Trump to Veterans: Thank You For Your Service. Now Get Out.
Trump's mass deportation machine is betraying America’s veterans and tearing their families apart.
This Veteran’s Day 2025, the Trump administration has made perfectly clear its message to a number of veterans and their family members: thank you for your service to our nation. Now get out.
Since the very beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, his mass deportation agenda has targeted the very people who have worn our uniform or lovingly raised those who do. Just days after his inauguration, ICE raided a New Jersey seafood business and detained a U.S. military veteran of Puerto Rican heritage. In June, horrific footage captured a landscaper and dad of three Marines being brutally detained by federal immigration agents while working a job outside a local IHOP. That same month, a Purple Heart recipient was forced to self-deport to a country that he hadn’t considered his home since he was just seven.
Other military veterans have been arrested for exercising their freedoms and speaking out in defense of their immigrant neighbors. “One, 70-year-old air force veteran Dana Briggs, was charged with assault after a video of an incident showed Ice agents advancing on the elderly veteran and knocking him over,” The Guardian reported last month. As previous reporting has made clear, some claims by agents that they’ve been violently attacked by protestors have collapsed under scrutiny. “The other, Afghanistan war veteran John Cerrone, was tackled by a group of ICE agents, another video shows,” The Guardian continued. “Cerrone was detained, held for nine hours in solitary confinement and charged with disorderly conduct.”
These are not isolated cases or tragic instances of human error. They’re the result of an unaccountable mass deportation apparatus that’s been assaulting our communities with increasing violence and has reached into our armed forces and affected our brave warriors regardless of legal immigration status.
SAE JOON PARK
Park, an immigrant veteran and a recipient of a Purple Heart for injuries he sustained while deployed in Panama, was forced to self-deport to a country he hadn’t considered his home for decades. Like many other military veterans, the green card-holder struggled with PTSD related to his injuries. “Though his body began to heal, he said his mind did not,” NPR reported in June. “Back then, Park didn’t know he was dealing with PTSD. So, he never sought help and the trauma slowly took a toll. He eventually turned to drugs to cope.”
His attempt to self-medicate would eventually lead to prison time some 15 years ago, which then resulted in the revocation of his green card and a deportation order. As veterans groups and lawmakers have said, service members in crisis need compassion and care, not to get kicked out of the country they served. Fortunately, he was allowed to remain here as long as he regularly checked in with immigration officials. He returned to Hawaii, got a good job, and continued raising his kids. But that all changed this year, when he was told by the Trump administration that he “would be detained and deported unless he left voluntarily within the next few weeks,” NPR continued.
“ I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told the outlet at the time. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”
JULIO TORRES
Torres, a green card-holder and veteran who has “the American flag and Marine insignia tattooed on his arms to show his pride in serving a country he calls home,” now lives in fear of going outside due to ICE raids, the AP reports. Like Park, Torres struggled with “post-traumatic stress syndrome, drug addiction and a criminal charge following his deployment” but worked to repay his debt to society as a pastor, a chaplain for local jails, and food pantry volunteer. “But these days, his community in East Texas feels more like jail than the land of the free,” the AP continued.
“Torres, who was born in Mexico and migrated legally to the United States at age 5, is afraid to venture far from home as President Donald Trump works to carry out his mass deportation agenda. Torres has a green card residency permit and a record of service in the U.S. military, but he was detained by immigration authorities last year under the Biden administration.” At that time, he spent a week in detention but was ultimately released, CBS 19 reported. But under the Trump administration’s ruthless mass deportation agenda, veterans and military family members who were previously given special consideration under enforcement policy are now being arrested, detained, and deported, leaving veterans like Torres living in fear of being permanently ripped from their families and homes.
“Do I want to leave this nation? No. I want to serve it. I want to continue to serve my community,” he told the AP. “It breaks my heart that I fought for this nation to raise my children in this nation, and now I have to pull my children out of this nation if I get deported. Then what did I fight for?”
