Detained is a the sort of reading experience that comes along once in a generation – a memoir that I wish I could firmly place in the hands of everyone currently living in the United States.

D Esperanza was only thirteen years old and on his own in Honduras, caring for his little cousin, giving up school to work any job he could, and missing his parents (and little sister he had never met) in el norte.

Along with two other cousins, D embarks on a frightening, long, and dangerous journey north to Mexico and then across the border to the United States. But after surviving so much together, the four boys are ripped apart and placed in child detention centers. 

Although D’s parents are desperate to bring him home at any time, they are separated for another five months. D is moved from facility to facility in the middle of the night, treated with condescension and apathy, and faces a myriad of cruelty under Trump’s family separation order and the larger violence of US immigration policies.

D survives, thanks to everything he pours into his journal, the friendships he forms with other kids going through the same terrors, and a mentor who becomes a sort of brother (and later helps him to bring his words to the wider world). 

He writes with the raw & unfiltered voice of a child - and his journal entries are lovingly addressed to the grandmother who passed months before he decided to leave Honduras. There is a lot of trauma in these pages, and D faces every situation with resilience and strength way beyond his years. 

D asks again and again why nobody cares, why nobody will give him a simple answer, why he is dragged away in the middle of the night without a chance to say goodbye, and so much more. It was an unraveling experience to see the pain inflicted in my own backyard through a child’s unfiltered eyes. He writes assuming that nobody will ever read his words, and that lends itself to such powerful and honest emotion. 

I was grateful for the epilogue and the chance to see that D is doing okay and working on healing, but no child should ever have to go through ANY of what he experienced. There are threads of hope in these pages, as he meets Iván and forms relationships (brotherhoods, really) with some of the other boys in his Alpha 13 tent in the “overflow” facility in Tornillo. But overall it is devastating and deeply infuriating.

An absolute must-read that isn’t easy to live in, but is the reality of this country. I’m glad this book exists and I hope it to see it absolutely everywhere once it’s released. 

CW: death (family), violence, grief, forced institutionalization, xenophobia, racism, car accident, injury, animal death (pet), confinement, deportation, colorism, terminal illness

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(I received an advance reader copy of this book; this is my honest review.)