A Salvadoran father and daughter were photographed lifeless on the shores of the Rio Grande after a failed attempt to enter the USA. The baby girl can be seen with her arm still wrapped around her father’s neck, while the two lie face down on shallow banks of the bordering river.

The father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 26, and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria, drowned just a kilometre away from an international bridge.

A reporter for the newspaper La Jornada, Julia Le Duc, told the Guardian that Óscar ‘crossed first with the little girl and he left her on the American side. Then he turned back to get his wife, but the girl went into the water after him. When he went to save her, the current took them both’.

The picture serves as a reminder of the repercussions of poorly conceived anti-immigration policies which do little to stop border-crossings but go a long way in terms of dehumanising immigrants.