Mexico is overhauling its migrant management to relieve pressure.

Benjamn Villalta, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan, couldn’t believe a Mexican immigration office would open in the middle of the night to issue him and 40 other migrants one-year humanitarian visas that would allow them to travel and work throughout Mexico.

“They took our information and we only had to wait about half an hour,” Villalta said, beaming. It was a stark contrast to his initial encounter with Mexican officials in early November, when he was imprisoned and then left at a remote Guatemalan border crossing. Undaunted, he tracked down a migrant caravan that had left Tapachula, walked with them for three weeks, and then accepted the government’s offer of a bus ticket to a different city and a humanitarian visa.

Such a scenario would have been unthinkable in the past, but it is now part of a fundamental revamp of Mexico’s approach to migrants at its southern border. It comes only days before the US and Mexico reached a deal on Thursday to re-implement a Trump-era policy known as “Remain in Mexico” at Mexico’s northern border under court order, which required asylum claimants to wait out their cases within Mexico.

Both sets of policy aim to relieve the respective governments’ immigration pressures. In the south, Mexico is attempting to alleviate mounting dissatisfaction among migrants held in Tapachula by the authorities. The previous administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which Joe Biden quickly canceled when he assumed office, was designed to deter asylum applicants by forcing them to wait in Mexico’s violent northern border cities.

Mexico was forced to look for ways to deal with the migrant caravans leaving Tapachula. Tapachula, a hot metropolis of 350,000 people, was overrun with tens of thousands of recent migrants after more than two years of a containment policy that kept migrants locked in the south, far from the US border. Many people have congregated in parks and plazas, moaning about their inability to obtain work.

According to the National Immigration Institute, the current idea is to relocate migrants to different states across Mexico and provide them with humanitarian visas that will allow them to work lawfully for a year.

The impact of the policy change is uncertain, especially because many migrants still want to reach the United States, but will do so from places closer to the border.

Thousands of people, predominantly Haitians, have been sleeping under trees and in the parking lot of Tapachula’s soccer stadium in recent days. They await buses that the Mexican government will employ to transport migrants to other cities, hoping for humanitarian visas, but they have no idea where they will travel or when the buses will arrive.

“I want to go to another place to hunt for employment,” said Edwine Varin, a Haitian migrant who sought shade under a sheet at the stadium with her husband and children. “How am I going to pay my rent if I don’t work?” How will I be able to afford food and clothes for my children?”

Jeferson, a Venezuelan migrant who only gave his first name, claimed he and his mother had just arrived in Tapachula. “We were coming by on the bus to turn ourselves in to immigration, and we saw all the people,” Jeferson explained. Later that day, an Associated Press correspondent saw them board a government bus, though it was unclear where it was going.

Migrants have sought to organize themselves with limited knowledge, but this has not always been successful. Some people have blocked roads in protest of the government’s failure to send extra buses. The immigration institute has not stated how many migrants have received humanitarian visas or been bused to other locations.

The United States will vaccinate asylum seekers registered in the program and help pay for efforts to house them in Mexico as part of the accord to re-implement “Remain in Mexico.”

Asylum requests have flooded Mexico’s system, as some migrants perceived it as a more accessible option than the United States. According to government figures released Wednesday, Mexico has received more than 123,000 asylum petitions this year, compared to roughly 70,000 in 2019.

Migrants were irritated by the delayed processing of asylum claims in Mexico’s overburdened system, as well as a lack of job possibilities and accommodation. Hundreds of people began leaving Tapachula in caravans in August, the first of which were forcibly disbanded by Mexican security authorities.

Others left in a more subdued manner. Thousands of Haitian migrants appeared across the border in Del Rio, Texas, almost unnoticed in September.

This year, Haitians have made up the majority of asylum seekers in Mexico, accounting for over 47,000 cases.

The number of migrants who receive humanitarian visas may still be small, but “it is a very significant change when compared to the confrontation the National Guard had with the caravans a few months ago and the severe experiences of control that migrants and asylum seekers faced,” said Tonatiuh Guillen, who led the immigration institute in late 2018 and early 2019 during President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration.

Others were not so upbeat. According to Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, a lawyer with the Fray Matias de Cordova Center, a voluntary organization that assists migrants in Tapachula, “it is an unplanned reaction” by immigration authorities. “They have people who are utterly unaware of the situation and believe they can move them like commodities.”

The Rev. César Caaveral, who leads the Roman Catholic Church’s migrant outreach activities in Tapachula, does not see it as a long-term answer. After the government issued similar visas in January 2019 in response to enormous caravans, he added, the migrants were sent back to Tapachula when their visas expired and were not renewed.

Authorities have also been recorded holding migrants who have proper clearance to travel north and returning them to Tapachula this year.

This time, though, the migrants who are getting them are relieved.

Josue Madariaga, a 28-year-old Honduran migrant, was already working in a market in the northern city of Monterrey a week after receiving his humanitarian visa. “They said they accepted me with insurance and everything because of my certificate!” Madariaga remarked.

Many migrants, on the other hand, will remain focused on the United States.

Villalta, a Nicaraguan migrant, had made it into Veracruz state with the caravan before accepting the government’s offer to be bussed to San Luis Potosi, a state in north-central Mexico, to obtain his visa. From there, he made his way north to Monterrey with other migrants, then to the Arizona border.

Villalta attempted to cross the border on Thursday after learning of the reintroduction of “Remain in Mexico.” He dialed his mother’s number and then crossed into US territory. He knelt and lifted his hands over his head when he saw the Border Patrol.

He expressed hope that paperwork verifying that he was politically harassed and tortured by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s regime would help him secure refuge in the United States before they resumed sending asylum seekers to Mexico.