MY BOY WILL DIE OF SORROW

A powerful mix of human rights memoir and examination of America’s flawed immigration policies.

In summer 2018, the Trump administration instituted a heavily restrictive zero tolerance policy that resulted in the separation of thousands of children from their parents, regardless of their rights as asylum seekers. For Olivares, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Immigrant Justice Project and an immigrant from Mexico, this story struck home—literally. The author lives in the Rio Grande Valley, an area saturated with Mexican culture, where the realities of immigration have never been far away. A mixture of poignant legal insight, vivid hometown familiarity, and personal struggle, his account includes interviews with immigrants alongside analyses of complicated legal processes and a history of the southern border. Zero tolerance, Olivares reminds us, is only part of a broader history. While widespread family detention began under Barack Obama, the author traces its origins further back, to racially discriminatory immigration policies as old as the nation itself. As we follow Olivares through his many visits to the U.S. District Court in McAllen, Texas, and conversations with migrant parents, we see the countless shameful obstacles put in their way. In touching and often heartbreaking sections, the author introduces us to a Guatemalan man of Mayan descent who was separated from his daughter and accused of human trafficking for not speaking Spanish well enough; a father who, with instinctive foresight, told his daughter to prepare to be taken away to a "summer camp"; officials from private prison companies MTC and GEO Group, both of which have reaped huge profits from the drama and suffering of migrants; and government officials who mock the cries of separated children, some despite being children of immigrants themselves. Regarding one agent, Olivares writes, “Did he not see himself, or his family, his ancestors who came to this country before he did, in the faces and the cries of these children?”

A harrowing firsthand account of inhumane immigration policies with which we all must come to terms.