ICE To Immigrant Military Veterans and Family Members: Thank You For Your Sacrifices. Now Get Out

“I am heartbroken,” U.S. military veteran Alejandro Barranco says about the brutal abduction and detention of his immigrant dad. “I love my parents. I love the community. I feel betrayed.”

The Barranco brothers say that their dad, Narciso, raised them “to be proud Americans,” reports U.S. military news outlet Task & Purpose. Two of the brothers are actively serving in the Marines, while a third brother, Alejandro, is a Marine veteran. “He raised us to be educated,” Alejandro told Task & Purpose, “to be strong, to be helpful to this country, to serve our country, to be grateful.”

But the thanks they got for their service and patriotism was the brutal assault, abduction, and possible deportation of their dad by masked mass deportation agents as he was out working a landscaping job at a local IHOP. Horrific footage captured by a bystander showed the masked men holding Narciso, 48, to the ground while one repeatedly punched him. “On his first call to his son after the detainment, Barranco was less concerned with his injuries and more concerned with his job,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “He told him where his truck and equipment were and asked him to speak with his client and finish the job, the younger Barranco said.”

Alejandro said “that had he treated a detainee the same way while he was serving as a Marine, ‘it would have been a war crime,’” NBC News reported.

But the inhumane treatment of this father was not over. Alejando said that when he visited his dad at the first detention facility where he was jailed, he was still wearing the same bloodied clothes from when he was arrested. Narciso told him he was “being held in a cage with at least 70 other people, with one toilet and no privacy, and that he has received water ‘maybe once a day’ and ‘very, very little food.’” He has since been moved to a second facility.

Alejandro, who aided in the American evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021, said that while he doesn’t regret his service, he does feel let down by his country. “I am heartbroken,” he said. “I love my parents. I love the community. I feel betrayed.”

Disgracefully, the Barranco family isn’t alone in being targeted by masked mass deportation agents. While ICE has previously factored in U.S. military service when determining immigration enforcement, that’s been thrown out the window under the agenda of mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller. “In recent months, US military veterans’ family members have been increasingly detained by immigration officials, as the administration continues pressing for mass deportations,” The Guardian reports. 

Miller, who actually runs the Department of Homeland Security while Sec. Kristi Noem carries out ugly photo ops, has ordered ICE officials to arrest at least 3,000 individuals per day or else. And that includes the loved ones of U.S. military veterans, their sacrifices be damned.

Disabled Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre “doesn't know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month,” NBC News reports. Paola Clouatre was simply trying to follow the rules by attending her green card appointment, only to be taken into custody. Because Paola’s mother, from whom she’s been estranged since she was a teenager, had missed an immigration court hearing in 2018, it resulted in a deportation order for her. That order, which Paola’s husband said she didn’t know about, had now come back to haunt her.  

During the green card appointment, Paola was asked “to wait in the lobby for paperwork regarding a follow-up appointment, which her husband said he believed was a ‘ploy.’” She was soon detained by agents and is now detained at a remote ICE detention facility in rural Louisiana.

“When his nearly 2-year-old son Noah asks for his mother before bed, Clouatre just tells him, ‘Mama will be back soon,” NBC News reports. “When his 3-month-old, breastfeeding daughter Lyn is hungry, he gives her a bottle of baby formula instead. He's worried how his newborn will bond with her mother absent skin-to-skin contact.” Visiting his wife now entails an eight-hour drive. “Clouatre, who qualifies as a service-disabled veteran, goes every chance he can get.”

Like Alejandro Barrasco, active duty U.S. Army member Aysaac Correa feels betrayed by the country he served, following the deportation of his wife, Shirly Guardado, to Honduras following two months in detention. Their one year old child stayed behind with Correa. Despite the fact that he’s an American, has a child who’s an American, and served his nation in uniform, Correa feels he’s been left with no choice but to leave his home in order to rejoin his wife in Honduras. Correa actually voted for Trump in 2024, believing the fiction that he would target only public safety risks. He now knows that simply wasn’t true.

“This administration, they're being heartless," Correa told Fox 26 Houston. "They're targeting people coming out of their cases, their hearings. They're out of control." Noticias Telemundo captured the gut-wrenching moment when the family embraced in Honduras after months apart.

But not even military veterans themselves are being spared from Miller’s grasp. Marlon Parris is a green card holder who has lived in the U.S. for two decades and served two tours in Iraq. But just two days after Trump’s inauguration, he was snatched off the street while on his way to the ATM. Like many other veterans, Parris struggled with combat-related trauma, including PTSD and brain injury. Several years later, he was charged with and pleaded guilty to a nonviolent felony drug charge.

“ICE agents had visited Parris before his release in 2016, assuring him he would not be deported because of his military service and the nonviolent nature of his offense,” USA Today reported in February. “They gave him a letter saying so and told him to keep it on him at all times.” But under the current administration, that official letter no longer meant a thing and he was kidnapped off the streets.

As veterans group Common Defense said, service members need care, not to get kicked out of the country they served.

"Veterans who have raised their right hand to serve this country, regardless of what we sent them to do, regardless of where they originated from, do not ever deserve to be tossed away," said Marine veteran and Common Defense organizing director Jojo Sweatt. "They deserve citizenship here in the United States, and they deserve to be protected, honored and respected and allocated all the resources that they need based on anything that they've been suffering from because of that commitment and sacrifice to service."

These abductions and deportations both separate families and risk our military readiness. Not only does the U.S. military depend on foreign-born recruits to build and strengthen its numbers, skills and power, military service has been a valuable mechanism for immigrants to gain U.S. citizenship. Now, recruitment worries abound. 

This is simply disgraceful treatment of service members and their families. Immigrant service members have a long tradition of serving in the military, fighting in major conflicts since our country’s founding. “Of the more than 3,400 Medals of Honor awarded since the Civil War, 22% have gone to immigrants, according to the nonprofit National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP),” Military.com reported in 2020. Some have made the ultimate sacrifice in honor of their adoptive nation. According to one figure, 300 foreign-born soldiers died in combat between 2001 and 2013. We should also remember that many immigrants, such as Military Dreamers, wish to serve their country but are hindered by their lack of legal immigration status.

Family separation is “just a hell of a way to treat a veteran," said Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge and attorney for Paola Clouatre. "You take their wives and send them back to Mexico?"

Meanwhile, as Trump spent millions in taxpayer dollars several weeks ago to put on a show in Washington, D.C. purporting to celebrate the U.S. Army, he’s tearing apart these same military families who have already put so much on the line for the country they call home.