face a slim chance of achieving legal entry into the US.

Under Trump, MPP had a less-than-1% acceptance rate for asylum cases.

Although Biden’s reboot lists new protections for enrolled migrants, it still isn’t clear exactly how the program will operate, said Alex Norman, a former paralegal who helps process emergency immigration parole cases at the camp in Reynosa.

“They aren’t going to have the capacity to process thousands of people who are here now,” said Norman, who sits in on calls between DHS officials and local aid organizations.

“Or the thousands who are on their way now that they hear there are asylum possibilities.”

Eleanor Acer of advocacy group Human Rights First told NPR that MPP was a “humanitarian fiasco” under Trump and would be so under Biden, too.

Yet migrants such as Correas, think any sort of shift in US policy is the best news he’s gotten after six months of limbo.

His parents fled Honduras in the 1990s when he was a child and his dream of bringing his own son to be with them in a safe city motivates him now to wait indefinitely.

“To be with my mom and dad, it will be the greatest gift of my life,” he said. “If I have to wait six or seven months like MPP says, then I’ll have to learn to adapt.”