Issues with US military recruitment

When a Trump supporter’s wife is deported

Sgt. Temo Juarez was a Trump guy. An Iraq combat veteran who served as a Marine infantryman and then an Army National Guardsman, his friends called him a “super conservative.” With his wife, he brought up their two daughters in Central Florida. He supported Trump in 2016, eager for a change.
But now, “I am eating my words,” he told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in an interview published last week.
On Friday, Juarez and his family became the latest victims of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on immigration.
On that day, his wife, Alejandra, left the country under a deportation order. She had come to the United States from Mexico illegally as a teenager two decades ago and had until now being living undisturbed with Temo, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and daughters, both natural-born Americans. This week, Temo will fly to Mexico with his daughters, 9-year-old Estela and 16-year-old Pamela — and leave his younger daughter there, even though English is her first language. He can’t do his construction job and take care of her in Florida by himself.
Temo Juarez believed Trump would deport only illegal immigrants who were criminals, and his wife had no record.
Instead, as the family fought Alejandra’s deportation, young Estela, with unicorns on her T-shirt, wept as she spoke to TV cameras: “I really do want to stay with my mom and dad. I want us to be together and stay in my house. I don’t want to go to Mexico. I want to stay here.”
For Sgt. Juarez, this was the Trump administration’s unique way of saying, “Thank you for your service.”
Trump’s “family separation” policy is most visible on the border. Last week, the administration said it still had not reunited 572 immigrant children it separated from their parents. The administration, in a court filing last week, said it should be up to the American Civil Liberties Union — the group that sued over family separation — to locate the parents.
But, as the Juarez case shows, the wanton cruelty of the immigration policy isn’t limited to new arrivals. “Zero tolerance literally ripped this family apart,” Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.), the Juarezes’ congressman, told me Monday. “The administration is so extreme on immigration that they’re deporting the spouses of military veterans.”
Soto and colleagues introduced legislation and wrote letters to help the Juarez family. No use.
At political rallies, Trump often exults: “Oh, do we love our veterans!” He also talks about illegal immigrants who “infest” the country; last week he said calling Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists was “peanuts compared to what turns out to be the truth.”
In real life, the ones Trump loves and the ones Trump demonizes are not so far apart. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tells me it doesn’t track the number of military spouses subjected to deportation. But the advocacy group American Families United, extrapolating from census figures, estimates there are as many as 11,800 active-duty military service members with a spouse or family member vulnerable to deportation. And that doesn’t include veterans’ families.
Since the Marquis de Lafayette during the Revolutionary War, and the Irish Brigade during the Civil War, immigrants have had a central role in the U.S. military. That’s true now, too, says Jon Soltz, an Iraq veteran who founded the group VoteVets. If zero tolerance is enforced, he said, it will feel as if “everybody has a family member who is affected.”
As many as 1,000 foreign nationals, recruited to the military for their critical language or medical skills, face potential discharge over delays in background checks. The Trump administration’s removal of protected status for Salvadorans and Haitians means many more military family members will face deportation. Many veterans themselves have been deported because of missed application deadlines.
ICE, in a statement, says it “removed Alejandra Juarez, a citizen and national of Mexico, to her home country.” ICE said she had attempted in 1998 to enter the country by falsely claiming she was a U.S. citizen and was issued an “expedited order of removal.”
She returned, illegally, and remained without incident until a traffic stop led ICE to reinstate her removal order in 2013. But the Obama administration did not prioritize the deportation of military family members — a policy of protection supported by, among others, then-Rep. Mike Pence.
These are different times.
Juarez hasn’t spoken much in public about his family’s ordeal. (He wasn’t home Monday when I attempted to reach him.) But in the Stars and Stripes interview, he spoke about preparing his daughters for the impending family separation. “I’ve been preaching to them you’ve got to be mentally tough — pretty much what they teach you in the Army,” he said.
But nothing the military taught him could have prepared him for the cruelty his country just inflicted on his family.
Twitter: @Milbank
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Issues with US military recruitment

A current issue with US military recruitment is the 2016 suspension of the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI), a recruitment program for non-permanent residents with high-demand skills from medicine to languages. Critics state that America has not kept its promise of service in exchange for US citizenship and that scrutiny of immigrants' background checks are unfairly keeping them from serving. As more women enlist, their roles in the US military are ever evolving as policies change allowing them to serve in combat roles.  A loss of trade-related jobs is increasing the number of applicants for US military recruiters. Documents discussing legal action directly attributed to a US President (such as Trump) are not relevant.

Find an article addressing this question on military policies.

He’s a U.S. soldier deployed on the southern border — and an unlawful immigrant

The U.S. soldier was ready to deploy across the world at a moment’s notice, but when the orders came down weeks ago to mobilize on the southern border, it sparked a flash of concern.
He knew the mission was in support of border agents combing harsh borderland terrain to arrest anyone unlawfully in the country.
People like him.
“I’m an illegal immigrant,” the Chinese-born soldier told The Washington Post by phone.
His duties do not often intersect with Customs and Border Protection agents, he said, but he has avoided them out of fear they will learn that one of 5,400 troops in their orbit is in violation of immigration law.
That has placed him in the unusual situation of serving a nation that has not recognized him as a citizen, despite promises from the Pentagon to quickly naturalize skilled immigrants in exchange for service, as they had done for thousands of troops since 2009.
The Post is withholding the soldier’s name and certain details, including his duty location, because he fears discipline for speaking to the media.
The soldier, now in his late 20s, began his path to the United States nearly a decade ago, after high school.
His home in southeastern China is beautiful, he said, the region dotted with lakes and towering limestone karst formations. But it is also stifling. He felt trapped by family expectations, and a passion for engineering could take him only so far there.
There were better opportunities in America, he believed.
He joined his sister in California on a student visa and enrolled in college. The military seemed like a place to further his career, he said, and the Pentagon’s immigrant recruit program guaranteed something more than job security: “A sense of pride,” he said.
His enlistment would also harness something that makes him especially valuable to the military — his voice. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, which is among several languages the Pentagon has deemed strategically vital but in short supply among U.S.-born troops.
And as the Pentagon has increasingly worried about China’s military ambitions, it seemed like the perfect time, then, for the Chinese-born soldier to offer his skills. He was scheduled to begin training in August 2016, according to documents obtained by The Post.
That’s about when everything started to go very wrong. The Pentagon program he enlisted through, Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, was beginning its year-long implosion.
Immigrant recruits commonly timed their enlistment so their student and visitor visas could carry them through with enough time to legally protect them. The Chinese soldier enlisted when he was still a lawful immigrant with a valid visa — in compliance with MAVNI requirements.
But the Pentagon’s security screening was so slow that “some number of 4,300 MAVNI applicants” had fallen out of lawful status as they waited, according to an internal agency memo dated Sept. 30, 2016.
The agency later said the number crested at 1,000 recruits. That number included the Chinese soldier, whose enlistment date slid back amid the chaos. Many recruits waited months, or years, to move forward.
The Chinese soldier did not even have weeks. In September 2016, the Pentagon introduced vastly more complicated security checks amid fears of foreign infiltrators.
Weeks later, in October, his legal status expired, making him an unlawful immigrant.
He picked up fares as a Lyft driver while he waited for his enlistment to move forward, he said, and took pains to avoid the border when he ventured to San Diego. He wouldn’t risk flying, either.
In August 2017, after nine grueling months under threat of deportation, he was granted deferred action by Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), but that already expired, he said, putting him back into the crosshairs of immigration enforcement.
The MAVNI program was shuttered last fall, crushed by its own bureaucratic inertia, and remaining applicants in the system trickled through enlistment.
Military naturalizations plummeted just as the Chinese soldier readied for training, and USCIS closed its offices at three basic training sites in January 2018, BuzzFeed reported.
The agency said it did so after rule changes mandated 180 days of service to naturalize. In response, it moved to a roving model to perform naturalization services, though it did not say how troops like the Chinese soldier could fall through the cracks.
Congress mandated faster naturalizations established after a U.S. soldier from Trinidad was killed in Iraq on his way to gather paperwork for his citizenship. A Pentagon spokeswoman did not return a request for comment on how and why immigrant troops may arrive at their units without being naturalized.
Soon after the January closures, the Chinese soldier made it to basic training.
His drill sergeants told him he would not be naturalized during basic training in Missouri, he said.
He then moved to advanced training in Texas. He said he was told the base was not set up for naturalizations, either.
And then, soon after he arrived at his home station, he was mobilized for the border deployment.
In China, his parents have worried about his status and his safety after seeing images of Central American migrants fleeing tear gas. He feels sympathetic to fellow immigrants, he said, who like him left their home to pursue opportunities elsewhere.
“At the same time,” he said, “a massive group rushing in wasn’t the best way to do so, I think.”
At his new unit, he said paperwork for his naturalization was underway but that the border deployment has paused the process while he is gone.
Troops on the border were scheduled to leave by Dec. 15. But on Tuesday, the Pentagon extended forces there to the end of January, leaving him more time to ponder the risks of interacting with federal agents there.
He has kept busy in his down time by working out, reading and studying for certification tests on his smartphone, he said.
Sometimes he will catch a sunset of brilliant orange and pink.
It’s wondrous out there, he said, in the big, beautiful country not quite his home.
This story has been updated.
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A woman’s daring escape from a Border Patrol agent helped reveal a ‘serial killer,’ police say


