“They were long, long nights.” A Honduran boy who went hungry while crossing the border returns to the United States with his father

The Honduran boy Anderson Hernández crossed the border from Mexico to the United States heartbroken: he cried with hunger and thirst.

After being sent to Mexico last month, this Tuesday he set foot on US soil again, although this time with a big smile and showing the papers in his father's hand that proved his legal stay in the country.

“I have been hungry on the road,” the 8-year-old boy told a Noticias Telemundo journalist who interviewed him. He had just got off the raft that had taken him across the Rio Grande in the second half of July.

"How many days did you eat Anderson?" Asked correspondent Edgar Muñoz.

"All the days that I have been walking and being hungry," replied the minor with his gaze fixed on the ground while tears fell on his cheeks.

Anderson Hernández cries as his father recounts how they were expelled to Mexico.Noticias Telemundo

He said that in his native Honduras there was nothing for him anymore.

His mother had died eight months earlier giving birth to his sister, who also did not survive the delivery.

So he and his father, Reinaldo Hernández, bet their luck on a new life in the United States, far from the poverty and violence that plague much of the Central American country.

But the US authorities expelled them to Mexico shortly after.

Disillusioned,

they settled in a migrant camp in Reynosa

, Tamaulipas, where there were more than 3,000 people in a situation similar to their own.

The first days they slept on the ground under the tents in the square.

Then they arrived at a shelter, 'Senda de vida'.

There, Reinaldo Hernández got help in submitting a request to U.S. immigration authorities to consider his asylum case on the U.S. side of the border.

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"They were long, long nights, waiting for an answer," says

Reinaldo Hernández in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.

But in the end their fight was successful.

This Tuesday, father and son crossed the border again, but not by a raft in the middle of the night, but in broad daylight through the bridge that separates Reynosa from Hidalgo, Texas, under the gaze of the agents.

With nothing more than the clothes they were wearing and a backpack where they kept their documents, the Hernándezes did not stop smiling at the cameras that had followed their odyssey.

The Honduran boy Aderson Hernández and his father, Reinaldo Hernández, after crossing the border bridge that separates Reynosa, Tamaulipas, from Hidalgo, Texas.Noticias Telemundo

"I am happy to be here, with my dad, and to have the papers in hand,"

said Anderson Hernández.

"I want to continue with my studies, I have already lost two years, now I want to continue, I want to win medals and trophies," added the boy.

He was wearing a US soccer jersey that he had reserved for that day.

Correspondents Edgar Muñoz and Damià Bonmatí contributed to this report from Texas and Tamaulipas.