On the night of 22 October 2019, Pham Thi Tra My, a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman, sent her last text to her mother. “I'm dying, I can't breathe,” she told her. “I am really, really sorry, mum and dad, my trip to a foreign land has failed.” And then she wrote no more.
Pham had left Vietnam a few weeks earlier, hoping to reach England. She was found lifeless in the back of a lorry on an industrial estate in Grays, 20 kilometres east of London, the morning after she sent that last message.
Thirty-eight of her compatriots, 31 men and seven women, were found asphyxiated with her. They are among the 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series.
