As a congressional intern this summer, Erick Alvarez has made some incredible memories — meetings with lawmakers, tours of the Capitol, lunch receptions with people who, like him, overcame the odds.
But his earliest memory isn’t so happy, one of “my father abusing me and bashing my head into a glass table because 5-year-old me couldn’t finish a whole Whopper meal.”
Four years later, Alvarez landed in the child welfare system. By then, his father was out of the picture, and his mother was struggling to raise two boys and two girls in Omaha, Neb.
