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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. Olivares 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, Olivares 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, Olivares 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. Olivares' 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.
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