Lauren Markham

press release: Lauren Markham has been reporting on undocumented immigration for a nearly a decade, but it was not as a journalist that she first met seventeen-year-old Ernesto and Raul Flores, who had recently emigrated from El Salvador alone. She was working at Oakland International High School, a school for recent immigrants where she coordinates programs for families, when the Flores twins walked into her office, scared stiff, having just missed their date in immigration court. That meeting grew into the illuminating and harrowing story she tells in The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life.