My Boy Will Die of Sorrow

April 18, 2022
In this powerful debut, human rights lawyer Olivares braids reflections on growing up as a Mexican immigrant with a stirring account of his experience representing immigrant parents separated from their children as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy in 2018. In the 1990s, Olivares was separated from his father for four years, when his father migrated to the U.S. But as he points out, his family’s “ ‘privilege’ of choosing to be apart” while his father sought a better life for them in Texas was a starkly different situation from that of the hundreds of immigrant families he fought for in McAllen, Tex., who had their separations forced upon them by the Border Patrol. Bringing their testimonies to the fore alongside searing analyses of America’s immigration policies, Olivares recounts case after case of brutality and desperation, underscoring how “notions of due process, justice, equality before the law, all fall apart at the border.” “This problem that has happened,” said one woman who’d spent weeks apart from her family, “can never be erased.” As Olivares contemplates his own assimilation into American society, he builds an affecting case against the U.S.’s treatment of those with “deeper skins... darker hair,” while humanizing their stories in a brilliant light. This urgent look at an ongoing crisis galvanizes and informs in equal measure.

May 1, 2022

Olivares, a human rights lawyer and immigration policy expert for the Texas Civil Rights Project, has penned a heartfelt first-person expos� of America's broken immigration system. During the Trump presidency. Olivares aided undocumented immigrants facing federal charges for crossing the Mexican border. He fought to reunite thousands of children separated from their parents at the border and held in often traumatizing conditions at US detention facilities. Olivares alternates between his own story--a Mexican American immigrant and first-generation college student who endured childhood separation from his own father--and the heartbreaking stories of his clients. Especially moving is the story of a father forced to take a DNA test to prove that his little daughter was truly his. The author's compassion is clear, though autobiographical elements can dampen these stories' moral urgency, and the two halves of his narrative do not always cohere. For complementary depth and context, see Separated by Jacob Soboroff and Taking Children by Laura Briggs. VERDICT Readers will appreciate this memoir as a moving firsthand account but also as a call to action to ensure that human rights prevail at America's borders.--Michael Rodriguez

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2022
In 2018, attorney Olivares and his colleagues at the Texas Civil Rights Project encountered one of the most significant human rights crises in recent history. That year, the Trump Administration announced a new immigration policy for the U.S.-Mexico border: every single person crossing the border without authorization would be prosecuted, and families traveling together would be separated. Parents were arrested without information about where their children were, whether they were receiving medical care, or even whether they would be reunited. One of Olivares' clients, a man named Mario, was coerced by a border patrol agent into saying his daughter wasn't his and then arrested for human trafficking. Olivares describes his clients' heart-wrenching stories alongside his own history as a young immigrant from Mexico, following his father to Texas. Part memoir, part exploration of the racism inherent in U.S. immigration policy, and part tribute to the families who have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government, My Boy Will Die of Sorrow is a thought-provoking look at the soul of the United States.

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
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.

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