37. Efrén C. Olivares, Immigration Attorney and Author of My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines

On the 37th  episode of Immigration Today! Angeline Chen welcomes Efrén C. Olivares, Director of Strategic Litigation at The Southern Poverty Law Center.  Olivares is a civil rights lawyer who has represented clients before federal courts and international human rights bodies for over a decade. His work focuses on ending immigrant detention and providing pro bono legal representation to detained immigrants at immigration detention centers in the deep South. Efrén and his team also defend workers’ rights, ensure local policing is not entangled with immigration enforcement, seek family reunification, and protect the rights of asylum seekers. In this interview, Efrén tells us about his upbringing and how that influenced the work he does today as an immigration attorney and fearless advocate for civil rights.   

Author of My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines, which was published in 2022, Efrén recounts his own immigration journey as young teenager arriving in the U.S. His work has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN and many other outlets. Efrén's grandfather was born in the U.S. to farmworker parents who would travel in between Mexico and Texas for work which eventually lead to his family establishing roots in Texas when he moved to the U.S at the age of 13. In his book he recounts what life was like assimilating into the U.S. and how his own experiences allowed him to see immigration work through a personal lens.

You can keep up with Efrén on Twitter/X @efrencolivares and on IG @e.olivares.a. Purchase his book via Amazon , Barnes and Noble, Target or any other outlet found on his website. Consider donating to the amazing work done at The Southern Poverty Law Center here. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram as well.

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DISCLAIMER – This podcast is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or a solicitation to provide legal services. The information in this podcast is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, a lawyer-client relationship. Listeners should not act upon this information without seeking professional legal counsel. The views and opinions expressed in the podcast represent those of the individual speaker only and are not necessarily the views of Clark Hill PLC.

Transcript

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Hello, everyone. It's Angeline Chen. Welcome to Immigration Today, where I interview leaders, advocates, experts, and volunteers in immigration and immigrant rights on the issues, their experiences, and how you can make a difference. Today we have Efren C. Olivares. Efren Olivares is the Director of Strategic Litigation of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He focuses on ending immigrant detention and provides pro bono legal representation to detained immigrants at immigration detention centers in the Deep South. Olivares and his team also defend workers rights, ensure local policing is not entangled with immigration enforcement, seeking family reunification, and protect the rights of asylum seekers. Olivares is a civil rights lawyer representing clients before federal courts and international human rights bodies for over a decade. He previously directed the Racial and Economic Justice Now Beyond Borders at the Texas Civil Rights Project, serving as the lead attorney in a landmark petition to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, in which he represented. Family separated under the Trump administration's zero tolerance immigration policy. Olivares work has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and many other outlets. His memoir, My Boy Will Die of Sorrow. A memoir of immigration from the front lines was published in 2022 and recounts his own immigrating journey as a young teenager arriving in the U. S. Efren received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and received his law degree from Yale Law School. Efren, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's my pleasure. No, thank you. Thank you. I know you are very busy and, and very well known in the community, so I appreciate you coming in today. So we're just going to jump into some questions about you and your work. Is that okay? Absolutely. Okay, great. Great. So tell me a little bit, and I know you talk about this in your book, but I'd love to hear just about your story of coming to the US, um, and your experience there. Sure. Sure. I was born in Mexico, in northeastern Mexico, in the state of Nuevo Leon, about three hours from the Texas border or so. And for the first three years nine or so years of my life, my life was going to be in Mexico. I, even at that age, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up, but I had no prospects of leaving, leaving Mexico. All my family on my mom's side was and continues to be in Mexico. Some aunts and uncles had moved. Um, at the age of nine, my dad basically ran out of work, couldn't find work. And he had been a bus, a truck driver in Mexico, so he emigrated to the U. S. to, in search of work. And we lucked out because my grandfather had been born in the U. S. Um, his, his own