NARCISO BARRANCO
This past summer, horrific footage captured by a bystander showed Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and dad of three Marines, being punched and kidnapped by masked mass deportation agents while he was working. Alejandro, one of his U.S. military children, told the Los Angeles Times “that his father was pepper sprayed and beaten, and that his shoulder was dislocated. After speaking with him Sunday at about 6 p.m., Barranco said his father had not received medical treatment, food or water after more than 24 hours in a detention facility in Los Angeles.”
Mr. Barranco, who has lived in the U.S. for more than three decades, was finally released on bond after three weeks in federal immigration custody and was visibly distraught following his ordeal, his family said.
“‘Thank you for everything,’ Barranco said by phone after he was released from federal custody,” NBC News reported in July. “His son, Alejandro, said his father looked bad as he stepped out of the detention center. ‘He was wearing the same clothes, and he was crying,’ the son, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, said as he was preparing to take his father to a doctor to make sure he’s free of pain, followed by home-cooked meals.”
“We’re willing to give all this for this country and then they take our parents like this,” Alejandro continued to NBC News. “I don’t think it’s fair.”
Following his release, Mr. Barranco spoke out in “emotional, tearful remarks” that included messages of love and support to the family members of immigrants he met while in detention, ABC News reported. “I want to tell their families they have faith, they miss you all, and even in that place, they have hope,” he said, pleading with federal immigration officials to not “take away the opportunities for them to reunite with their families.”
ICE’s brutal campaign denigrates the heroism of immigrant service members, whose contributions to the U.S. military date back to the founding of our nation. In fact, while overall recruiting numbers shift over time, “the foreign born have been a constant presence in the U.S. armed forces,” the Migration Policy Institute said last year. “Hundreds of thousands of immigrants pledged to defend the United States with their lives in the Civil War, both World Wars, and conflicts like those in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq,” FWD.us said in a 2022 report. During the American Civil War, more than 20% of Union soldiers were also foreign-born, mostly from Germany and Ireland. By the time the U.S. was involved in World War I, approximately half a million immigrants were serving in the U.S. military, Bipartisan Policy Center said in 2017. “Foreigners have continued to serve in significant numbers since World War II.” Immigrant veterans now make up a growing share of America’s veteran community – rising from about 2% in 1990 to 4.5% today.
The cruel irony here is unmistakable: America asks immigrants to risk their lives for our freedoms, and immigrants have heeded that call only to end up facing detention, deportation, and separation.
On Veterans Day, honoring service means more than words or parades – it means keeping our promise to those who defended us. No veteran or military family should live in fear of deportation and separation. Period.
I'm ashamed to be an American these days...will things eventually get better? Why is there NO end in sight to the problem of homelessness. I'm an elder living in "affordable" housing. What exactly is "affordable" when your income is only social security, and the landlords here raise the rent over $100 every year. Now it costs almost $1900 a month to rent one of the "affordable" apartments here, furnished with appliances that are old and in poor condition. I have a housing voucher., and they are very hard to get nowadays, I waited years. But without that voucher, I wouldn't be writing this note, I'd be long gone!
Anyone trying to rent an apartment today needs to submit a Credit Report, and pay a huge deposit, and most young folks now have to stay with mom and dad, because to have one's own studio apartment is out of their reach, and they're lucky if that's even an option! And people wonder why the birth rate is so low? OPEN YOUR EYES, AMERICA!
Reading about the treatment of our veterans and our immigrants is just heartbreaking! And even seven million people across the whole USA visibly protesting in the streets are not enough to see even a small change in the way the ICE is treating detainees! The cruelty is beyond comprehension! Detention facilities awaiting deportation to where? Lights on for 24 hours a day? No cover, sleeping on a cement floor? Denied medicine, and even food and water? THIS IS AMERICA IN 2025?
I thought a judge somewhere stopped deportation without a hearing. Guess I was wrong. Sorry to be taking up so much space here, but I read the morning news and it just breaks my heart.