ICE deported veterans without proper screening, government report finds

On the same day that the White House heralded veterans on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a federal watchdog said the government had violated its own rules on deporting former service members - and immigration authorities have no idea how many they have removed.

Though U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is required to especially consider a veteran’s health, deployment record and other circumstances and must elevate decisions of veteran removal to senior officials, the agency often did not because it was “unaware of the policies,” the Government Accountability Office said in a Thursday report.

ICE did not elevate a decision in 70 percent of relevant cases, according to the report. The consequence, the GAO found, was that some veterans were deported without being properly screened.

Immigrants have served in uniform since the nation’s founding and have been naturalized in uniform or as veterans for a century. Nearly 130,000 troops have been naturalized since the Sept. 11 attacks alone.

But assumptions that the process is automatic has left some veterans unaware that they need to apply themselves. That has partially led to deportations for an unknown number of veterans for crimes ranging from assault to relatively minor offenses such as petty theft.

“I haven’t seen ICE use any discretion except for one veteran from El Salvador,” said Hector Barajas-Varela, an Army veteran who was deported to Mexico for 14 years but was later pardoned by California’s then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, in 2017 and was naturalized last year. He advocates for other deported veterans.

ICE does not know precisely how many veterans it has deported, the report found, which validates an issue Barajas-Varela has warned of for years: that unclear policies mean no one knows exactly how big the problem has become.

Barajas-Varela estimates 2,000 veterans have been deported but said he could not be certain.

“Even if they started counting now, there’s no way to find out,” he told the Washington Post on Saturday.

In a letter to acting ICE director Mark Morgan on Thursday, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Mark Takano, D-Riverside, said he was “deeply alarmed” over the findings.

“We cannot allow noncitizen veterans to fall through the cracks of our broken immigration system,” Takano said.

“Deporting veterans represents a failure by our government that could have been prevented if ICE officials had been adhering to agency policies,” he said.