Issues with US military recruitment

After losing court battle, Pentagon will send green-card holders to recruit training

The Pentagon will begin sending a backlog of thousands of green-card holders to recruit training, suspending a policy adopted by the Trump administration last year that required more-stringent background checks for some immigrants wanting to serve, according to two defense officials and an internal memo.
The policy called for green-card holders to submit to and complete a full background check and respond to any concerns before they could go to boot camp. That was in addition to standard requirements for green-card applicants, such as biometrics screening.
The change put thousands of people in limbo, as their screening languished and specific jobs within the military promised to them slipped away.
The new directive says that each armed service must comply immediately with a preliminary injunction issued last month in the District Court for the Northern District of California. In it, Judge Jon S. Tigar agreed with an argument from the lawyers of two prospective service members and the American Civil Liberties Union that the Pentagon had not satisfactorily explained why new screening is necessary. Tigar said the policy should be disregarded.
Air Force Lt. Col. Carla Gleason, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the services will begin sending the recruits to training this week. They will be placed in available slots, and the services will have to consider factors such as their needs and prospective recruits’ preferences.
The injunction eases pressure on a group of prospective troops that the Pentagon has long recruited, pitching self-betterment and, in some cases, a chance at U.S. citizenship. About 18,000 U.S. troops were green-card holders at the beginning of the Trump administration, and about 5,000 joined the military each year before the stricter policy, Pentagon officials have said.
Some military officials have raised concerns internally that the growing backlog of green-card holders could present problems for a military always in need of new troops.
The directive, which was obtained by The Washington Post, was issued two days after a reporter began asking military officials last week about the glut of potential recruits waiting to train and whether it was complying with the injunction.
In the Navy, officials overseeing the issue called it “untenable” in a recent document reviewed by The Post and warned that the situation brings “increasing risk of mission failure.”
The document said the average wait time for a green-card holder to join the U.S. military had grown to 354 days as opposed to 168 for U.S. citizens, raising the possibility that the Navy would miss its recruiting goals.
If the Pentagon ordered the services to comply with the court injunction, the Navy should ship lawful permanent residents to the “maximum extent possible” to fill about 1,154 open slots in recruit training in December and January, officials added.
A military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the Navy has more than 2,870 green-card holders under contract and waiting to go to recruit training.
A Marine Corps spokesman, Gunnery Sgt. Justin Kronenberg, said his service had 1,062 additional green-card holders awaiting recruit training. Like the other services, the Marines were awaiting additional guidance from the Pentagon last week.“The Marine Corps Recruiting Command has kept full pace with [Defense Department] policy updates and is in compliance with all guidance regarding Lawful Permanent Resident accessions,” Kronenberg said. “We’ve maintained maximum transparency concerning the process with our LPR applicants to ensure they and their families are informed and their questions are answered.”
The Marine Corps sent 1,044 green-card holders to recruit training in 2016 and 1,169 in 2017, but the number dropped to 808 in the most recent fiscal year ending in September.
The Air Force sent 567 green-card holders to recruit training in 2016 and 590 in 2017, according to data provided by the service. But that number dropped to 44 in the fiscal year ending in September. About 470 green-card holders are under contract and waiting to attend training.
The Army sent 4,600 green-card holders to recruit training in 2016, and 3,600 in 2017, according to data provided by the Pentagon. That number plummeted to 513 in 2018, as the Army also missed its recruiting goal in 2018 for the first time since 2005 by about 6,500 soldiers, despite spending more than $200 million on bonuses. The service declined to say how many green-card holders are in its system waiting to ship to training, citing the open litigation.
The green-card holders originate from many countries with which the United States has friendly relations, with lawful permanent residents from the Philippines making up the largest number. In the Navy, about 656 of the group waiting to go to boot camp are from there.

China, Jamaica, Nigeria and Mexico are among the other nations with significant numbers, according to data provided to The Post.
The Pentagon has grappled with frequent Chinese efforts to steal U.S. secrets and is concerned about Islamic extremism in Nigeria, but it also has lauded the past efforts by green-card holders from those nations to join the military and earn their citizenship.
The suit filed in California by the ACLU details the cases of Jiahao Kuang, who moved to the United States from China at 8 years old, and Deron Cooke, who successfully applied for a green card at age 22 and emigrated from Jamaica.
Kuang grew up in California and enlisted in the Navy in July 2017, motivated by a desire to serve the United States and earn money for college, according to court documents for the case. He was initially expected to head to training in July 2018, but that date was later shifted until January 2019. He did not apply for college in anticipation of joining the Navy, the documents said.
Cooke, unaware of the Pentagon’s new policy last year, resigned from a job in anticipation of soon joining the Air Force as an auto mechanic. He, too, was caught in limbo and still hasn’t begun training.
The judge ruled that the two recruits are representative of the kind of people affected by the Pentagon’s policy. The court will continue to review the issue.
dan.lamothe@washpost.com


Issues with US military recruitment

Discharging immigrant soldiers is the American way. That’s the problem.

Last month, reports emerged that the U.S. military had begun discharging immigrant Army reservists and recruits who did not pass their security screening and were deemed “unsuitable.” For many, it closed off their pathway to obtaining U.S. citizenship through the military.
This action reflects the latest in the Trump administration’s organized assault on immigrants, but it’s also part of a far longer story. Over the past 70 years of unending U.S. wars, the military has repeatedly welcomed immigrants and those deemed “foreign” for their skills and symbolic value, and then subsequently discharged them on the grounds that they posed a threat to the nation. Doing so reflects an America caught between military necessity and suspicion of others, driven by racism, that has made appeals for immigrant inclusion and support for U.S. overseas militarism increasingly difficult to separate.
During World War II, hundreds of Japanese Americans were recruited into the military from internment camps. Many served in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Those skilled in the Japanese language joined the Military Intelligence Service to gather and analyze enemy intelligence.
Beyond their language skills and manpower, Japanese Americans also offered great symbolic value for the military by countering Japanese propaganda about American racism. At a time when nearly 120,000 Japanese residents in the United States were imprisoned in camps and had their constitutional rights suspended because they were deemed “enemy aliens,” these exceptional Japanese American soldiers told a story of redemption and American progress. President Harry S. Truman commended them in 1946: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice — and you have won.”
And yet, even as symbols of American enlightenment and indispensable cogs in the war machine, many Japanese American service members faced intense scrutiny because of suspicions about their potential for disloyalty. After the war, the Army ordered “all inductees or enlistees of Japanese ancestry” to Occupied Japan to serve as translators and “ambassadors of democracy.” At the same time, the Army’s Office of Intelligence (G-2) monitored them for potential subversion, and Japanese American service members believed to have ties with Japanese communists were discharged.
Once the Korean War broke out, Korean Americans stationed in South Korea were similarly interrogated over their political affiliations and potential ties to Communist North Korea.
Even as these Americans served their country with distinction, they were treated as foreigners whose presence in the military only further amplified the threat that they posed to national security. They were seen as racial minorities first and soldiers second, and notwithstanding their donning of the military uniform, their loyalty to the nation was rendered inherently suspect by their race. In some cases, Army intelligence officers even believed that their “racial background” made them susceptible to communist propaganda.
This ambivalence toward nonwhite American soldiers extended to soldiers from allied countries. During the Cold War, the Defense Department created the Mutual Defense Assistance Program to train soldiers from allied countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and South Vietnam. The program brought over 140,000 foreign military trainees to the United States throughout the 1950s.
Like the Japanese Americans in the military during World War II, the Defense Department saw these trainees as vital manpower for the defense of the “free world” from Communism as well as cultural ambassadors who could spread the gospel of American democracy back in their home countries. To enhance what they termed the “collateral benefits” of the trainees, the Defense Department even published guidebooks to acquaint them with the “American way of life” premised on ideals of freedom and individualism.
Despite being allies, these foreign trainees were not immune from the anti-communist hysteria then sweeping the United States. Immigrant communities in particular fell prey to witch hunts in this environment. And when some foreign trainees went AWOL and sought asylum in the United States from U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes in their home countries, they quickly went from being perceived as military assets to being viewed as an immigration problem and national security threat. Instead of being granted asylum, many of them were subjected to deportation.
The pattern of welcoming foreign nationals into the military and then discharging or criminalizing them has continued to the present. In 2009, the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI, program was established to enlist non-U.S. citizens through the promise of expedited citizenship. The MAVNI program prioritized enlistees with “critical skills” such as “physicians, nurses, and certain experts in language with associated cultural background.” It was part of the revival of counterinsurgency championed by senior military officials in the War on Terror.
Despite its promised military benefits, the specter of “foreigners within” plagued the program almost from its start. In 2009, MAVNI was suspended temporarily after the mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., by U.S.-born Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The program was reinstated in 2012 after the implementation of tighter screening procedures.
With the recent wave of discharges of MAVNI recruits, however, we are seeing echoes of the past. Some of the recruits have been discharged because of their “foreign ties” of their relatives living abroad.
There has been a persistent contradiction between the imperatives of fighting U.S. wars abroad — in which immigrants and those perceived to be foreign because of their race are valued for their skills and symbolic value — and the ongoing war at home against immigrants and racial minorities who are deemed a threat to America’s imagined homogenous culture. Discharging “bad” immigrants from the military has been a way of resolving this contradiction. It preserves the military’s image as an inclusive and diverse institution and reinforces the false idea that there are “deserving” immigrants. At the same time, however, it nurtures suspicions about racial minorities, immigrants and foreigners.
As this history reveals, the struggle for justice on behalf of those who have been discharged from the military must be waged as part of the struggle against this administration’s anti-immigrant policies, and that struggle must be a part of the broader fight to end America’s permanent war at home and abroad. So long as the United States remains engaged in almost perpetual war, there will be a need for nonwhite soldiers with cultural and symbolic value and simultaneously intense suspicion of them. Xenophobia and militarism have always fueled one another, and ending one requires ending the other.


