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.
Anyone surprised by this
I am surprised that the “thank ya fer ya service” crowd isn’t throwing a fit.
Thank you for your service mostly means, “look at me being a real good boy! Are you happy I’m a real good boy?! I thought about joining! Did you know that I thought about it? Mama said I have flat feet. Did I say thank you for your service?”
It’s about in-group membership. In-group loyalty to trump is supreme, followed by Republican party, with American a distant third.
It’s not about values or internal consistency. It’s about belonging.
This is what I initially came to say and got lost along the way. Thank you.
Conservatives in America are overwhelmingly white supremacist. They only respect the white veterans
performative politics.
I am surprised that the “thank ya fer ya service” crowd isn’t throwing a fit.
Their media ain’t covering these stories. And if the media is covering the story, they find the single person that lines up with what-ever narrative they want and run with it. Facts be damned if they fucked over 99 other innocent people to get that single guilty looking person.
Sounds about right. I know we all like to pretend Trump is “the worst”. And he is. But hear me out.
In no time in US history (except maybe post WW2 for white men) has this country ever respected the young adults that happened to survive from wars.
It’s just a different level of “fuck you” this time.
Didn’t Trump abandon hundreds of Afghanis who worked as translators etc?
The war machine is a meat grinder. Always has been. Always will be.
I’ve got an idea for all these at risk vets… They should band together and uh… Well, let’s just say that 6 Jan happened.
In France, if a member of the Foreign Legion is wounded, they are automatically granted French citizenship. This is known in France as Français par le sang verse. French by spilled blood.
Why the US doesn’t have the same makes no sense. If you were a green card holder, and you served in the US military and were wounded, citizenship should be yours for the asking at any time. No need for any lengthy legal shit.
The idea of citizenship in our stolen land is laughable.
Everyone who makes it here is supposed to be here
Fight fascists.
Okay I’m of the opinion that American veterans of any war since WWII deserve to get screwed by their government, but even I have to say: This is fucked up. I mean I still have no sympathy for imperialist stooges, but what the shit Trump?
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.
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.
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.
It is insane how I have to crawl around Lemmy to see this. A story like this would be flown on an over pass on highways across the country if this was reversed politically. There would be a clownvoy honking across the highway until every person was aware of this.
Veteran ? You mean war criminal.
Care to share what you know?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#By_Coalition_forces_and_private_contractors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Iraq_War
Fuck all these “veterans”
Whiny bitches
So much for service guarantees citizenship
dint protect him from trump-guaranteed deportations.
It was never legally guaranteed but only de facto guaranteed because of “norms and traditions”
Isn’t it against some UN rule for a member state to cause an individual to become stateless?
What are they gonna do about it?
tell Trump he’s won a Nobel prize and has to come to the Hague to accept it
I dream of this actually happening.
It wouldn’t, because the US would invade the Hague. Like the US literally passed a law authorizing military action if one of its people get arrested for warcrimes.
I can still dream.
That’s some late karma
I beat him to it. I escaped from the USA during Trump’s first term. Not going back. I’m also a veteran and everything about Trump and his cult reminded me of the countries that we are always spying on and invading.
He likes the ones that didn’t get exploded into the side of a building.
The big issue is that Trump promised his supporters that he would root out the millions of “criminal illegals” in the country who “rig the vote” for Democrats. It turns out, though, that the undocumented people who are here are just as law-abiding as everyone else. (And they don’t vote, because they can’t, and they understand that misrepresenting that is a sure ticket to getting kicked out.)
So in order for Kristi Noem to keep her made-for-TV raids on the air, they need to go after hardened criminals like students, veterans, and gay people. As well as non-citizens who are already in the system (and abiding by the law). There is no plan, other than to harass anyone who looks like they don’t belong, and let them know they are not welcome here.
Well, this dude did fire a random shot into a crowd and hit a pregnant teenager. He got out of prison early and was picked up by ICE from there.
Dude has a serious brain injury and PTSD. He should have received the best treatment he could get. He should have received citizenship immediately upon earning his Purple Heart (or fighting for the US in the first place). He should have been afforded a path to a decent life.
He wasn’t. He committed a senseless crime, probably directly as a result of his brain injury and ptsd that he got defending a country he had lived in since he was a toddler.
Even considering his violent act, he spent over a decade in prison and “paid his debt to society”. Of course it isn’t about that. It isn’t about rehabilitation. It’s about punishment, and because he happened to be born a few years before his family brought him here, before he could ever even think about where he wanted to be, he gets to live the rest of his life in misery.
A recipient of a Purple Heart, a war hero. And oh boy, he’s gonna spend the rest of his life paying for that.
Breaks my heart and I wish I could help him in some way.
It’s hard finding criminals because they are the ones who have a vested interest in being undercover. People who think the law protects them foolishly get jobs and pay taxes.
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I always found the stereotype that immigrants commit more crimes counterintuitive. Without looking at the statistics, my instinct would be that they are less likely to commit crime because they don’t want to be deported, and that undocumented immigrants would especially try to avoid drawing any attention to themselves.
when you look at the statistics you’ll find not only do they commit fewer crimes but they have an effect of bringing crime down in neighborhoods they live in
You’re acting like this wasn’t the intention all along… They laid the groundwork with the claims of criminal immigrants, got the MAGA crowd frothing at the mouth about it, and then started deporting people.
Their supporters just need to hear that “the bad guys are getting deported,” and they celebrate. They don’t know, or really care, that 90% of these people have no criminal record.
More specifically, many don’t know. Many still know and are completely on board with it. This is absolutely what was intended.
Turns out that manufacturing consent in the age of MAGA and Fox News is trivially easy (another intended consequence of decades of propaganda).
Imagine being willing to die for a country and almost doing so and they just turn around and do this.
I mean if I were him and I had state secrets, I’d be looking to head to China.
The absolute idiocy of deporting a purple heart veteran. My God.
Dudes a retired vet; I can’t imagine he’s drowning in up-to-date classified info…
That and being purple heart means he saw action, isn’t likely the kind of nerd privy to the interesting intel.
A maintenance crew member from a B2 would be an intelligence score.