parents were farm workers back in the early 1900s, so. During the season, the farm working season, they came to Texas and he happened to be born on U. S. soil. And because of that, my father was able to come to the U. S. and get his citizenship. And he eventually found a job as a school bus driver. So for the following four years or so, he was in South Texas working as a school bus driver. And my mom, my siblings, and I were back in Mexico and he would visit us. Whenever he could for a weekend or so and that went on for about four years. And then when I was 13, we, we joined him in South Texas. I was supposed to, I was in eighth grade, but I was kept down a year because I didn't speak English. So I came into seventh grade there in South Texas. Wow. That's awesome. Very lucky that your grandfather was already a U. S. citizen here, right? Makes it a lot, lot easier. It's one of those accidents of destiny, you know, it was, and then it literally changed the course of my life and my family's life. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so what drew you to working in immigration? Like, where did that passion come from? And I know you yourself was an immigrant, but, but just helping others and, and, you know, in, in all family reunification, all those things, like how, how did immigration kind of draw to you for your career? I went to law school wanting to be involved in human rights work, you know, public interest work. I wasn't sure exactly that it would involve immigration. I thought I wanted to do indigenous people's rights. I spent some time in Mexico working with indigenous communities in southern Mexico. But the way, you know, things in life change, I ended up getting a job with the Texas Civil Rights Project. in McAllen, Texas at the border in 2013. And the following summer, the summer of 2014, was the first, you know, significant influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America. Yep. We saw for the first time that the soft sided pants there in McAllen, during the Obama administration, So, and I was there, so, mm. It, it sort of became in many ways my first involvement in earnest in the immigration sphere. Mm-Hmm.. And I was very involved in that. And then the 2016 election happened, right? That Mm, yep. On, on, on a platform of, of border wall and deport them all and anti-immigrant. And, and that led to the family separation policy and all of that. So it was not. One of those situations where I set out myself to devote my career to immigrant justice issues. It was after the fact, I can connect the dots that I was in the right place at the right time to try to make a difference. And in doing the work, I came to realize that my own experience as an immigrant, knowing what it's like to pick up and leave your country and start over. That gave me a sense of understanding what a lot of my clients have gone through, and that I believe has helped me and, and be a, uh, uh, an advocate for them. Yeah. Well, I'm so glad you were there, um, at that time, cause they definitely needed a lot of help actually in 2014. Tell us a little bit about what happened, you know, for our viewers in 2014 with the influx of unaccompanied minors and you know, what, what happens to them after things like that? And it's still continuing, but you know, what was kind of going on then? Yeah, I think it's important to go a little further back at least to 2009 when there was a coup in Honduras, a military coup and the democratically elected president was overthrown with the support of the US government, right? The Obama administration and then Secretary of State Clinton supported that coup and that destabilized Honduras and its neighboring countries of El Salvador and Guatemala. So that a few short years later, you have a huge exodus of. Children, really 13, 14, 15 year old children who are being targeted by gangs in those countries as a result of the political instability and they come to the U. S. trying to be reunited with their parents or other family members and some of them, frankly, have nobody else to turn to, right? The U. S. is the only, the only hope that they have and our laws have special provisions for unaccompanied minors, right? Minors who are. not with a parent or guardian, have special protection. They're not supposed to go into detention. They go, they don't go under the custody of DHS, but instead the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and are supposed to be assigned a social worker to see if they have family members in the U. S. or somebody else who they can be reunited with. Um, so that is what is supposed to happen, and it happens in different ways. Some cases, but doesn't always happen. Yeah. No, definitely. Definitely. I'm glad you went into the history because all the rhetoric that we hear in the media with influx of migrants and blaming it on other people as if we're doing them a favor when a lot of it is caused by us government policies and practices. And, and it's so important just to hone in on, okay, what did we do to cause this? And we should help these people. I mean, in general, we should, but. Uh, the blame, we have to really shift that blame to ourselves or the government. Um, so when, then what drew you to the Southern Poverty Law Center? Well, when I was at the Texas Civil Rights