The encargado of the shelter, whom I’ll call Iván, was unloading boxes of milk powder from a van out front. He hushed the dog and told me to head on up. I thanked him and started climbing an uneven staircase cut into the hillside. Flat white and cerulean blue were shellacked onto the adobe walls of the shelter’s four separate ramshackle buildings. Maybe 40 feet from where I stood on those steps, the U.S. border wall—its rusted steel bollards rising from the dry grass and brown dirt—stood directly on the other side of the street. I could have soft-pitched a baseball, or a ziplock of China white, straight over and into the United States. A surveillance aerostat balloon, its cameras ever monitoring, loomed fatly on the cloudless horizon. Blazing klieg lights, visible through the steel slats of the border fence, were outshone by the brightness of the late desert morning. Concertina wire coiled, birds flitted about, and a Border Patrol truck creeped up and down the sinusoidal hills. The whole landscape seemed redundant, notched too tight, artificially harsh.

The encargada of the shelter, whom I’ll call Magda, was sitting on a slippery metal folding chair in a dark, concrete-floored room, watching what looked like a cross between a Mexican morning news show and a dance contest playing on the wall-mounted screen: a woman with darkly kohled eyes and a short black-and-gold dress repeatedly did the Swim, pinching her nose and dropping her hips, eliciting explosive laughter from the other three hosts, all cartoonishly good-looking. I introduced myself to Magda and started to try to explain that I was a journalist working on a story about, and she jumped in to tell me how happy she was that a UN agency called IOM, the International Organization for Migration, had donated two dozen twin mattresses. Ten of them were still in their thick, partially ripped plastic, stacked in the corner. We got a television, too, she added, and we salvaged some drywall for the ceiling. As we talked and watched the news/dance show, a woman in a bathrobe and jeans lugged a five-gallon paint bucket with steaming hot water up the steps. Tilted by the weight of the bucket, she waved to us.

She’s from Guatemala, Magda told me. That’s her son, and she gestured to the room’s darkest corner, where a little boy was quietly hunched in a plastic chair, the lambent projections from a cell phone reflecting off his round face. I said hi and asked what he was watching. He glanced at me over the screen and leaned the phone forward. It took me a second to figure out what I was looking at: a video of a backhoe clawing out a hole.

His mother, the woman who had been carrying the bucket of hot water to bathe with, later told me that he was in love with construction vehicles. The boy, Ángel, was eight, and had gone more than four months without attending school. His mother, Patricia, explained that they’d been in the shelter since early December and were still waiting for a chance to ask for asylum. In another corner of the room, behind the woodstove, leaned a heavy-looking wooden cross that was almost as tall as the ceiling. A single razor blade was wedged into the downshaft.

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I’ve visited dozens of migrant shelters in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States over my years of reporting on borders and immigration. The shelters offer reprieve—a hot meal, new socks, a prayer—where migrants spend a night or two, recoup, and set off again. If they’re injured, especially weary, or needy for some extra reason, they can stay longer before continuing northward. In the last few years, more shelters—impromptu clusters of tents, hastily converted factories, or huddles under bridges—are popping up on migrant trails and along the world’s borderlines. These shelters are increasingly housing people for longer periods: weeks, months.

I asked Patricia how she and Ángel spend their days. They wake up, they eat, she cleans, he watches videos, they eat again, clean up. He plays with other kids if there are other kids around. Sometimes she goes to the store. She’s not allowed to work in Mexico, and she doesn’t have enough money to send him to school. I asked about the wall. It seems so close from our perch on the shelter’s landing that you could jump, volplane over, and land on the other side. She smiles toward it and comments: Allí está. There it is.

On the railing in front of us, like animal hides being left to dry, six pairs of wet-darkened jeans are turned inside out, pockets hanging. I once learned at a shelter outside Mexico City a quick way to measure if pants will fit. Wrap the folded waistline around your neck: If the edges meet, they’re a fit.

As they hope and wait, Patricia and Ángel have done what they can to make themselves comfortable. They’ve secured a bottom bunk and piled it in blankets: blankets hung from the nearby wall, a blanket threaded on the underside of the supports of the next bunk up, blankets folded as bumpers at the head and foot. The room’s beds are stacked four high: body upon body upon body upon body. And most nights it’s crowded, she said. In the bunk room, wood panels covered over parts of the broken concrete floor. A bright pink rag with maroon, green, and white stripes was fighting a leak seeping from the floor. A woodstove, its pipe doglegging out of a window, gave particulate weight and welcome heat to the air. Patricia and Ángel had to leave Guatemala, she told me, after receiving multiple death threats. When I asked who was threatening her, she said: The kind of people who follow through.

After a long pause, she said: There’s nothing left to do but wait. As it doesn’t seem like the Biden administration is about to open the asylum door anytime soon, I asked her how long she was willing to wait. She wasn’t sure but figured that eventually she would send her son to present alone at the port of entry (she’d heard they were letting some Guatemalan kids through) while she would hire a coyote and cross through the desert. I asked her where she’d find a coyote. They’re all around, she said, gesturing vaguely. Expensive, I added. (The going rates are ten thousand dollars or more.) She nodded.

