Deporting soldiers? Why immigrant veterans fear removal from the US

Deporting soldiers? Why immigrant veterans fear removal from US

President Donald Trump's push for mass deportation has heightened fears that immigrant veterans who served in the US military could be expelled.

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“Here comes another one!”

From his guard booth, Benito Miranda Hernandez enthusiastically waved another car into the overnight car park. But the latest vehicle, like the others before it, drove straight past.

Hernandez was unfazed. Serving others has been one of the ideals he grew up with.

“The satisfaction that I’m helping you makes me feel good. It's like my soul needs something good, you know?” the 42-year-old father told Al Jazeera. “My mother says it well in Spanish: If you don’t live to serve, it’s not worth living.”

Hernandez, an animated man with a trim goatee, is a United States military veteran, having served three tours of duty during the country's war in Iraq. The US has been his home since childhood; he grew up in California, then spent years on the East Coast.

Hernandez’s job overseeing the overnight car park in San Diego comes after years in and out of prison, primarily for drug convictions. It is part of a reentry programme to help former prisoners transition back into society.

Hernandez feels like he's finally headed in the right direction. His sentence will conclude in August.

But there's a worry looming in the back of his mind: that, once he is released, he could be detained by immigration agents and deported. Hernandez does not have US citizenship.

“Just walking on the street, just walking out of the programme where I'm at, I can get picked up,” he told Al Jazeera.

Since President Donald Trump began his second term in 2025, the Republican leader has led a mass deportation campaign that has forcibly removed at least 675,000 people as of January, according to the administration’s own estimates.

The aim of the operation, Trump officials have said, is to expel the "worst of the worst". But some immigrant veterans, particularly those with criminal convictions, fear they too could be swept up in the deportation campaign.

The prospect leaves Hernandez, who was born in Mexico, frustrated and angry.

“I was willing to die for this f***ing country,” Hernandez said. “I went to war for this f***ing country. And you want to try to deport me?”

Seeking citizenship from a warzone

Hernandez has spent most of his life in the US. He was brought across the border by his mother as a baby. He now has three children, all US citizens.

As of 2022, nearly 731,000 military veterans like Hernandez were immigrants. They comprise roughly 4.5 percent of the US's veteran population.

For decades, faced with declining enlistment numbers, the US military has depended on immigrants to serve alongside its US-born citizens. Most have citizenship, too — but an estimated 118,000 immigrant veterans do not. Hernandez is one of them.

Like many other veterans struggling to reintegrate into society after their military service, Hernandez struggled to find his place in the civilian world.

He was jailed on illegal gun charges shortly after returning from his deployment. When he was released a few weeks later, he found he had been evicted from his apartment, and all his possessions, including military memorabilia, had been confiscated.

“I came out with nothing," he told Al Jazeera. With few options left, he became involved in selling drugs, which led him to be in and out of prison on multiple convictions.

Without US citizenship — and especially with convictions on his record — the threat of deportation now hangs over him.

His experience is not an outlier. Roughly a third of veterans are arrested at least once in their lifetimes, and surveys estimate that as many as 181,500 are imprisoned each year.

Many veterans struggle with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorders and substance abuse issues, which can lead them to commit criminal offences.

Hernandez was among those who enlisted after the attacks in the US on September 11, 2001. In the military frenzy afterwards, a recruiter at his California high school convinced him to sign up.

Hernandez was just 18, and the structure, ambition and steady income of military service appealed to him.

“I was trying to make a difference, trying to defend the land that was supposed to be my country — that adopted me,” he said.

Hernandez was deployed when the US invaded Iraq in 2003 and then deployed two more times after that. He worked on the USS Kearsarge LHD-3, an amphibious assault group in the US Navy.

“They said I was going to get to see the world," he said. “I didn't. It was nothing but sea.”

During his first deployment on the ship, he filed his application for citizenship.

The process was supposed to take only about six months. Then-President George W Bush had pledged to expedite naturalisation applications for active-duty service members who served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in an effort to boost recruitment.

But like other immigrant soldiers at the time, Hernandez’s naturalisation was delayed. The US immigration system has been chronically overwhelmed, and after the September 11 attacks, stricter background checks led to even slower service.

By the time Hernandez was finally called for his citizenship interview in 2006, two years had passed since his return from his final deployment.

He already had a criminal conviction for drug possession. As he was no longer in the military, Hernandez’s expedited naturalisation case was denied.