Project after the during in 2020 is when, when frankly, I had been there. for a while, and I was trying to continue to do this work, immigrant justice work, and looking for opportunities to do it at a bigger scale, perhaps outside of a single state, and this opportunity came up at SPLC, and I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to To continue working on similar issues, right? Immigrant detention. I strongly believe that nobody should be incarcerated because of their immigration status. It doesn't make any sense as a public policy. We only do it because it fills the coffers of private prison companies, right? It's a money making machine. Um, and. SPLC offered a platform and a perch to do this kind of work at a bigger scale, right? And that's why I, I came to SPLC and I'm glad I did. Uh, we, we've had some important wins in the last few years and look forward to continuing this work. Yeah, no, that's great. And now you are the director of strategic litigation. What does that mean? Like, what does that role for you? Yeah, I recently took on that role, and I'm very excited for that for that opportunity. And again, now expanding a little beyond immigrant justice work, looking at broader mass incarceration issues that we have in the Deep South, in particular in places like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. Economic justice as well, the poverty rates that we have in the deep south that impact particularly black and brown people, including immigrants. And of course, the erosion of democracy in Florida, in particular, with some of the policies, anti immigrant policies and otherwise that have been implemented in the last few years. trying to figure out the best role that litigation can have and, and to address those issues, right? Litigation is not always the answer and often is not the best tool, but it often has a role to play, whether it's as a sword or a shield, and apologies for that analogy, but Sometimes you can go on the offensive through litigation, and sometimes the role of litigation is simply to play defense and try to make sure that things don't get worse, that rights are not eroded further, while the other political branches don't get worse. And organizing, right? The people power to push forward on, on trying to build a more just, more fair, multiracial democracy in this country. That's great. And, and what could you give us as an example of one case that you really thought, um, you made an impact on or impacted you and that you'd be willing to share? Obviously had to be closed already, right? But yeah, uh, SPLC or TCRP or? Oh yeah. Anywhere. Well, one, one case that I am, um, that I, I share sometimes is, is one of the separated families, the very first family that we represented of a child with special needs. A six year old child with special needs was separated from his mother. And when that happened, I, I mean, every separation was heartbreaking, but to take a six year old with special needs who needed medication away from her mom, all bets were off at that point, right? There were no limits. There were no exceptions to the policy. And we were lucky enough that. a volunteer attorney took on that case to represent the mother and the child in their immigration cases and first trying to get them reunited, trying to arrange for a phone call, like all the nitty gritty steps to make that happen and how difficult it was because The adult in ICE detention, ICE, is not used to arranging phone calls with a child in ORR custody and vice versa. The social workers are used to arranging phone calls. But long story short, the attorney took on that case and we stayed in touch and assisted in every way we could. The family was reunited. And about a year and a half later, when time came for their asylum hearing, Probably closer to two years later, their cases, the child and the mom's cases had not been consolidated. So they were at the same time, but not consolidated. So there was a possibility one could be approved and the other denied. Oh no. Yeah. And leading into that case, uh, in conversations with that attorney, she agreed that if mom was deported and the child stayed in the U. S., she would take care of the child, right? Like she would be the sponsor that they could stay with. And to me, that was the ultimate demonstration of commitment. Yeah. And it was, we, you know, when they went into that hearing, we were all on pins and needles because it was not guaranteed that it was going to happen. And it was a happy ending, right? Ultimately, they were both granted asylum. Oh, good. Now, They have asylum, they have their green cards, are living on the East Coast, and it's sort of a quote unquote happy ending, legally, but the trauma that they were subjected to, that, there's no way this will ever be a happy ending, but that is a case where I believe that the work my team at TCRP and I did Contributed in some way to get this family, their political asylum in the U. S. so that they are now together and making their life here. Yeah, that's, that's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing. I mean, what makes me so upset is all the resources that are being used to help this family when they should never have been separated in the first place. I mean, we're talking about years and so much