Like any debut author, D. Esperanza looked forward to seeing his name on the cover of his memoir, Detained: A Boy’s Journal of Survival and Resistance. Then, President Donald Trump won a second term.

Suddenly, Esperanza was advised to use a pseudonym for his memoir, which includes his experience being detained by the United States government at the border for five months in 2018.

While his audience will not know his name, they can hear him as he narrates the audiobook and read his words in English and Spanish, depending on which they prefer. Detained is the first memoir written by a child detained at the U.S.-Mexico border during Trump’s first term.

Recording the audiobook had him “reliving what you would call traumas,” Esperanza told Latina Media Co through a translator. “But I wanted to read the audiobook so people could hear my voice.”

To co-author Detained with his former teacher Gerardo Iván Morales, Esperanza used his journals from when he was 14. At an age when many teens still rely on their parents to wake them up for school, Esperanza and his cousin migrated from Honduras to the United States in the hopes of joining his parents.

While every administration this century has detained children at the border, controversy erupted around the detention camps in 2018. That year, the Trump administration developed a “zero tolerance” approach toward migrants caught at the border, including those who plan to apply for asylum – who have a legal right to stay in the United States while their application is processed.

Officials detained so many children, both unaccompanied minors and those separated from their parents at the border, that the government built temporary camps to hold them in the desert near El Paso. Esperanza spent several months in Tornillo, which was originally constructed to house 400 minors, but held as many as 4,000 children, sleeping in tents.

Through journal entries and poetry, Esperanza vividly portrays how the camp tried to dehumanize him and his peers. Teachers call him by his number, not his name, despite spending 12 hours with him daily. He initially thinks the 30-by-12-foot tent is large until he realizes 19 other children sleep there.

While the tent does have air-conditioning – the law requires the facility to be properly ventilated – his only option for a bathroom is a plastic porta-potty that traps odors and gives him nausea. He waits until evening, when the smell is less bad, to use it. Other children try to avoid the bathroom by not eating or drinking, eventually passing out.

The law stipulates that children detained by the federal government are entitled to certain conditions. Known as the Flores Agreement of 1997, detained children must be released “without delay” to a parent or guardian. They also must have adequate food, water, and ventilation. Children cannot be detained for more than 20 days, per most courts’ interpretations.

Esperanza spent five months shuffling between government-run camps while his parents advocated for his release. He got his location to his parents, but the government refused to confirm where he was. His parents were also concerned about their own status as undocumented residents of the United States.

Moving to the Alpha 13 tent while at Tornillo changes Esperanza’s circumstances some. There, he meets Morales, a teacher who tries to make the camp as comfortable as possible for the children.

Morales remembers seeing news coverage of children being held in tents and saw it as a personal “call to action.” He got a job there easily – the only requirements were to be 21 years old and have a driver’s licence.

Esperanza is surprised when Morales allows the children to call him by his first name – the other adults all went by “tícher” – and when he uses the kids’ first names, rather than their bunk numbers. Morales told Latina Media Co that he considered using his name to be human decency: “There’s no reason I needed to call D anything other than his name.”

Morales immediately requests extra food for the children, telling us the leaders at the camps were receptive to him. Many of the other supervisors at Tornillo would not take action to meet the children’s basic needs. For example, other teachers would eat multiple boxes of cereal in front of the children even though the kids only got one box each.

It’s experiences like this that led Esperanza to write, “The point is, there are two ways you can hurt people. You can hurt a person actively, like by punching them or stealing from them or whatever. But you can also hurt a person passively, by refusing to give them help when they need it, or by pretending you don’t see them, or by acting like they don’t exist.”

Esperanza has lived in Tennessee since his release from the camp in October 2018. He now works in construction and is married with a son. He said he has met many “incredible” people in the United States, including his English teacher, who helped him write this book.

But, he said, he also has experienced mistreatment, racism, and division within the Latine community. “Sometimes we are a little united, sometimes we are not,” Esperanza said. “I feel like we lose a little part of ourselves, the Latino community, [when] we’re not fully there for each other.”

“There’s so much fear within the Hispanic community, and there are different forms that people resort to as protection,” Morales said. “People prefer to be divided because, in a way, they are protected. It is hard to come out here to advocate for a specific view of immigrants.”

We see examples of this all over the news. In 2020, about 30 percent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were Latine. Most join not because they are anti-immigrant, but because they need a paycheck. Meanwhile, data shows that more than 90 percent of people who ICE arrests without an order are from Latin America.

And almost half of Latines voted for Trump in 2024, including some whose loved ones have been arrested by immigration officials.

As Morales said, “ignorance is bliss” for those who cared about the issue of child detention in 2018 but have not thought about it since then. In Detained, Esperanza remembers seeing drones flying over the camp, photographing images that enraged the public and led to the eventual closure of Tornillo.

That coverage is lacking today. “Because there’s a lack of information today, people don’t realize that within our immigrant community, these are our everydays, and the numbers are still climbing,” Morales said. His memoir “gives that voice to the thousands of children that were being detained, and the people who are still being detained.”