Issues with US military recruitment

Hundreds of immigrant recruits risk ‘death sentence’ after Army bungles data, lawmaker says

Army officials inadvertently disclosed sensitive information about hundreds of immigrant recruits from nations such as China and Russia, in a breach that could aid hostile governments in persecuting them or their families, a lawmaker and former U.S. officials said.
A spreadsheet intended for internal coordination among recruiters was accidentally emailed to recruits and contained names, Social Security numbers and enlistment dates. The list was sent out inadvertently at least three times between July 2017 and January 2018.
The breach prompted at least a dozen asylum claims amid concern that if the list were intercepted and recruits were forced to return to autocratic nations such as China or Russia, their enlistments would be harnessed to punish them or their families with jail time, harsh interrogations or worse, said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a former human rights official in the State Department under President Barack Obama.
“If that list is floating out there, it would potentially be incredibly dangerous for [recruits]. In some countries, it can even be a death sentence,” Malinowski told The Washington Post, referring to China and Russia. It is not clear whether those governments have obtained the list.
The list contains sensitive data about more than 4,200 immigrant recruits. Of those, more than 900 Chinese Mandarin speakers and dozens of Russian speakers are on the spreadsheet, according to a copy obtained by The Post.
The breach carries a tinge of irony. The Army negligently gave sensitive personnel information to recruits who the Pentagon says present an elevated security risk — information that could become a propaganda victory for adversarial governments.
Chinese citizens found to seriously breach national security are subject to the death penalty, according to criminal law there. Punishment for foreign collusion in China ranges from 10 years to life in prison.
The Army said recruiting officials investigated the breach and “ensured corrective actions were taken,” according to Col. Michael Indovina, a spokesman for Army Training and Doctrine Command, although his statement did not elaborate on what action was taken.
“We acknowledged the severity of this inadvertent disclosure of sensitive personal information; upon notification of this release, the command immediately reported the disclosure, and while we determined that the risk of further disclosure was minimal, swift actions were taken by the command to mitigate further release,” Indovina said.
The command declined to comment further.
The data breach has been used as supporting evidence in at least a dozen asylum claims for Chinese recruits who fear government retaliation, according to a person with knowledge of the claims who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Abhishek Bakshi, an Indian recruit, said he received the list by accident in July 2017 from an Army recruiter in Wisconsin who asked whether he wanted to schedule a security interview. The spreadsheet was disturbing, said Bakshi, whose name is on the list.
“The list could be a risk to those people,” Bakshi told The Post. He filed an affidavit to support one Chinese asylum claim that has since been used for other claims. The breach, he wrote, “increases the danger of persecution of Chinese [recruits].”
Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer and retired Army officer, said she is aware of six Chinese recruits who have been granted asylum. Dozens of others are waiting on pending claims overseen by her and other lawyers, she said.
All of the affected recruits were part of the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest recruitment program, which has rotated more than 10,400 immigrants into the force with promises to quickly naturalize them in exchange for needed medical and language skills. It was closed in 2017 following security fears and increased background checks that paralyzed vetting resources within the government.
Chinese recruits filing for asylum are concerned that extensive background checks implemented in 2016 will deny them enlistment for innocuous reasons, and some have waited so long that their visas have expired, exposing them to deportation. That has heightened concern they may be forced into the waiting arms of hostile governments.
“The Defense Department is coming up with any reason to fail them,” Stock said.
Another Chinese recruit at an Army Reserve aviation unit in Fort Knox, Ky., received the list in December 2017, among other documents related to enlistment, after it was forwarded among a chain of recruiting officials.
His name was also on the list. “I was shocked to receive the spreadsheet,” he wrote in an October asylum claim. “I surmised that Army personnel didn’t bother to look at the Excel attachment before forwarding it.”
The lists also include the status of intelligence agency checks and background investigations that are similar to the scope of top-secret clearances.
Malinowski said recruits or their families could be imperiled if adversarial intelligence networks learned of their enlistments and detained them to ask their understanding of the enlistment process, security at U.S. installations “or anything that may be useful.”
Although the list does not provide a country of origin, languages are listed using Defense Department linguistics codes, and program participants must be foreign-born. One list has circulated as early as July 2017, and variations of the list have included home addresses, obtained emails show.
Updated lists referred to in emails as late as January 2018 may contain more names.
Malinowski has said that other evidence of enlistment could be gathered by adversarial powers, such as social media posts and communication surveillance. But the spreadsheets can confirm enlistments and fill in any gaps they do not have, removing any speculation, he said.
The Defense Department had used caution to handle personal information of immigrant recruits, underscoring the need to safeguard their families in hostile nations, said Naomi Verdugo, a former senior recruiting official for the Army at the Pentagon.
Since 2009, when the MAVNI program began, officials would instruct Army public affairs staff to clear the use of photos, names and other details in media reports with immigrants who were particularly vulnerable.
“If you’re from Canada, it’s probably not an issue,” Verdugo said. “If you’re from Pakistan, it could be a problem.”
The practice was in place in 2015, when Verdugo left, she said, although it is unclear whether Army or defense officials follow the same policies.
The Justice Department has successfully argued in a lawsuit that identities and personal information of certain immigrant recruits should be protected. The recruits “have a right to privacy and may not wish to be identified,” a U.S. attorney wrote in an August filing.
The MAVNI program intended to harness skills in short supply among U.S.-born troops. But now, Malinowski said, Chinese recruits granted asylum may be just refugees instead of soldiers.
“Wouldn’t it have been better if we got the benefit of their intended service?” he asked.
This post has been updated.
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He’s a U.S. soldier deployed on the southern border — and an unlawful immigrant