money, right? And it, and. And it's heartbreaking and the emotional, I mean, even for you, right? It's, it's traumatic. I think some people don't realize that the service providers that people who are doing this work, I mean, it is hard. Um, and of course for the child and, and the mom, but I just, it just makes me so upset and I'm, and I shouldn't be used to it by now since I'm immigration attorney too, but I'm just not, it's just like, when I hear these stories of years and work and, and, um, You know, it's just unbelievable. It's it's, it really is. It still shocks me. And, and I want to make sure that people just don't get numb from hearing it because in the beginning, like they're hearing family separations and it was, it was like, what, what do you mean? And now I feel like people hear and they're like, yeah, you know, it sucks. But. That's what happens, you know, and they're just people are getting numb and they just get used to it And I just it's so so horrible, but thank you so much for for your work. And that's a really beautiful story So let's segue into why did you write your book and wit and your the title is my boy will die of sorrow Where did the title come from, you know, tell us a little bit about it Yes. So I didn't set out to write this book. The idea for it came up at a presentation I gave at my undergrad to first generation students there, many of whom were first generation Americans, about that work with families at the border and combined it with my own experience coming to the U. S. and being apart from my father in the process. Somebody asked from the audience, when are you going to turn those stories into a book? And I thought, well, I actually, maybe, maybe I, let me look into that, right? So the book is a braided narrative. So that chapter one is the 2018 crisis when it started. And then chapter two is my childhood in Mexico growing up when my father has left to go to the U. S. And then they go back and forth until the two stories merge at the end of the book. And the, the title of the book comes from, from a quick interaction I had with one of the separated fathers. The very first day we went to court, to the federal court there in McAllen, to the zero tolerance hearings where people were being charged under this policy. And, and I can read a brief excerpt, uh, that yeah. where the title comes from, and it's me speaking to one of the fathers whose name is Leonel in the courtroom. I was speaking to Leonel, who was also from Guatemala. He was less than a year younger than me, and wore a plaid short sleeved shirt, white with dark and light blue lines, and cowboy style buttons, the kind you snap together. He must have been no taller than five feet, seven inches. In broken Spanish, he explained that he had come with his 11 year old son, Daniel. Like Viviana and Sandro, another family, they were traveling alone and they were inseparable. He and Daniel were both first time crossers and had no family in the U. S. They were hoping to apply for asylum due to the persecution they had faced in their indigenous village. I got all the critical information from Lionel, but I still couldn't believe that the agents had not given him any information about his son, where he was being taken or who would care of him. Surely the agents must have told him something about the process and about what to expect, I thought. What do you think would happen, I asked Leonel, if you are deported and your son doesn't go with you, if he stays here? He looked down as if thinking about it, and when he looked up, he shook his head. His look was one of resignation. No pues, mi niño se muere de tristeza. My boy will die of sorrow. For a second, my eyes didn't leave his. I struggled to write down what he was telling me. I pursed my lips and looked down, swallowed hard, and couldn't find words to respond. That's where the title of the book comes from, and it's so meaningful to me also that it's, it's not even my voice that gives title to this story. It's the voice of one of the directly impacted families. Um, And it was such an unbelievable moment to hear him say that out loud. It frankly caught me off guard in the chaos of what happens in a crowded courtroom. Um, but yeah, that is the title of the book and it is really meaningful to me. Well, thank you for sharing that, that story. That is, I forgot tissue and I'm crying on a podcast. Um, Can you tell me that that story ended? Well, did they get okay? They were, they were reunited in. Yes. And we are now in the Northwest. Yes. Okay, good. Congratulations, because that I would have, I would have been falling if you told me it didn't. Um, how does this. I mean, I see you also, it's hard not to get emotional from these kinds of cases. How do you deal with it yourself? You know, kind of seeing this, doing this all the time, how do you kind of keep yourself sane? It's hard. It's hard. And I, I think my answer to that question has changed over time. I've gone through phases. I would say that that summer, those two months in particular, or two and a half months from May to July. where a blur of adrenaline and caffeine and sleep deprivation and just trying to do what we could to help as many people as possible, writing the book itself. Was cathartic in some ways, even therapeutic, I would say. And I started