Summary
In a harsh example of Trump’s immigration crackdown, U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient Jose Barco faces deportation to Venezuela, despite serving in Iraq and suffering severe combat injuries.
After his citizenship application vanished during service and he served prison time for a violent offense linked to untreated trauma, ICE detained him upon release.
Venezuela won’t accept him, leaving him stateless.
Barco’s case spotlights the Trump administration’s punitive policies toward veterans, erosion of due process, and broader threats to constitutional rights under his increasingly authoritarian leadership.
Military service is one of the ways out of poverty we dangle at young people. I can’t blame an 18-year-old for wanting in on the GI bill. Student loans suck.
Okay, and? The crimes American soldiers committed against the Iraqi people (including waging an illegal war of aggression in the first place) aren’t something that can be excused by “but they offered me money”.
Do you have a job? If so, you are participating in captialism which means you support genocide.
There’s a difference between working to not starve or die in the cold, and willingly enlisting to military service.
I think you could argue it for a mandatory draft, but its not forced upon anyone in the US.
Or people just wanting to get out of wherever they lived their whole lives. There’s also still living veterans who were drafted for Vietnam.
That’s like saying you can’t blame nazi soldiers because they were born poor
You can blame them for their crimes, but not for getting drafted. They didn’t have a choice.