Ice arrests of veterans and their relatives on the rise

[struggle4progress]

José Olivares
Sat 28 Jun 2025 14.26 EDT

The son of an American citizen and military veteran – but who has no citizenship to any country – was deported from the US to Jamaica in late May.

Jermaine Thomas’s deportation, recently reported on by the Austin Chronicle, is one of a growing number of immigration cases involving military service members’ relatives or even veterans themselves who have been ensnared in the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.

As the Chronicle reported, Thomas was born on a US army base in Germany to an American citizen father, who was originally born in Jamaica and is now dead. Thomas does not have US, German or Jamaican citizenship – but Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency deported him anyway to Jamaica, a country in which he had never set foot.

Thomas had spent two-and-a-half months incarcerated while waiting for an update on his case. He was previously at the center of a case brought before the US supreme court regarding his unique legal status ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/us-military-veterans-detained-trump

[struggle4progress]

1. Families of military members aren't safe from deportation crackdown

June 25, 2025, 5:11 PM EDT
By Chris Hayes

... Every day, we are seeing stories of immigration enforcement that truly shock the conscience, as armed, masked agents rolling up to regular folks who have not been convicted or even accused of serious crimes— folks who, in many cases, are just trying to do their jobs. Often, these unidentified agents detain them as onlookers cry out for them to stop.

One recent example from the city of Santa Ana, California, involved a landscaper named Narciso Barranco, an undocumented man with no criminal record who has lived and worked in the U.S. for decades. He has three sons, all of whom are either active-duty or veterans of the Marine Corps.

Over the weekend, Barranco was doing what he does every Saturday: working. Video of the encounter shows Barranco being approached by armed, unidentified masked men while he was cutting the grass at an IHOP restaurant. Frightened, Barranco fled, still holding his weed-whacker. The agents then caught up with him, sprayed him in the face with something, wrestled him to the ground and started beating him.

The Department of Homeland Security alleges Barranco assaulted agents with his weed-whacker, but eyewitnesses, including the manager of that IHOP, say that’s not what they saw. “He was protecting himself,” Guilermo Villarreal told KNBC, the local NBC News affiliate. “He’s not attacking [anybody]. They were beating him so hard.”

According to Barranco’s family, he is currently being detained in an L.A. detention center. One of Barranco’s sons spoke to KNBC about what his father experienced ...

https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-ice-raids-california-marine-betrayed-rcna215053

[struggle4progress]

2. Deporting veterans betrays America's promise

... An estimated 94,000 veterans do not have U.S. citizenship, leaving them vulnerable to detention and deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not report the veteran status of people who have been deported, so the exact number of deported veterans is almost impossible to know. Some organizations have reported there have been hundreds of cases of deported veterans—and this is likely a gross underestimate.

My name is Alex Murillo, and I am one of those deported veterans.

My story is one of honor, sacrifice, and injustice. Born in Nogales, Mexico, I came to the U.S. as an infant and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. I went on to proudly serve in Iraq as a jet mechanic in the U.S. Navy. In 2011, I was deported to Mexico due to a nonviolent offense after struggling with the challenges many veterans face when transitioning back to civilian life. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “1 in 3 veterans have been arrested or jailed at least once, often for crimes stemming directly from traumatic experiences related to their military service.” For noncitizen veterans, criminal convictions—including for nonviolent and misdemeanor crimes—can result in mandatory deportation. Like many other deported veterans, I was stripped of my home, family, and the nation I swore an oath to defend. I spent over a decade south of the border, advocating for other deported veterans while enduring the pain of being cast aside by the country I once served.

After years of applications, lawyers, and waiting, I was able to return home to Arizona, and I am now receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. But countless veterans remain stranded abroad, living as exiles from the nation they fought for. Under the Biden administration, efforts were made to return “military service members, veterans, and their immediate family members who were unjustly removed,” according to former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s a very different reality for the more than 40,000 noncitizens serving today under the Trump administration ...
https://prismreports.org/2025/04/07/deported-veterans-undocumented-immigrants/

[struggle4progress]

3. Estimates say 10,000 U.S. veterans have been deported

KJZZ | By Jill Ryan
Published June 24, 2025 at 11:39 AM MST

Arizona Rep. Yassamin Ansari and nine other members of Congress are demanding federal authorities answer their concerns about the Trump administration’s deportation of military veterans.

In a letter to the secretary of Defense, the secretary of Veterans Affairs and the secretary of Homeland Security, Ansari demands to know the current number of veterans facing deportation, as well as the number of veterans who’ve already been deported since President Donald Trump took office in January.

It also asks the feds to detail what immigration case assistance and information is being offered to veterans swept up in Trump’s efforts to deport immigrants.

The letter cites estimates that 10,000 or more veterans have been deported so far ...

https://www.kjzz.org/politics/2025-06-24/estimates-say-10-000-u-s-veterans-have-been-deported-rep-ansari-demands-answers-in-letter