therapy recently, um, to share and try to get over this secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue. I remember noticing the compassion fatigue in myself that summer, right? Where the first, when Leonel told me that his boy would die of sorrow, I couldn't swallow, right? I was taken aback. Weeks into these conversations, after having heard dozens of them, a parent or a mother would tell me something equally heartbreaking. And I was like, all right, date of birth. country of origin and just like collect the information I was desensitized to the trauma and I now know that those are signs of compassion fatigue and secondary trauma. So I've tried to work through that. I continue to be inspired by the clients that we work with and their resilience. Um, And it is, you know, one, one thing you talked to touch briefly on on the narrative, right, that people say that a lot of immigrants who come come looking for a handout and have it. But if you think about it for half a second, right, the people who risk their lives. To bring their families to pick up and leave to, you know, cross the Darien Gap or hitchhike through Mexico. Those are the best people. Those are the survivors. Survivors, they will figure it out. We should be welcoming them with open arms. They're not looking for a handout. They are trying to survive and they're entrepreneurial and hardworking and they're looking to make it right. They make this country stronger. So that, that fallacy of immigrants are coming here looking for a handout. just gets me every time. Um, so that inspires me, right? That resiliency, that, that, uh, survivor nature, but it's hard. I, I would deny some days are really tough when we, when we lose a case or one of our clients is deported, uh, when we know they're being deported to harm's way. It's very difficult. Yeah. Yeah. I feel, I feel the same way. I don't do it as much as you. We have some pro bono work and we go to the border Tijuana and help with the migrant shelters and we've tried to accompany some families to the border. Yeah. I've seen just really strong, resilient, hardworking people. You know what I mean? A woman with like a two year old with a backpack from Guatemala. Like how in the world did you get here? How? You know, it's, it, it's, these people are survivors and they just, they just want a better life or they're fleeing something so horrible, you know? Um, yeah, I think, uh, for me at least doing these podcasts, help, help us like my therapy as well, maybe kind of sharing, hearing, you know, from other people who do this work more than more than I do, but, um, yeah. I feel like this is therapeutic for me to so in terms of now, right? We hear about, oh, in 2020, it was a zero tolerance policy. We don't have that anymore. 20, you know, 2014 is unaccompanied minor. Like, but now there are these migrants coming in and they're just storming in through the border. We don't know what to do. What? How do you react to these comments that are happening right now? Yeah, so it's extremely frustrating to see how far the rhetoric has moved to the right to bigotry and xenophobia. Uh, sure the numbers of people coming trying to come to the us, some looking for asylum, others looking for work are, are high. But to say that we cannot process 'em at the border, that we cannot find the, the number of, I don't know. Paperclips and staplers to process some applications when we are the wealthiest country in the world that have landed rockets on Mars and can do face, like, give me a break. It's our heart. This is just an issue of political will. There's no political will to address the common sense policies. For example, when it comes to asylum, let's be serious and devote resources to processing asylum seeking families. And I don't mean A 5 percent increase, right? I'm talking 10x 20x the number of asylum officers, social workers assigned to families that has been shown to work right over 99 percent of compliance when families had a social worker assigned to them as part of the family processing program. And on the on the economic side, right? There's a labor shortage in this country. Yes. And there's a lot of people wanting to come to work. Like, in the world, does it not, is it not obvious that there's a way to meet supply and demand? Putting aside even the moral obligations that we touched on earlier, just the economical benefit for all involved. And there's no sure our guest worker programs could be improved. There's a lot of abuse and wage theft and all the things, but we could improve it. All I'm saying is that it's just not that this is a, an intractable problem. It's an issue. of political will. There's no political will to address it to our own detriment, because one industry that in the next few decades is going to be in dire need of, of labor is a care industry, right? We're getting older as a population, the ill and elderly need care. Care is, and that's not going to be replaced by a I right human beings to do this work and we are turning them away at the border as we right now, that should be the opportunity for this country's next phase to grow and and have it's been shown time and again by all the economic studies right that when there's influx of immigrants, the economy grows. And all can benefit. Yeah. And yet