The Border Chronicle
The Border Chronicle
A Memoir from the Front Lines of Family Separation: A Podcast with Human Rights Lawyer Efrén Olivares
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A Memoir from the Front Lines of Family Separation: A Podcast with Human Rights Lawyer Efrén Olivares

“Putting these feelings, these experiences on the page was cathartic," he says about his new book on Trump's Zero Tolerance and its aftermath.

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In the summer of 2018, Efrén Olivares was a human rights lawyer in South Texas who became a crisis worker on the front lines of Zero Tolerance representing hundreds of families in court. In his new and deeply moving memoir: My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines. Olivares weaves his own personal story of family separation with that of the hundreds of families who he worked to reunite. Olivares talks about the challenges when it comes to doing social justice work where there’s often few happy outcomes, and about how family separations continue to happen, and what the U.S. government could do to stop these separations right now. “Putting these feelings, these experiences on the page was cathartic,” he says about writing the book. “Letting it out and sharing it with readers was one way of not keeping it all bottled up inside myself.”  

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The Border Chronicle
The Border Chronicle
The Border Chronicle podcast is hosted by Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller. Based in Tucson, Arizona, longtime journalists Melissa and Todd speak with fascinating fronterizos, community leaders, activists, artists and more at the U.S.-Mexico border.