“My Boy Will Die of Sorrow”: Efrén Olivares on His Memoir of Family Separation Under Trump & Beyond

About 400 children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy have been reunited with their parents by a Biden administration task force. At least 1,000 families of at least 5,000 who were impacted remain separated. In an in-depth interview, attorney Efrén Olivares discusses some of the families he represented who were separated at the height of the crisis, when he was an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project in McAllen, Texas. He is now deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. His new book is My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines. Olivares also describes immigrating to the U.S. as a teenager and being apart from his father in that process, and the long history of U.S. immigration policy and family separation.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.