we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot with the way this is being handled. Absolutely. And, and that's, that's what I know. And, you know, other people have said, I mean, this is totally just racism. Like, I mean, honestly, when, when, and I, and I, and when people say we're not able to process all these people and I compare with what happened with the Ukrainians. Where they were able, they were able to process so many thousands so quickly, so smoothly and, and now nobody complains about them and literally being able to cross through, you have a Salvadorian family behind them and Ukrainian and just be able to walk through the border and it's, you know, obviously they then ended up changing and having a parole process. Which they should for others too, but that's the that's a great comparison. That's incredibly recent that they're able to process thousands of people in a very short amount of time, but they treat these brown and black people so differently. And you're so right about the, about the jobs. I tell people, Restaurants are looking construction looking agriculture is looking and we work with employers to in the healthcare industry like we need these caretakers we need caretakers which are not even they need registered nurses to but with the caretakers doesn't really take too much of experience. So difficult to do so much money, you know, to get these people and you're so right that that example of the of the Ukrainian program is also so it was in stark contrast to the Haitian asylum seekers who are trying to come to Texas and also close in time, right? We're somehow magically, as you say, able to process the Ukrainians and it was Haitians. We receive them on a horseback and with a whip. You cannot deny the racial disparity of our immigration system. Another, another example is, uh, some people might remember the audio during the family separation crisis, a heartbreaking audio of children inside a detention facility, um, that was leaked by ProPublica. And it was, uh, Angelina, a turning point because that audio is so difficult to, to listen to. But it was leaked on a Monday night and by Wednesday afternoon, the president signed an executive order purporting to put an end to the separations. So, and it's complicated because some separations continued, but certainly not that volume, right? Right. And that audio was so powerful in turning public opinion against this policy. People who had previously defended it and said things like, well, it's the parents fault for bringing their kids across the border. Right. Even those people were against it once they heard that audio. And, and I'm convinced that that audio was so powerful and, and was much more effective in driving the narrative than a video or a photograph would have been. Because when you hear those children cry, you don't see the color of their skin. That's true. And, and all children cry the same. People could think those could be my kids. Or that, that could be me when I was a kid. Right. So it got to people's stomachs right at a visceral level in a way that when you see somebody's skin or hear them speak a different language, or the way they look, you're able to other them in a way, think, Oh, they're not like me. They're not like my family. It's fine to turn them away. So that the power of that audio was transcended race in a way that very few other things have. But to me, it shows that it is about race largely. Right. I'm glad you, you, you mentioned that I forgot about that audio. I forgot about that audio. Oh my goodness. We can go on and on and on. Oh, I want everybody to read your book. I want people to support the organization you're in. How do people found, uh, how do people get your book? So it's available for purchase at your favorite bookstore online. My boy will dial sorrow. com. They can find all the links to the indie bookstores or Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Your bookstore of choice has it available. Um, if I get any royalties from the sales of the book, if I get any royalties from the sale of the book, I will donate 50 percent to the. Families directly to directly impacted families. So I hope people will read it and I hope they will see that there are human lives behind the headlines that we hear often, especially coming from politicians who are interested in staying in power rather than actually addressing the challenges of immigration. But thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. We have to have you again. And, um, honestly, for your hard work and your commitment, it is not easy work that you're doing. So thank you so much, Efren. My pleasure. Thank you. This podcast is intended for general education and informational purposes only, and should not be regarded as either legal advice or a legal opinion. You should not act upon or use this publication or any of its contents for any specific situation. Recipients are cautioned to obtain legal advice from their legal counsel with respect to any decision or course of action contemplated in a specific situation. Clark Hill PLC and its attorneys provide legal advice only after establishing an attorney client relationship through a written attorney client engagement agreement. This recording does not establish an attorney client relationship with any recipient.