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.
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.
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.
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.
TRUMP TO VETERANS: suckers and losers, whats in it for them?
They are no different than slaves to him. Slaves to be used and discarded once they are done. This has actually been the norm throughout history. It is why very few people wanted to be soldiers in the past. They weren’t respected, and weren’t well paid and weren’t treated well afterward.
The whole idea of giving ex-soldiers benefits after the war is a fairly new idea in history. Historically the only people who did it were the Romans. If you were a roman legionaire and served 20 years you were given a plot of land. If you weren’t a Roman citizen you got that at the end, too.
But that was a uniquely Roman thing. For the most part if soldiers did get something out of war it was due to plunder. That was actually the principle motivation for many common people who went to war.
So much for service guarantees citizenship
It was never legally guaranteed but only de facto guaranteed because of “norms and traditions”
dint protect him from trump-guaranteed deportations.
The idea of citizenship in our stolen land is laughable.
Everyone who makes it here is supposed to be here
Fight fascists.
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.
they wouldn’t be dumb enough to try to invade a nato country… maybe send some special forces raids though
It’s always the guy who did everything he could to dodge the draft who treats veterans like some sort of lesser being because they didn’t have the cash to get bone spurs.
And my fellow veterans eat his shit like it’s made of butterscotch and diamonds. Fucking pathetic.
Fellow vet: I never understood fellow service member’s blind servitude to the GOP. They fuck us over ever chance they get, and we’re dogs at a dog show for them only when it’s convenient. When they show up at a base, it’s either a completely scripted Q&A, with questions vetted weeks to months ahead of time, or they show and are guided around by the base commander and make a super quick appearance at whatever event.
My favorite was the 1 time Cathy McMorris did a debate. She touted helping 100’s of vets a month. Her opponent: “If you are really helping the vets, you wouldn’t have 100’s a month with issues.”
It gets pretty ripe listening to guys bitch up one side of the mountain and down the other about how the Libtards are screwing them over. Then praise a guy who can’t get un fucked long enough to show up to a veterans event because it’s a golf day but in the same week ask for a 4-mile-long military parade for his birthday.
Rogers showed up to a kid’s fund run. There were all of like 15 kids there. 3 of them mine. She wouldn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t an officer. She wasn’t even there when the race started. Kid’s fund run and she couldn’t even stay and see it through or even walk the thing.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of 'is country,” when the guns begin to shoot.I hated those visits. We had to field day our shop and barracks for the better part of the week prior. That put us so far behind we’d have to work 6 days a week 12+ hours a day just to catch up.
Those fucking voluntold assemblies on day shift. That’s ok, we don’t have jets to work on. I don’t have 10 computers to fix that will be kicked off the network tomorrow if I don’t patch them. Nah, we can stop this ISO inspection that is already behind. All so you can give some vapid speech and peace out before anyone else can talk to you.
I am certain that every sailor who had to cover up McCains name on the ship for his visit would love to see him waterboarded in a Vietnamese prison camp.
I know it varies by region but don’t be fooled, many vets I know, myself included, are not in support of this shit.
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.
Guess the 'thank you for your service"-people are about to step up, right?
He already served. They said thank you.
Transaction complete!
I can feel the Thoughts and Prayers from here.
Hey look it’s the anakin/padme meme
Right?
“Thank you for deporting me for my service.”
– Jose BarcoRight alongside the second amendment people to take down the tyrant.
I bet John Stewart will.
Oh they can say thank you and go back to your country in the same breath.
Ha hahahaha, you’re funny.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
[/s]
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.
That’s some late karma
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?”
performative politics.
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.
Conservatives in America are overwhelmingly white supremacist. They only respect the white veterans
