Armando Alejo Hernández went missing in the desert after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in May of 2021, but not before sending several last audio messages to his eldest son describing the difficult terrain and asking for help. “He wasn’t feeling so good, and he was out of water and food,” says Hernández’s 17-year-old son Derek. “The group got ahead, and then he lost the group.” Hernández was an undocumented worker in the United States for more than a decade before being deported in 2016. His wife and two sons, who are U.S citizens by birth, have pleaded with Border Patrol and the Mexican Consulate for help, without any luck so far. “This year we are going to break the record of migrants dying at the border,” warns Fernando García of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights, one of many organizations demanding that the Biden administration “fulfill their promise to change the inhumane policies at the border.”

This post was originally published on Democracy Now!.