Issues with US military recruitment

The military is kicking out foreign recruits it needs — for having foreign ties

In the past month, the Pentagon booted two Chinese recruits from the enlistment process because of their dead grandfathers, who lived very different lives.
One recruit’s grandfather, whom he never met, served in the communist military. Another recruit was removed from the program after drilling for three years because of the polar opposite — Zicheng Li’s grandfather fought against, and was tortured by, China’s Communist Party, defense officials wrote.
Screening documents obtained by The Washington Post detailing reasons that these and other foreign recruits were removed from the military reveal a pattern of canceled enlistments and failed screenings for fact-of-life events and, often, simply for existing as foreigners.
Immigrant enlistees have been cut loose for being the children of foreign parents or for having family ties to their native government or military. In some cases, they have relatives who served in militaries closely allied with the United States. Those removals raise questions about the Pentagon’s screening process and why it has weeded out precisely the recruits defense officials said they needed.
The Pentagon program under which they were recruited called for a simple idea: The military would enlist immigrants to harness strategic language and medical abilities in short supply among U.S.-born troops, calling the skills of immigrants a national security imperative.
The program was even named in that fashion — Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI, which enlisted more than 10,400 foreign troops in the past decade, with the promise of fast-tracked naturalization that would take weeks. Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Arabic and other speakers have been in demand by defense officials.
Then denials began to quicken since stricter screening was implemented in late 2016, an attorney for immigrant recruits said, pointing to family ties as a common reason.
Li, who arrived in Minnesota from China in 2012 to study aerospace engineering, told The Post that his Army enlistment had crawled since February 2016. In that time, he attended drills as a selected reservist and received his uniform and an ID card that grants him access to Army installations.
Then this month, after three years of waiting, an enlistment denial justification letter arrived in his mailbox, containing two sentences about family history.
Li told investigators that his since-deceased grandfather’s torture decades ago by communists prompted worry of reprisals if the Chinese government learned of Li’s enlistment. “You revealed that you fear for your family’s safety,” officials wrote in a letter, saying his suitability for enlistment is adverse, documents show.
“I’m shocked and numb,” Li said. “They use anything they can to kick us out.”
The new vetting process has delayed enlistments by years, and the wait has turned more than 1,000 recruits — who enlisted as legal immigrants with visas — into unlawful immigrants whose credentials expired as their screenings tumbled through bureaucratic limbo.
The Pentagon has acknowledged in court filings that none of the thousands of recruits who later naturalized from the program have been charged with espionage-related crimes, though one Chinese recruit has been accused of failing to register as a foreign agent. The new vetting procedures did not play a role in his detection, court filings said.
It is unclear how many immigrant recruits have been turned away as recruits or discharged as soldiers in recent months. In a spate of lawsuits alleging misconduct and violation of equal protection laws, the Pentagon has reversed decisions and halted discharges.
Defense officials have not offered public insight into how the vetting works or what kind of oversight exists but defend the process as necessary to avoid foreign influence and coercion. The vetting results are typically explained in one or two sentences.
Another Chinese-born recruit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal to his family by the Chinese government, told The Post he was denied enlistment last month because his father and grandfather served in the communist military, though the report about his relatives’ positions was inaccurate, he said.
His grandfather died before the recruit was born. “I don’t know what the harm is for me to finish my contract and gain my citizenship,” he said.
MAVNI screening can be “time-consuming due to our limited ability” to verify information from home countries, said Jessica Maxwell, a Pentagon spokeswoman. She declined to address questions about the process itself and whether screeners adjust expectations of foreign ties if they are screening foreign people.
She also declined to say how many MAVNI recruits are still waiting for their screening to finish, citing litigation and privacy limitations.
Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer who has represented MAVNI recruits, including Li, said the Pentagon has scuttled millions of dollars and years of time to produce unclear reasons it separates immigrants the agency itself determined it needed.
“This is what they come up with? Your grandfather served in a foreign army before you were born?” Stock said. “What is the threat to national security? They can’t articulate it here.”
Other rejections point to speculative or seemingly benign information for immigrants living typical lives.
“You revealed that you maintain routine contact with your father and mother who are citizens of and reside in China,” one document said.
An Indian-born recruit was cut loose after an investigation determined that family members “work for or have worked for the Indian army,” according to one document, even thought India and the United States share a defense relationship. Recruits from South Korea, a key U.S. defense ally, have been penalized because their fathers are required by conscription to serve, Stock said.
Maxwell declined to say why a family member’s involvement in a friendly military would raise suspicions.
Another enlistee was rejected for “multiple wire transfers” through U.S. banks, though the screening review did not describe the nature of the transfers or whether they were unlawful.
One recruit, a Chinese doctoral student, was turned away because a screener with no medical experience said the recruit had Asperger’s syndrome — on the basis that the screener once observed a family member with autism, The Post previously reported.
Potential persecution of Li’s family could be aided by the U.S. military itself. U.S. Army recruiters inadvertently exposed the private information of hundreds of Chinese-born recruits, heightening the risk that Chinese government officials would target their families, a lawmaker said.
Those disclosures and enlistment delays have forced several to apply for U.S. asylum protection, including Li, while he fights the Army’s determination that he is unsuitable for service.
He said wants to bring his family to the United States. Until then, he has taken a rather American path: He helps design grain enclosures and spreaders for a farm equipment company in Minnesota, with an eye to eventually transitioning from the Army to the Air Force.
Li wants to be a pilot, he said, perhaps for the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.
Fighters can be flashy, he said. But the Hercules can get him more time in the cockpit on missions around the world.
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Issues with US military recruitment

Immigrant recruits face more scrutiny than white supremacists when they enlist. Here’s why.

Dan Lamothe contributed to this report. Read more: ‘This is disgusting:’ Lawmakers blast companies overseeing military homes racked by toxic dangers

Officially, U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson wielded a secret security clearance and oversaw development of vessels designed for drug enforcement and counterterrorism operations.
But, prosecutors said, time at his work computer also drifted to planning a domestic terrorist attack and building a hit list as the self-avowed white nationalist stockpiled guns at home.
Hasson’s arrest last week in Maryland, where he faces drug and gun charges, has raised questions about how the military screens for hate group affiliations or other threats, especially compared with how the Pentagon has approached vetting its foreign recruits — an arduous process that has led to a number of lawsuits.
Few tools to screen for hate group affiliation are available beyond visible tattoo inspections and a criminal record check during the enlistment and commission process, said Air Force Maj. Carla Gleason, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Individual military services have rules for how they rescreen and investigate potential violators after they are in uniform, she said.
By contrast, a Pentagon program for skilled foreign recruits designed to trade expedited citizenship for service requires layers of intensive vetting.
Recruits with valid visas are screened by the State and Homeland Security departments before even entering the program, and since 2016 they have been subjected to additional counterintelligence screening and security checks similar to a top-secret clearance.
Continuous vetting requirements, even after recruits had been naturalized, were reversed by a federal court after a judge ruled they were so stringent that they violated constitutional equal-protection laws. The Pentagon said it feared insider threats in the military.
“The military is neglecting checks on native-born Americans,” said Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer who helped implement the foreign recruit program at the Pentagon. “And they’re focused on vetting the least dangerous group in the military.”
The Pentagon could institute simpler broad checks for native-born and foreign recruits alike to block or catch more bad actors, she said.
The Defense Department said it feared security holes in the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest recruitment program, or MAVNI, which was shuttered in 2017, though it acknowledged in court filings that none of the thousands of naturalized recruits from the program have been charged with espionage-related crimes.
One Chinese national who entered the program was charged with failing to report as a foreign agent but did not make it to basic training, and the new vetting procedures did not play a role in his detection, court filings said.
The additional Pentagon vetting became such a bureaucratic albatross that it essentially imploded the program. Other lawsuits and decisions related to vetting and naturalization procedures led to victories for immigrant recruits.
Similarly heightened screening for green-card holders has also been introduced and subsequently challenged.
Hasson, 49, was ordered held for 14 days as prosecutors weigh additional charges. He had previously served in the Marine Corps and the Army National Guard. Coast Guard officials said he is no longer in his position as an acquisitions officer at their Washington headquarters.
“Unlawful possession of drugs and firearms, as well as advocacy for supremacist doctrine, ideology, or causes, violates Coast Guard policy, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and our organization core values,” said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a Coast Guard spokesman.
Hasson had held a secret security clearance since April 2005, McBride said, and he would have renewed it in 2015. It is unclear whether the clearance was revoked.
A Coast Guard member was reprimanded last month for flashing a hand signal associated with white supremacy on live TV.
White supremacists and neo-Nazis became an issue in the 1980s and ’90s, when officials ordered crackdowns to weed out individuals who sought access to weapons and tactical training to later use in a race war.
But white supremacists are still getting through. In 2017, an active-duty Marine took part in violence at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and two others hung a racist banner in North Carolina, prompting embarrassment in the service and a rush to emphasize that participation in such groups was not tolerated.
Existing measures are not adequate to combat extremism in the ranks, experts said.
“ 'Screening out’ ” isn’t a comprehensive enough answer for the threat posed by the white power movement,” said Kathleen Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” and a history professor at the University of Chicago. “What we need is a broad public conversation about this movement,” she said.
It is unclear how many service members with ties to hate groups are in the military. A 2017 poll by Military Times found a quarter of troops said they saw evidence of white nationalism in the ranks. The white power movement overall has taken cues from cell-style terrorism to make it harder for authorities to monitor and defeat, Belew said.
A lack of scrutiny for U.S. citizen recruits has recently led to other national security breaches.
In 2017, a dual French-U. S. citizen enlisted in the U.S. Army after he fought with Russian separatists in Ukraine and helped start an anti-Western militant group. He was assigned to an infantry unit in Hawaii undetected until a report by The Washington Post led to his discharge.
Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
Read more:
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Issues with US military recruitment

