Valeria Luiselli is an immigrant from Mexico. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Early in her career as a writer, while she was still in the process of seeking her own Green Card, she was hired by the federal immigration court in New York to translate for child asylum seekers. The book was written in the 2014 – 2016 timeframe, before Trump came to office, while the Obama administration was still dealing with the refuge crisis at the southern border of the United States. There is also a postscript dated 2017, just as the book was published, and Trump’s first administration had taken over.

She illustrates, in the words of children as young as three or four years old, up to teenagers, how the American court system handles the crisis. Why are thousands of unaccompanied children arriving at the border, where they are giving themselves up to the immigration authorities? What are their motivations? Why are they here, and what is their fate when they are here?

Tell Me How It Ends is a powerful indictment of the American immigration policy. The children are the victims. Yet, they are  the ones whose lives are destroyed before they ever have a chance to grow up. It deals with the source of the problem in the first place, the utter violence and lawlessness in the Central American countries where the children come from, and it all traces right back to American drug use and consumption of drugs coming from Central America, and the thriving arms trade of American weapons back to those countries.

It is ironic to read this book now, eight years after it was first published, while the Trump Administration is applying a radial approach to solving the problem, deporting the most vulnerable and innocent victims of the whole malaise that causes this problem in the first place, demonizing the victims.

As I see it, particularly after reading Tell Me How It Ends, what they are doing now is not going to fix the problem whatsoever. It will just cause immense harm to those families and children affected directly. History will not judge us favorably for these years and these actions under our watch.

The book is only 99 pages long. I read it in hardcopy. I don’t have solutions. But I have a better understanding of why, and I can only fathom the immense damage that is being inflicted on a whole generation of Latin American children.

Tell me how it ends, because I do not know!