Black and brown military veterans, their families and community members gathered last week at Healthy Hood in Pilsen to raise awareness about President Donald Trump deporting undocumented immigrants who served in the U.S. military. Non-citizens are able to serve in the U.S. military if they have a green card and can speak, write and read English fluently.
The group is calling on Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to act urgently to issue pardons to six veterans who were convicted of crimes that were committed in Illinois. It’s unclear if the six have already served out their prison sentences; the group of veterans did not name the six due to fear of targeting. The six are “in exile,” according to the group, and are currently based in Illinois, Texas, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala and Guyana. Grassroots organizations in attendance at Healthy Hood were Black Deported Veterans of America (BDVA), Common Defense, Centro Sin Fronteras and Illinois LULAC.
With mass arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials continuing, advocates hope that Pritzker will act as he did in 2019 when he granted clemency to Army veteran Miguel Perez, who immigrated to Illinois as a child and served nearly eight years in prison for a non-violent offense. A legal resident, he was deported to Mexico in 2018 after his release from prison.
“This has already begun to happen,” U.S. Marine Corps veteran James Smith II said, referring to the ICE raids. “So we are looking for Governor J.B. Pritzker for you to help set an example for other states and other leaders to show their support.”
According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, more than 40,000 foreign nationals were serving in active and reserve components of the U.S. Armed Forces as of February 2024. The report also states an estimated additional 115,000 foreign nationals residing in the U.S. are veterans who have previously served on active duty.
“No immigrant is safe, not even those that serve in the United States Armed Forces,” Smith said. He’s also the founder of BDVA. “Whether you’re a member of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, Coast Guard or Space Force, if you were not born in the US, you are a target.”
Smith, who is based in San Diego, Calif., traveled to Chicago specifically to draw attention to the plight of the six veterans requesting pardons from Pritzker. Smith would not name the six veterans out of fear of them being targeted by the Trump administration. In an email to The TRiiBE, a spokesperson from Pritzker’s office said they can’t comment on ongoing pardon cases.
Smith noted that the start of mass veteran deportation is tied to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. President Bill Clinton signed this law, making it easier to deport any noncitizen—regardless of their legal status—if they commit a crime or remain in the U.S. longer than their legally allowed time. It’s estimated that at least 94,000 veterans have been deported since then.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, there’s been a heightened alarm around the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducting mass arrests of undocumented people in Chicago and beyond.
The mass arrests by ICE nationwide coincided with the recent detention of an Iraq war veteran in Arizona on Jan. 22, further highlighting the group’s calls for Pritzker to act immediately.
When conversations around immigration come up, Black immigrants are often overlooked, Smith said.
“If you go to Google and you put ‘deported veteran’ and click on images, you don’t see people that look like us,” he said, referring to Black veterans. “We need to begin to wake up. Not only are Latino people being deported, Black people are being deported, Asians are being deported and Middle Easterners are being deported—it’s across the spectrum.”
For the families of these veterans, deportation tears both families and communities apart. This is a pain that Ahmad Isaacs knows all too well. When he was 13, his father, Mark Isaacs, was transferred from Illinois to Louisiana and was deported from there to his birth country, Guyana, in 2013. Mark Isaacs came to the U.S. in his twenties, joined the U.S. Army, and served in the military for nine years. He was deported after he served out a three-year sentence.
“It hits me a little bit harder than it would hit the average person. I lived through having my family broken up essentially by the government,” Isaacs said. “If there’s anything I could do to save the next child or next family from being broken up in the same way, especially when their father or mother may have protected this country and the rights of this country, I would do anything that I can.”
Isaacs, who’s now based in Missouri, saves money and makes yearly visits to his father, who is still in Guyana. He described his father as the glue that held their family together. Despite the thousands of miles between them, his father is an active parent to him and his two other siblings.
“I pray that we can not only bring my father back home to America, to his family, and to his friends, but that we can also bring back all deported veterans back to the United States,” Isaacs said.
Jesus Manuel Valenzuela-Rodriguez spoke at the Healthy Hood press conference. He’s a Vietnam War veteran who has also experienced the looming threat of deportation firsthand. He was born in Mexico in 1952 and joined the U.S. Marine Corps at 19.
In 2009, Valenzuela-Rodriguez received a notice from the Department of Homeland Security to appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. The notice was based on an arrest twenty years earlier for a misdemeanor drunk and disorderly charge. He had spent a night in jail and later completed 20 hours of community service.
“Deporting veterans shouldn’t be in the vocabulary of this government of the United States. We should be here in this country that we protected,” he said. “We put our lives on the line.”
It wasn’t until his mother’s death in 2009 that he learned that she’d been born in New Mexico, making him a U.S. citizen. His case was later dismissed. His experience propelled him to fight for other non-citizen veterans still at risk.
Though things worked out for Valenzuela-Rodriguez, he’s concerned about future plans targeting immigrants, including Trump’s plans to end birthright citizenship. “He wants to get that thrown away. That’s sick. It’s not right.”