A couple of weeks before talking to Patricia, I visited three separate shelters in Juárez. A cold snap had hit northern Chihuahua, and the migrants were miserable. People asked me: What can you do to help? I explained that I was a journalist and there wasn’t really anything I could do. I said I wanted to understand the reality of what they were living through, that few Americans saw for themselves the concrete human effects of U.S. immigration policies.

A young woman told me: We don’t want to be rich, we’re just trying to live. Our priority is our family, another woman said. An old man: What, sir, can you do to help me? I told him I could do nothing but I would be glad to talk to him. He told me an awful story of kidnapping and murder threats and his corner store being set on fire, and then he stood up and thanked me.

Patricia told me she sometimes cries when other migrants leave. You grow attached, tomamos cariño. We were still talking on our perch, gazing across the border. Iván, the encargado, had finished unloading the milk powder and tinkering under the hood of a van and had come up the steps to join us. He was wearing an old Beatles baseball hat, a greenish long-sleeved henley, thin-soled shoes with the Ferrari logo on the sides, blue oversized work pants. He took his hat off and on as he spoke and told me a story about how he and his wife were praying for tube-frame bunk beds to replace the wobbly homemade frames he’d put together, and then, a few weeks later, the good Lord (working through the IOM) gifted them tube-frame beds.

He later mentioned that he always tells migrants who are heading out, whether leaving the shelter or just running to a store, not to walk on the border wall side of the street. They, the bad guys, he called them in English, will think you’re going to jump the fence.

A couple hours later, when I was leaving, he reminded me not to walk on the far side of the street. Seriously? I asked. He raised his eyebrows.

It was about 10 years ago that I first visited the migrant shelter Hermanos en el Camino in southern Oaxaca. I was there researching a novel I ended up overwriting and which I should certainly shred at this point. Those were the years I was learning that what I was doing, or wanting to do, was actually journalism.

Since then, I have come to recognize the near impossibility of understanding, no matter how closely you observe them, experiences of violence that are not your own. Iván, the shelter manager, had spoken to me in hyperbole about what side of the street it was safe to walk on, but by doing so he was communicating a basic truth: Border cities like Nogales, and throughout much of the world, have been wracked by extraordinary levels of violence—both the state violence under the guise of “security,” and the violence performed by opportunistic smuggling and trafficking organizations—all of which can suddenly turn a sunny day or a simple stroll into something out of a nightmare. Such violence is neither ubiquitous, constant, nor indiscriminate (typically targeting the most vulnerable), but the borderline makes it always, at least, possible. That reality is something I will likely never be able to understand in the same way Patricia or Ángel understand it. And yet here I am, trying to bridge the unbridgeable.

The shelter in Oaxaca was still under construction when I visited a decade ago: It had been receiving migrants, sometimes hundreds, for years, but the facilities were bare. It can be so persistently hot in that part of Mexico that without air-conditioning or a fan blasting, sleeping indoors for the unacclimated is hard. I was offered my choice of sleeping arrangement, the same as everyone else: sprawled on a thin mat in the migrant barracks or laid out on one of the buildings’ roofs. I picked the roof.

I’d taken up with a thin, wispy-haired, pimply-faced, effeminate Guatemalan guy named Fredy who loved to sing: high-pitched, slow, happy songs he told me he had learned in the Guatemalan mountains. He was 19 and staying for more than the standard three days as he recovered from having been poisoned. He’d recently been kidnapped outside the shelter, forced to drink some noxious liquid, robbed, molested, and left by the side of a stream. He and I became friends immediately and kept in touch for years after that, until he abruptly stopped responding to my messages. I fear the worst.

That night, my first in the shelter, on the slightly sloping roof with the warm wind gusting and the looming moon overhead, I couldn’t sleep. In the early morning hours, when the surrounding low jungle began to buzz and cry, I finally began to doze off. But then, sounding as if coming from everywhere at once, a song began, a resonate, encompassing, rhythmic buzz. As it grew louder, then almost piercing, I began to make out the words:

The music was coming from a multi-speaker system mounted to a tricked-out garbage truck, and, as it neared, halted, and the garbagemen started feeding bags into the truck’s back-mouth, the music was so loud it hammered the song into my head deeply enough that it stayed there for years, and still occasionally inches its way to the surface.

I still remember, an hour or so later, Fredy singing the song in the hot dawn as the shelter began to come awake, the dogs stirring and scratching at nits, Cayetano the cook machete-chopping wood for the cookfire, and migrants pouring out of the barracks to sudsily brush their teeth in the open air, readying themselves for the train, La Bestia, that would carry them to the next shelter.

John Washington writes about immigration and border politics, as well as prisons, foreign policy, beer, and hats for various publications. He is a frequent contributor to The Nation and The Intercept. His first book, The Dispossessed —a narrative take on asylum policy and ancient history—was published by Verso Books. Find him at @jbwashing.