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As if firing tens of thousands of veterans from federal service, gutting Veterans Affairs benefits, and slashing Medicare and Social Security weren’t enough, Donald Trump is now moving to deport veterans — many of whom have risked their lives for a country that’s now kicking them to the curb like trash.
As I write this, Jose Barco, a U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient, sits in a Texas detention center awaiting deportation to a country that won’t even take him. Barco was born in Venezuela, but the Venezuelan government is claiming his birth certificate is a fake, alleging it looks too new to be real.
Barco — a veteran of two combat deployments to Iraq, who put his life on the line for a country that now refuses to recognize him as one of its own — is caught in limbo as the Trump administration decides what to do with him. What they do know is that they don’t want him in the United States.
Barco came to the U.S. at the age of four. He enlisted in the Army and served in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment — the kind of unit that saw the worst of Iraq during the height of the insurgency. In 2004, he earned a Purple Heart after an explosion launched him through the air and into a wall, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and severe burns. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). TBI and PTSD are the very conditions that Trump, through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is neglecting by slashing critical mental health services and eliminating over 80,000 jobs at the VA.
While serving, Barco tried to file for citizenship. His commanding officer helped him complete the application. Then it vanished. No chain of custody. No record. A lost folder with a soldier’s future inside it. What should’ve been a straightforward path to naturalization became an invisible trap door leading to exile.
When he returned stateside, Barco’s untreated brain trauma turned to instability. He committed a violent crime in 2008. He fired a random shot, which he says he doesn’t recall, into a group of people and injured a pregnant teen. He paid for it with 15 years of his life behind bars for attempted murder. His sentence was reduced for good behavior, and he was granted his release after his first parole hearing.
Barco was honorably discharged. He was diagnosed with serious physical and mental injuries. He was promised a path to citizenship. And yet, immediately after his release from prison in January, ICE scooped him up and put on a plane to Venezuela — a country he hasn’t seen since he was a toddler and which refused to accept him.
Now he is stateless, a man with no nation. The United States of America — the same nation he fought and bled for — has denied him the basic dignity of belonging.
Barco’s story is a cautionary tale of abandoning due process. It isn’t just about him; his is the story we know of. There are about 40,000 foreign nationals currently serving in the U.S. military. This is about the hundreds of deported veterans now scattered across 40 countries. This is about the failure of a country that thanks you for your service one day and deports you the next. This disregard for service has never been more egregious than under Trump, whose indifference toward the dismantling of the VA — and the callous, senseless firing of thousands of veterans at the hands of Elon Musk and DOGE — is willfully doing more harm to our veterans than any other administration in the modern era. Some are trying to intervene on Barco’s behalf, arguing that he should be transferred to a VA facility for medical care, yet nothing has materialized as of today.
Barco’s story, however flawed he was as a citizen, sheds light on the wider problem with Trump’s lawless second term. If Trump can do this to a war hero, he can do it to anyone. He can ignore the Constitution and run again. He can suspend habeas corpus, jail protesters, and detain American citizens. He can pivot hard toward a more fascist and authoritarian America. Republicans in Congress will cheer him on. The mass protests across the country are a powerful start, but they are not enough to ensure America doesn’t backslide into the very despotism it was founded to resist.
Even if Democrats take power in 2026 or 2028, the party seems unwilling to dismantle the system of unlimited money in politics ensuring another Elon Musk can buy influence. Nor, outside a few, are they offering voters something other than “Republicans lite.”
The only one who can save you is you. Are you ready for what comes next? You better be.