When it comes to helping our soldiers, talk is cheap

“Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner?” President Trump mused last month.
With that conjecture about the leadership of Admiral William McRaven, whom he succinctly dismissed as a “Hillary Clinton fan” and “Obama backer,” Trump provoked yet another scandal about presidential comportment. Of course, it’s hardly news that Trump criticized someone seemingly unassailable; indeed, his swipe at Chief Justice John Roberts three days later largely displaced the McRaven story.
But like Trump’s insistence that the late Sen. John McCain was “not a war hero,” his criticism of McRaven rankled in a newsworthy way because it grated against our sense that military personnel ought to be publicly venerated. The ritual of saying thank you to the troops is now an established, almost demanded, response to the pervasive notion that military personnel are the best among us, frequently couched as a repayment of our perceived collective debts for their sacrifice.
But singling out military personnel for such acknowledgments actually comes at the expense of meaningfully recognizing their service. By taking the easy way out, offering accolades instead of the concrete support they need or careful thought about the human costs of U.S. foreign policy, we may actually be putting our troops at greater risk. Because adoration for the troops has become so central to American militarism (the idea that war is necessary, inevitable, even beneficial), participating in these rituals may, in fact, cement the beliefs that inspire the United States to send its military personnel to war.
The expectation that politicians and ordinary citizens alike express their unwavering support for the troops is relatively new. Although our government has provided compensation for injured veterans since before the Revolutionary War, it has often doled out these benefits begrudgingly.
During the Civil War, the government established a veterans’ pension, and the years after the war were marked by an upwelling of citizen gratitude for the massive conscript army credited with preserving the Union. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln implored the nation to “strive on…to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans.” This pledge later became the foundation for the mission statement of the Veterans Administration.
Yet by the end of the 19th century, animosity toward people with disabilities contributed to the social marginalization of injured veterans. Indeed, over time, the initial good will toward veterans morphed into resentment about the special treatment they seemed to be receiving from the state. In public discourse, veterans were often scorned for laziness, criminality and malingering unemployment, a characterization that persisted into the era of World War I.
In October 1920, as New York voters considered a state bond that would pay a bonus to veterans, Henry Stimson — Secretary of War under William Howard Taft and again under Franklin Roosevelt, and himself a World War I veteran — wrote a piece in the New York Times warning that this bonus would “inevitably teach the service men to lean upon the State and nation.” Although the bond issue passed handily, the nationwide push toward rehabilitation for injured veterans was motivated by a concern that they become productive — gainfully employable — members of society, not any sense that the nation owed them a debt of gratitude.
In the midst of the Great Depression in 1932, thousands of jobless World War I veterans converged on Washington to demand immediate payment of service bonuses they were scheduled to receive in 1945. In an attempt to repulse the “Bonus Army,” the Hoover administration called in the city police.
After this provoked a riot in which two protesters were shot and killed, Hoover dispatched an Army unit equipped with tanks and tear gas that ultimately dispersed the men.
Hoover’s successor, Franklin Roosevelt, took a gentler approach to veteran activists, even as, in 1933, he gave a speech that would be virtually unthinkable today: insisting that veterans, even disabled veterans, were not entitled to any special benefits. In 1944, Roosevelt — perhaps mindful that the nation could ill afford a return to the mass discontent and unemployment that sparked the Bonus March — signed the GI Bill. Notably, however, even this seminal legislation spawned controversy in both houses of Congress.
The GI Bill reflected how, by and large, World War II veterans received a heroes’ welcome, supported tangibly with state resources. Yet this treatment of veterans was anomalous in 20th-century American wars and did not last. Sharply divided public opinion about the Vietnam War begot conflicting opinions about the personnel who fought it, with many veterans stung by the sense that they returned home to a hostile public and a government disinterested in their needs.
The end of the draft in 1973 and subsequent transition to an all-volunteer force, however, changed the meaning of enlistment, transforming the act into the utmost symbol of patriotism and willing self-sacrifice. Moreover, the belief that an indifferent or even antagonistic civilian population exacerbated the trauma of Vietnam veterans became a cautionary tale about how military personnel ought to be treated.
The newfound option for most Americans to avoid military service seemingly endowed them with a new responsibility: expressing gratitude toward military personnel who enlisted so that they didn't have to. This resulted in a crucial transformation: the choice not to enlist became entirely unremarkable — until a civilian criticized U.S. military action, the military or someone in it, at which point their civilian status instantly delegitimized their argument. By the time the Gulf War began, rhetorically supporting the troops became a political imperative, and after September 11, it became the only viable platform, regardless of one’s position on our subsequent wars.
This historical transformation manifested itself in the two most prominent reactions to Trump’s criticism of McRaven: professions of gratitude for the admiral and criticism of Trump’s lack of military service. Even many Republican leaders made clear their respect for McRaven, though they dared not criticize the president directly. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) exemplified this, tweeting: “I don’t know if Adm. William McRaven shares my political views or not. But I do know that few Americans have sacrificed or risked more than he has to protect America & the freedoms we enjoy. His military career exemplified honor & excellence. I am grateful for his service.”
Many of the mainstream news stories about Trump’s comments cited the five draft deferments that the president received during Vietnam. The stories often referenced this information without elaboration, as if its meaning and relevance were self-evident: Trump was a coward who had no right to criticize McRaven, because McRaven served and he had not.
But there is something specious about this popular reverence for the military. While the vast majority of Americans view all branches of the military favorably, they have little interest in enlisting. A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations revealed that only 0.5 percent of the population (1.29 million people) are active-duty military, down from roughly 1 percent (2.2 million) in 1973. With the exception of a small uptick after September 11, the size of the active duty-military has been steadily decreasing for the last 45 years, and this year the Army fell short of its recruiting goal of 80,000 new enlistees.
The disconnect between our regard for the military and our disinterest (my own included) in actually serving deepens the already sharp division between civilian and military populations. Paradoxically, venerating military personnel, even with good intentions, may exacerbate it further. Setting military personnel apart as special and glorifying their combat experiences makes it easier to ignore the costs of war and the deeply uneven ways that they are distributed, both domestically and abroad. Instead of this reckoning, civilians who shoulder few of those burdens can feel as if they've contributed, merely by professing their support and gratitude to the troops.
In this way, it becomes easier and easier to consent to militarism and so to guarantee that the same people will be called on to fight again and again. At the same time, the slow-motion crisis at the VA, the recent spike in suicides among young veterans, the ongoing epidemic of untreated mental health issues among military personnel and the financial hardships that many military families encounter all reveal the shallowness of the gratitude that we are compelled to profess. Chastising the president for yet another boorish attack does nothing to solve these problems. Instead, we’d be far better off questioning our own accountability for the suffering of military personnel, which mandatory platitudes will never alleviate.