Waves of deportations

There are no clear numbers on how many US veterans have been deported.

While US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is required to report the veteran status of anyone placed in deportation proceedings — to afford them extra consideration in their immigration cases — a 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the agency was not collecting this information consistently.

Veterans, however, have faced deportation proceedings for decades. Advocates point to 1996 as the year that the deportations of non-citizen veterans first jumped.

With the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, deportable offences were vastly expanded to include nonviolent offences like wire fraud and drug offences. The law is estimated to have led to the deportations of thousands of veterans.

Then, from 2009 to 2017, President Barack Obama led an aggressive campaign that registered more than 3.1 million deportations over his eight years in office, a record total.

Trump has pledged to top that sum, telling voters ahead of his second term, "On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."

Sofya Aptekar, an urban studies professor at the City University of New York, said that veteran deportations are not the result of targeted operations, but rather of indiscriminate immigration enforcement.

“They're just getting deported the way people are getting deported, period,” Aptekar said. “Because we have this ramping up of a brutal deportation regime, veterans are going to be caught up in that.”

Advocates and politicians have pushed for solutions to protect immigrant veterans from deportation.

In 2021, for instance, a programme called the Immigrant Military Members and Veterans Initiative (IMMVI) was created to identify deported veterans and facilitate their return to the US through immigration pathways like humanitarian parole.

At the time, however, IMMVI was criticised for not going far enough. Humanitarian parole is only temporary, and the programme has only facilitated the return of 138 deported veterans so far.

“To me, that's not a measure of success,” said Aptekar.

'Leave no man behind'

Even that small possibility of repatriation has practically disappeared. Under the second Trump administration, advocates point out that access to humanitarian parole has been restricted, and immigration agencies are understaffed.

“Your application just kind of sits there because they're not processing them,” said Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer who received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 for her work on policies for service members.

“Officially, they still have the benefit, and officially, you can still apply for it. It's just if you apply, you don't hear anything. You don't even get an email back most of the time."

For other deported veterans, the military lifestyle itself has been an impediment to navigating the immigration system.

Edwin Salgado, an Iraq war veteran, had started the naturalisation process during his enlistment. He had been brought to the US from Acapulco in the Mexican state of Guerrero at age three.

But in 2003, he was deployed to Kuwait under Operation Iraqi Freedom — and missed his fingerprinting appointment. “That basically put a hold on the whole process,” he said.

In 2015, Salgado was incarcerated on drug and gun sales charges. Upon his release one year and one day later, he was transferred to immigration detention and deported within weeks.

“Thank you for your service, but you’re a danger to society,” Salgado recalls an immigration judge saying.

Now a tattoo and graffiti artist, he has spent years rebuilding his life in Tijuana, Mexico, just across the border from San Diego. He has given up trying to return to the US.

“In the Marines, they told us to leave no man behind,” said Salgado, 44. “But we’ve been left behind.”

But there are disadvantages to being cut off from the US. While deported veterans are still eligible for Veterans Affairs benefits, they often face insurmountable barriers to accessing care.

Some medical conditions, for example, require in-person evaluations at Veterans Affairs centres, and finding alternatives to those screenings can be difficult.

Salgado himself struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and hearing loss. Art helps him cope.

“It makes me strong," he said. “It's like a form of defiance against the government, against the world, while I'm keeping the smile on my face.”

But after receiving news on April 17 that his criminal convictions were vacated, he is hoping he can soon return to the US to obtain medical care and visit his family.

'Just like you'

Hernandez knows he too could be deported to the other side of the border, cut off from his family and veterans' resources.

In October, he visited an immigration office in San Diego to register his fingerprints. But he didn’t go alone: A group of veterans, organised by formerly deported veteran Hector Barajas, accompanied him.

“They were like, ‘Yeah, we want to be there. Don't worry. We got you,’” Hernandez said.

Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has approved his application for a green card, granting him permanent residency, and Hernandez is waiting for it to arrive in the mail. But even his green card is no shield against deportation.

“I know my place in the United States is not guaranteed,” he said. “A green card, it's not going to save you from deportation. So it's still over my head."

But he insists that veterans, after serving the US, should not be subject to deportation.

Hernandez still plans to try every available path to obtain US citizenship, including by vacating his earlier convictions. He does not want his deportation to separate him from his three children.

“I want to see them grow,” he said. “I don’t want it to be like, ‘Well, my dad was an immigrant and got deported because he f***ed up.’ OK? I'm a citizen, just like you.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.