Drowned on their way to a new life: Horrific picture emerges of Salvadoran migrant father and his toddler daughter washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande as they tried to cross to US

Heartbreaking images reveal the tragedy of a father who drowned with his 23-month-old daughter as he went back to try and save her in the...

Heartbreaking images reveal the tragedy of a father who drowned with his 23-month-old daughter as he went back to try and save her in the Rio Grande while her mother watched on. 

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 25, and his daughter Valeria were found face down in shallow water on the Mexico side of the river across from Brownsville, Texas on Monday morning.

After waiting desperately for two months in a migrant camp Ramírez crossed the lethal currents near Matamoros first with his child before returning to other the side for his wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos, 21.

But their youngster, misunderstanding why she had been left on the other side got back into the water and Ramírez fatefully went in to save her.

Ávalos could only watch in horror as her husband and daughter were swept a few hundred yards downstream to their deaths.

Photos from the scene show his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl's head tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments. 

Ávalos said the family left El Salvador on April 3 and that they spent the last two months in Mexico at a migrant camp waiting for an appointment to apply for asylum to enter the U.S.

A Tamaulipas government official said the family arrived in Matamoros early Sunday and went to the U.S. Consulate to try to get a date to request asylum. 

It's not clear what happened to the family at the U.S. Consulate, but a shelter director said only about 40 to 45 asylum interviews were being conducted in Matamoros each week, while somewhere in the neighborhood of 800-1,700 names were on a waiting list.

Frustrated by the wait, Ramírez tried to swim across the river with his daughter on Sunday afternoon.  

Ramirez had contacted his sister, Wendy, via Facebook on Sunday afternoon and informed her of his decision to cross the river.

But three hours later, Ávalos called Ramírez's mother to tell her that her that he and their daughter had disappeared in the river. 

'They said they were afraid of how the situation with the migrants was under pressure from Trump, so they decided to cross the river,' Wendy told  the Salvadoran outlet El Diario de Hoy.

'The idea was to surrender to the United States migration [authorities].' 

A search was suspended after sundown Sunday.  

On Monday, the bodies were discovered on the bank of the river near Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas, and several hundred yards from where they had tried to cross, just a half-mile from an international bridge.

The southern U.S. border has seen a massive surge of illegal crossings in recent months, with more than 144,000 apprehensions in May alone.

Many of the migrants are from Central America, often in family units. Due to a patchwork of legal restrictions, Central Americans who cross the border illegally with children and request asylum are frequently quickly released into the interior to await a court hearing.

The searing photograph, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils of the latest migration crisis involving mostly Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States. 

From the scorching Sonora desert to the fast-moving Rio Grande, the U.S.-Mexico border has long been a deadly journey for those who try to cross illegally between ports of entry.

In recent weeks alone, two babies, a toddler and a woman were found dead on Sunday, overcome by the sweltering heat. 

Elsewhere three children and an adult from Honduras died in April after their raft capsized on the Rio Grande, and a 6-year-old from India was found dead earlier this month in Arizona, where temperatures routinely soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

'Very regrettable that this would happen,' Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Tuesday in response to a question about the photograph. 

'We have always denounced that as there is more rejection in the United States, there are people who lose their lives in the desert or crossing' the river. 

The tragic deaths come amid reports of squalid conditions and overcrowding at migrant shelters overwhelmed by the surge of crossings.