Issues with US military recruitment

The longtime connection between race, country music and military recruitment

As protesters against police killings take to the streets across the nation, different branches of the U.S. armed forces have begun to reckon with the issue of race and military service. The Marines announced a ban on public displays of the Confederate flag. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., an African American and Pacific Air Forces Commander, posted a video to Twitter detailing the racism he has faced while serving the country.
Given the current momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that more than 40 percent of the nation’s active duty military are members of a racial minority, it makes sense that the armed forces are grappling with their racial politics.
But if the military truly wants to change race relations in the ranks, it may have to rethink an old strategy that has made a recent comeback in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic — the use of country music as a tool for military recruitment.
The Army and Air Force Recruiting Service began using country music radio and television performances in the 1950s to boost voluntary enlistment among the young white Southerners who were the presumed audience for the genre. The Army stumbled into this tactic in 1953 when it drafted a rising star named Faron Young. While Young completed basic training, his first hit, “Goin’ Steady,” climbed the charts.
Recruiters then made Young a voice of recruitment and entertainment for the remainder of his enlistment period — including an appearance on an ABC talent show, “Talent Patrol,” that showcased the entertainment skills of service members. By employing Young in this way, the Army used the singer’s growing popularity as a way to plug enlistment from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and brand military service with the down-home appeal of country music.
The recruiting service soon partnered with Owen Bradley, one of Nashville’s top producers, to create more Pentagon-sponsored country music content. In 1957, the Army launched “Country Style, U.S.A.," a 15-minute television program recorded at Bradley’s studio. Each episode featured current stars, including future legend Johnny Cash, performing a few songs with a recruiting service message to join the Army stuck between the tunes.
Other service branches copied the Army’s strategy. The Air Force created a radio recruitment show called “Country Music Time,” and the Navy followed with the humorously named “Hootenavy.” The entertainment value lured audiences to these shows, exposing them to the recruitment pitches embedded within each episode.
Yet, this wasn’t simply an economic win-win-win for the military, the country stars who gained publicity and potential enlistees. Rather, the recruiting service’s use of country music also had a dark side. Because of the racial history of the country music industry, recruiters imagined that their message only appealed to white recruits, and they used it heavily during the height of the mid-century civil rights movement.
While country music can claim fans of all genders and races, it still retains a reputation as a genre made by and for white Southerners, a reputation that stretches back to its commercial beginnings. In the 1920s, record companies segregated musical genres along racial lines in reflection of the Jim Crow laws of the day, casting “hillbilly” music, later renamed country, as an all-white genre and “race records” as a catchall for different genres of black music. Those divisions never really abated over the years, even as country music produced African American stars like Charley Pride and later Darius Rucker.
For the white Southerners targeted by these country music campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, joining the military offered a steppingstone to social respectability and economic stability — a way to avoid the manual labor and low-wage service sector jobs that dominated the post-war economy of the South. The pitches in shows like “Country Style, U.S.A.” always focused on the economic benefits of military service. Thousands of white Southerners, including several future country music stars, joined the armed forces for these economic reasons. Cash, who grew up on a farm in Dyess, Ark., enlisted in the Air Force in 1951 for the prospect of a steady job. As he wrote in his autobiography, “a government paycheck and a clean blue uniform looked pretty good.”
The military’s use of country music continued for nearly 40 years — until rising enrollment of African Americans and people of color prompted a change in recruitment strategies. Backed by fiddles, steel guitars and banjos, country music recruitment helped brand the genre as the sound of white devotion to the nation-state. At the same time, the recruiting service acted as an unofficial promotional branch of the country music industry, helping push the music to military and civilian audiences and giving a government-sponsored boost to the genre in the process.
Of course, the links between country music and the military extended beyond these recruitment partnerships, as country stars found success with patriotic anthems and militaristic themes, from the anti-hippie backlash of Merle Haggard’s “Fightin’ Side of Me” to the macho nationalism of Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” These types of songs have led many observers to equate country music with the conservative political beliefs that tend to align with unflinching support for the nation’s military missions.
Given this history, it’s not shocking that since May 17, the U.S. Army has sponsored country music star Chuck Wicks’s weekly Facebook Live “Sunday Serenade,” marking the return of country music recruiting. On the first Army-sponsored episode, neither Wicks nor guest Brantley Gilbert engaged in jingoistic posturing or even urged their audience to join the military. But Wicks appeared in front of an Army recruitment banner, an Army logo appeared in the bottom corner of the screen and the artists mentioned briefly that the U.S. Army sponsored that week’s show.
While the lack of a hard sell might surprise some, the hawkish patriotism heard in songs by the likes of Haggard and Keith has obscured the deeper connection between country music and the U.S. military found in the long history of musical recruitment. Now, amid the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout, it looks as if the Army has retooled this old strategy for a new landscape, deploying country music to entice a new generation of recruits with the tools of social media.
Therein lies the inherent problem with country music recruitment. Although country music has grown more diverse over the last decade, with artists like Rucker, Kane Brown and Jimmie Allen experiencing success, the industry still predominantly caters to a white fan base.
Just last week, Mickey Guyton, an African American country singer, released a new song called “Black Like Me” in which she sings “If you think we live in the land of the free / You should try and be black like me.” This is not patriotism as support for the military but patriotism as dissent. Guyton has struggled to break through in the white, male-dominated world of country, and the smash hit “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X proved deeply controversial and failed to get country airplay, reinforcing the sense that country is a white-dominated genre.
Country music’s history as the sound of hawkish patriotism, owing both to connections with the military and songs from artists like Keith, means that the return of country music recruitment strategies runs the risk of reinforcing the racial divisions that have plagued the nation for generations. Instead, the military ought to consider the impact of its longtime country music recruitment strategy and wrestle with the way it contributed to some of the cultural problems our armed forces must now confront.


Issues with US military recruitment

A deported veteran has been granted U.S. citizenship, after 14 years of living in Mexico

Cameras surrounded a smiling Hector Barajas-Varela as he stood outside a small building known as “The Bunker,” a support house for deported U.S. military veterans in Tijuana, Mexico, not far from the California border.
Tucked in his left arm was a blue folder with a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, delivering the good news he had waited more than a decade to hear. As cameras clicked, Barajas-Varela held a cellphone in his right hand, telling his mother in Southern California that he’s coming home. Then he turned to a friend and gave him a high five and a hug.
“I got it,” he said, laughing. “I got it, bro. Two weeks.”
Barajas-Varela, an Army veteran, learned Thursday that he has been granted U.S. citizenship, 14 years after he was deported to Mexico because he committed a crime. In two weeks, on April 13, he will attend a naturalization ceremony in San Diego, the last step in the process of becoming an American.
“On paper, it’s nice to be validated,” he told The Washington Post on Saturday. “It’s the government validating what most of us already feel.”
“This is our country,” he said of the United States. “Nothing is going to change about what we feel and who we are and what we’re willing to risk our lives for.”
Barajas-Varela was born in Mexico, but he grew up in the Los Angeles area. He became a permanent resident, or a green-card holder, in 1992. Three years later, he joined the Army and was honorably discharged in 2001. But not long after, Barajas-Varela lost his legal residency because he was convicted of shooting at an occupied vehicle in the Los Angeles area. Nobody was hurt, and Barajas-Varela spent 13 months in prison and another month on parole.
He was deported to Mexico in 2004.
He has lived in Tijuana since, in a small shelter he had turned into a haven for people like himself: veterans who lost the right to live in the United States because of criminal convictions. The Deported Veterans Support House has served about 20 people since 2013. The Bunker provides services and legal resources to deportees adjusting to a life outside the United States. The support house also has identified and made contact with more than 300 deported men and women from more than three dozen countries, Barajas-Varela said.
Barajas-Varela could have applied for citizenship before he was discharged from the Army, but he had mistakenly believed that serving in the military automatically guaranteed it.
He finally applied while he was living in Mexico, and in 2016, passed the English and civics portions of the naturalization process. Applicants are required to pass oral and written English tests and another on U.S. government and history.
Last April, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) pardoned Barajas-Varela for the crime that led to his deportation, removing a potential barrier from his path to citizenship.
“He has shown that since his release from custody, he has lived an honest and upright life, exhibited good moral character, and conducted himself as a law-abiding citizen,” according to the pardon, which also cites medals that Barajas-Varela received while in the Army.
In December 2017, Barajas-Varela filed a federal lawsuit to compel the USCIS to make a decision on his citizenship application, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial counties. The lawsuit was dismissed after the agency agreed to make a decision by Thursday.
Despite gaining his citizenship, Barajas-Varela said, he plans to stay in Mexico and live in The Bunker for another year to continue his work supporting deported veterans.
“To make sure that if I leave, it doesn’t close down. … I got a commitment to these guys,” he said.
Two deported veterans are now living in The Bunker, Barajas-Varela said. The support house opened a second location last year in Juarez, Mexico, near the Texas border, and another one is in the works in the Dominican Republic.
For years, deported veterans have received little to no attention in Washington because politicians are unlikely to support convicted criminals. The Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy has steered the debate toward cutting legal immigration, creating a border wall and imposing travel restrictions on people from predominantly Muslim countries.
Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer and an Anchorage-based immigration lawyer, said the majority of deported veterans, like Barajas-Varela, were green-card holders who were honorably discharged from service but were convicted of a crime after returning to civilian life.
Barajas-Varela’s case is unusual, however: Only a handful of deported veterans have managed to make it back to the United States legally, Stock said.
“It’s extremely rare because it takes an enormous amount of legal resources to convince the government to approve a naturalization case for somebody who’s been deported,” said Stock, whom Barajas-Varela consulted about his case years earlier.
Most deported veterans are charged with an aggravated felony, a blanket term that runs the gamut, from violent crimes such as murder and rape to nonviolent ones such as theft and tax evasion, Stock said. People with that type of conviction are ineligible for American citizenship — unless the governor of the state where they were convicted decides to grant a pardon.
Barajas-Varela is one of at least three deported veterans who received gubernatorial pardons from Brown last year. Another is Marco Chavez, a Marine Corps veteran who regained his lawful residency and was allowed to come back to California in December. He had been deported to Mexico 15 years earlier over an animal cruelty conviction. The other is Erasmo Apodaca Mendizabal, another Marine Corps veteran who was convicted in 1996 of burglary.
In April 2016, Daniel Torres became a U.S. citizen after living in The Bunker in Tijuana for five years. Torres was brought to the United States illegally as a child and enlisted in the Marine Corps using a fake birth certificate. He joined the Marines in 2007 and served in Iraq.
Barajas-Varela said he plans to eventually move back to the Los Angeles area to be with his family, to have a house and to find a job there. He has an 11-year-old daughter who was born after he was deported.
“I have a responsibility to my daughter, to make sure she gets to college,” he said.
Theresa Vargas contributed to this report.
Read more:
Deported veterans: Banished for committing crimes after serving in U.S. military
The Pentagon promised citizenship to immigrants who served. Now it might help deport them.
‘It looks like we’re afraid of foreigners’: Army turns away some green-card holders


Issues with US military recruitment

Restriction on transgender troops serving in military can stand for now, D.C. federal appeals court rules

A federal appeals court in Washington sided with the Trump administration Friday, saying restrictions on transgender men and women serving in the military can stand.
The decision lifted an injunction that had barred the government from limiting transgender people’s service.
The unsigned order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has no immediate impact on transgender troops because federal judges in three other cases have temporarily prevented the administration from implementing its policy.
The Defense Department is continuing to abide by the other court orders that allow transgender men and women to enlist and serve, the Pentagon said Friday.
Even so, the five-page ruling was a blow to the civil rights and gay rights organizations challenging the policy nationwide. In reversing a lower-court ruling, the appeals court wrote, “the District Court made an erroneous finding that the [administration’s policy] was the equivalent of a blanket ban on transgender service.”
The appeals court order came after oral argument last month before Judges Thomas B. Griffith, Robert L. Wilkins and Stephen F. Williams.
The court noted that its order was not a final ruling on the merits of the challenge, but that judges must give deference to military leaders when it comes to policy decisions about standards for service.
Attorney Jennifer Levi, director of GLAD’s transgender rights project, said the decision is “based on the absurd idea that forcing transgender people to suppress who they are in order to serve is not a ban. It ignores the reality of transgender people’s lives, with devastating consequences, and rests on a complete failure to understand who transgender people are.” GLAD is an acronym for GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders.
President Trump announced a sweeping ban on transgender people’s military service via Twitter in July 2017, citing what he viewed as the “tremendous medical costs and disruption.” The administration’s order reversed President Barack Obama’s policy of allowing transgender men and women to serve openly and receive funding for sex-reassignment surgery.
Attorneys for active-duty service members went to court to block the policy shift, which could subject current transgender service members to discharge and deny them certain medical care.
The court rulings were met with another policy revision this year from then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who issued a plan to bar men and women from the military who identify with a gender different from their birth gender and who are seeking to transition. Mattis’s plan makes exceptions, for instance, for about 900 transgender individuals who are already serving openly and for others who would serve in accordance with their birth gender.
The order Friday said the lower-court erred by not giving sufficient weight to the administration’s effort to revise its policy in response to the initial court ruling. The appeals court specifically mentioned the creation of a panel of military and medical experts for input.
“It was clear error to say there was no significant change,” on the administration’s part, the appeals court said.
“The government took substantial steps to cure the procedural deficiencies the court identified,” according to the order. “Although the Mattis Plan continues to bar many transgender persons from joining or serving in the military, the record indicates that the plan allows some transgender persons” previously barred to join and serve.
The policy is not a “blanket ban,” the court concluded, because “not all transgender persons seek to transition to their preferred gender or have gender dysphoria.”
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called the decision “cursory and misinformed” and said it “rests on the utter fiction that this ban is not a ban. Every other court has immediately understood that when you say you can serve only if you serve in your birth sex, that is a ban. It is dangerous and irresponsible.”
Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said Friday the department would continue to “press our case in the courts.”
“As always, we treat all transgender persons with respect and dignity,” she said in a statement. “It is critical that the Department be permitted to formulate personnel policies that it determines are necessary to ensure the most lethal and combat effective fighting force in the world.”
The administration has separately asked the Supreme Court to intervene to allow the government to have the policy take effect. The high court has not yet acted on the administration’s request.
ann.marimow@washpost.com


Issues with US military recruitment

Pentagon developing plan to scrutinize recruits with green cards and other foreign ties, memos show

The Pentagon, citing terrorism and espionage fears, is developing a plan to scrutinize prospective recruits with foreign ties, including some U.S. citizens, after a related effort targeting thousands of green-card holders was blocked by a federal judge last year.
The new policy, still in development, will be distributed to the military services by no later than Feb. 15, according to two Defense Department officials and several department memos obtained by The Washington Post. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
The new vetting is likely to screen thousands of recruits per year who have what the Pentagon considers “foreign nexus” risks, including some Americans who marry a foreign spouse or who have family members with dual citizenship, the memos said. Anyone identified for the screening would not be allowed to attend recruit training until they are cleared, a process that could take days for some but drag on much longer for others.
One draft document, labeled “predecisional,” has circulated in recent weeks among senior officials and others who oversee recruiting. It is attributed to Joseph D. Kernan, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and James N. Stewart, who performs the duties of undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, a post President Trump has left without a permanent political appointee since Robert Wilkie left it to run the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“One primary concern associated with qualifying for these positions relates to the potential counterintelligence or terrorism risks,” the memo says. " . . . The Department must implement expanded foreign vetting and screening protocols to identify and mitigate the foreign nexus risks.”
Defense officials declined to comment on the memos, saying the new policy is undergoing legal reviews and that some changes could be made.
The documents show the Pentagon to be grappling with the dual challenge of thoroughly screening prospective recruits for potential security threats and finding enough men and women willing to join the military. The armed forces have long sought green-card holders as recruits, marketing such jobs as a chance to attain U.S. citizenship.
The initiative comes as the Trump administration continues to take unprecedented steps to curb immigration to the United States. Many of its efforts have been halted by federal courts, including the president’s efforts to bar Central Americans from seeking asylum in the United States, end a deferred-action program for young, undocumented immigrants and withhold funds from “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with certain immigration enforcement efforts.
Among the people who could be targets of the foreign-nexus screening are people who have foreign contacts, foreign citizenship, dual citizenship, a birthplace outside the United States if born to foreign parents, family members who are not U.S. citizens, and immediate family members who have dual citizenship, according to one of the memos.
Other factors that could require such screening include possessing a non-U.S. passport, having financial interests abroad, residing outside the United States for more than three of the previous 10 years and living in the country for less than the last five consecutive years unless the circumstances involved work related to the U.S. government.
A Dec. 21 memo prepared by Stephanie P. Miller, who oversees recruitment policy for the Pentagon, says the Defense Department recognized gaps associated with its screening of individuals with foreign ties “since the receipt of specific reporting beginning of 2016,” though the memo does not specify what that information covers. But the concern stretches to some American citizens, too, she argued.
“DoD recognizes that some U.S. citizens pose a similar risk by virtue of their foreign associations, foreign travel, marriage to a foreign spouse, or dual citizenship,” she wrote. “It is imperative to treat the risk related to a foreign nexus in a similar fashion for any recruit or Service member, regardless of citizenship.”
The Pentagon is preparing the new policy after Kernan’s office and the Army combined in the summer of 2018 to screen green-card holders already in the military through a new process that relies on dozens of existing intelligence databases, one Defense Department memo said. The screening detected more derogatory information about the service members in less time than traditional background checks managed by the Office of Personnel Management, the memo said.
The memo promised that the new process — called foreign nexus screening and vetting, or FNSV — “can be completed in a matter of days or, depending on the analysis required for detected anomalies, in a few weeks, as compared to the months and years” required under traditional background checks. The new screening process, the memo said, “can process up to 1,600 cases per day.”
Historically, about 70 percent of all recruits with green cards are processed quickly, defense officials said in the memo. Under the new policy, the other 30 percent would still be withheld from recruit training until their screening has been completed, but the process would in theory be faster.
The new screening process still faces a major hurdle: another court injunction.
In November, Judge Jon S. Tigar of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that it was unreasonable for the Pentagon to require all green-card holders to undergo a full background check and receive a favorable determination in a security review. He issued a preliminary injunction, forcing the Pentagon to begin shipping a backlog of thousands of green-card holders to recruit training.
The Defense Department has continued to fight the case in court. Miller argued in a Dec. 14 declaration that if the court does not stay its order, “the harm to the military and national security could be significant and irreparable.”
“Foreign nationals, including those with [green-card] status, raise unique counterintelligence and counterterrorism concerns because of the heightened susceptibility to influence by foreign governments and organizations and because of the difficulty in verifying information about them that is maintained overseas,” Miller’s declaration said.
The injunction has not been lifted, but the Defense Department memo from Kernan and Stewart said the Pentagon is preparing to put in place its new policy within 30 days of the court’s approving it. It is unclear whether the court will do so.
Separately, the Pentagon faces litigation after ending in 2017 another program known as Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI. It promised expedited citizenship to immigrants the Army recruited to take hard-to-fill language and medical jobs, but was ended as defense officials cited security concerns.
More than 10,400 immigrants entered the military through the MAVNI program. Last year, the Army sought to force out some soldiers recruited this way while citing security concerns. The service paused that process after several lawsuits were filed.


Issues with US military recruitment

Pentagon faces internal questions about program to screen recruits with foreign ties, emails show

A Pentagon program designed to screen potential recruits with foreign ties, including green-card holders and some U.S. citizens, has prompted questions from military officials about whether it will have detrimental effects on the services, according to emails and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Defense officials touted the program as a way to speed up vetting of recruits who have what the Pentagon considers “foreign nexus” risks. The process could be completed “in a matter of days or . . . in a few weeks, as compared to months and years” required under traditional background checks, according to one Defense Department memo.
The program, which was tested by the Army last summer but has not been implemented, would rely on mining several government databases for information.
But the plan also may come with complications, according to emails obtained by The Post. That would be a concern for a military that has long sought to attract immigrants to meet its recruiting goals in part by promoting the possibility of U.S. citizenship.
Discussions about the program began in earnest after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in November ordering the Pentagon to begin sending a backlog of thousands of green-card recruits to initial training. The order came after two prospective recruits — one born in China and interested in joining the Navy and one originally from Jamaica who planned to join the Air Force — sued the Pentagon, arguing that months-long delays in screening had caused them harm.
The two men were among thousands who were left in limbo after the Trump administration, citing security concerns, adopted a policy in October 2017 that called for green-card holders to submit to more stringent background checks before they could go to boot camp. That was in addition to standard requirements for green-card applicants, such as biometrics screening.
The program would need approval in court to overcome the injunction. But internally, some defense officials have expressed concern that it also will create some delays.
Russ Beland, a senior civilian official in the Navy Department, said in a Feb. 27 email obtained by The Post that the estimates officials were using to determine which recruits needed additional screening “may be far too low.” After assessing its pool of recruits waiting to go to initial training, the Navy determined that “somewhere between a third and half” could require new screening, he wrote.
“I recognize there are risks from inadequate screening, but there are also risks from gapped billets,” Beland said, using military parlance for empty slots in training.
In response, Lernes Hebert, a senior defense official overseeing personnel issues, said he was committed to working with the Navy Department on exceptions to the policy “if class seats are at risk of going vacant.” In that case, he wrote, the Pentagon would require tracking recruits who are identified for additional screening to be completed “as soon as possible” while they make their way through initial stages of training.
Such exceptions would be rare, Hebert predicted, and would require Pentagon approval.
Beland said he had concerns about that, too. By the time a recruiting command became aware of concerns about a recruit, it could be too late, he wrote. If every case must go up to that level at the Pentagon, he added, it “does not sound workable to me if we encounter widespread delays.”
Beland, in an email, said that he could not comment on the messages because the policy is “in a pre-decisional state.”
Hebert referred comment to the Pentagon’s public affairs office.
Air Force Lt. Col. Carla Gleason, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said that she was unable to address questions but that the Defense Department needs “every qualified patriot who is willing and able to serve.” As of May 2018, about 19,800 noncitizens were among the nation’s 1.2 million active-duty service members.
The Trump administration’s new restrictions on service members with foreign ties also has included the end of a program begun in 2008 to attract foreign recruits with key medical and language skills. That effort, known as the Military Accessions Vital to National Interests (MAVNI) program, offered a path to citizenship but ended in 2017 after U.S. officials concluded it was vulnerable to insider threats.
The Pentagon began discharging some service members who joined the military under MAVNI, but suspended the process in 2018. In a lawsuit brought by 17 U.S. service members who became U.S. citizens through MAVNI, lawyers argued during a trial late last year that the Pentagon was treating them differently from other citizens by requiring them to undergo extensive biannual screening.
In January, U.S. District Judge Thomas S. Zilly found in the MAVNI troops’ favor, ruling that the Pentagon had not met its burden of proof to require the screening.
During the trial, Stephanie Miller, a senior Pentagon official involved in recruiting, said the Defense Department Inspector General and intelligence agencies had warned defense officials that “direct threats for espionage” had been identified in the MAVNI program and that “hostile governments” were targeting it.
Under questioning, Miller said that in the program’s nearly 10-year history, one person who attempted to join through MAVNI had been charged in an espionage case. That person had not yet obtained U.S. citizenship or a security clearance. More than 10,000 U.S. troops joined the military through the program.
Miller referred questions to the Pentagon’s public affairs office.
In the other pending case, the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Latham & Watkins have argued in federal court that obtaining a green card already requires significant screening and that requiring even more is not only discriminatory but also harms the Armed Forces by withholding recruits.
The Justice Department, arguing on behalf of the Pentagon, has countered that researching the background of someone who was not born in the United States can be difficult and that some recruits had falsified information while seeking security clearances. The case could go to trial this year.


Issues with US military recruitment

Trump is losing military voters. Here’s how Democrats can win them over.

On Wednesday, at the al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, the president of the United States claimed responsibility for passing a 10 percent pay raise for military employees while implying this was the first time in a decade that service members had seen a raise. That both declarations proved wildly false isn’t surprising, given President Trump’s well-documented tendency to lie, even to the troops. This tendency, among other things, might have contributed to active-duty personnel’s vanishing 9-percent margin of support for the president since the fall of 2016 — today’s troops are now evenly split over Trump’s performance.
Trump’s latest bumbling conduct, regardless, marks an opportunity for the left to reassess its own approach to service members and veterans, an approach that ought to signal a distinctive contrast to Trumpian showboating.
Democrats already intuit that the military embodies a crucial battleground in the culture war, at least as it pertains to the rights of gay or transgender people. President Barack Obama understood this when he overturned the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gay troops in 2011, and opponents of Trump’s transgender ban understand that today. But it is high time for liberals and progressives to expand on this intuition, come to grips with the countless (and emblematic) difficulties of those in uniform and, in due course, perhaps change the ideological or partisan contours of a reliably Republican constituency.
A report came out this month, for example, that infertility for military women is three times higher than for their civilian counterparts, and that TRICARE, the health-care system for the Department of Defense, continues to refuse coverage for in vitro fertilization and related services. This despite convincing evidence that such widespread infertility has been caused by work-related contact with chemicals, toxins and air pollution resulting from burn pits on bases in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Numerous
Potential openings lie elsewhere as well. Polling of military opinion suggests stark gendered fault lines when it comes to Trump and party affiliation, and accounts of sexist behavior, including sexual misconduct, abound. Sixty-nine percent of military women have an unfavorable view of Trump, compared to only 38 percent of military men. In the lead-up to the midterms, 53.5 percent of military women said they planned to vote for Democrats while only 23.6 percent of military men did. A survey published a few years ago by The Washington Post, in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that about half of female veterans believed the military is not doing enough to prevent sexual assault. About 40 percent of the men surveyed believed the same. Another review by VA, involving 1,500 female veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, concluded that a quarter had been sexually assaulted during deployment.
These numbers provide quite a few reasons for Democrats to join Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and others in elevating the testimonies of relevant service members and veterans while pushing for legislation to wrest control of investigations and prosecutions from male-dominated chains of command. But similar attention to the racialized aspects of the military experience is also warranted.
For instance, only 29 percent of nonwhite active-duty personnel have a favorable view of Trump, compared to almost 44 percent for the active-duty population as a whole. Despite the military being a disproportionately white institution, a poll last year revealed its members see white nationalism as more of a national security threat than Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. This finding indicates that many service members are likely to join progressives in their fight against bigotry, provided they are encouraged to do so. It might also signify an awareness of racist elements in the military, something Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), along with ProPublica, Frontline PBS and the historian Kathleen Belew, have attempted to bring to light. It would be wise for Democrats, both as a matter of principle and strategy, to devote more energy to confronting this reality.
Similar consideration should be directed to Islamophobia within the ranks, which has already led to the death of at least one Marine recruit. And this must be accompanied by continued advocacy on behalf of green-card holders in the uniformed services, especially in the face of persistent attacks from the Trump administration.
Plenty of other issues could be mentioned, like the fact that the military spouse unemployment rate floats around 20 percent, or that veterans make up an overrepresented 11 percent of all homeless adults and commit suicide at 1.5 times the rate of their non-veteran adult counterparts. Even when it comes to countering Trump’s “America First” posturing with a genuinely left internationalist (as opposed to imperialist) foreign policy, centering the perspectives of service-members and veterans makes sense, since their inordinate support for presidential candidates such as Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Bernie Sanders and Trump have been driven in large part by disillusion with American interventionism abroad.
Polling
There is no doubt Trump wins the award for most mendacious pandering when it comes to his interactions with the troops. But Democrats have yet to offer a clear alternative. They have yet to speak in a progressive voice that conceptualizes the military not just as a special interest looking for a pay raise, but as a unique community that has constituted ground zero for many of America’s most pressing injustices and challenges.
Such a shift in mind-set bears a small chance of winning over the bulk of service members or veterans, but the imaginative outreach it might inspire could certainly help in mobilizing the activist energies of (and turning out the vote for) a number of citizens who would otherwise remain aloof from electoral politics. Just as important, such a shift would provide freshly compelling ways to speak to a self-consciously patriotic citizenry about dire problems affecting everyone.