J Malcolm Garcia - Without a Country: The Untold Story of Americas Deported Veterans

Praise for J. Malcolm Garcia

I dont know if hes unheralded, but theres a writer named J. Malcolm Garcia who continually astounds me with his energy and empathy. He writes powerful and lyrical nonfiction from Afghanistan, from Buenos Aires, from Mississippi, all of it urgent and provocative. Ive been following him wherever he goes.

Dave Eggers

Garcia is an exceptionally powerful voice on behalf of the people about whom he writes. As he illustrates the results of Americas military adventuring, Garcia not only takes us to the physical space of the people who are the victims of our drone attacks, our bombs, and our bullets, but he also goes where few nonfiction writers have the skill to venturehe takes us inside their heads.

Dale Maharidge, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of And Their Children After Them

J. Malcolm Garcia is the keeper of forgotten stories. He is an invaluable witness and a compassionate observer of todays wars.

Fatima Bhutto, author of Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughters Memoir

Portions of this book have appeared in slightly different form in the following publications: Guernica: A Magazine of Arts & Politics, Tampa Review, Latterly Magazine and The Massachusetts Review . The Nation Institute for Investigative Reporting funded some of the research.

Copyright 2017 by J. Malcolm Garcia

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2243-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2244-6

Printed in the United States of America.

Dedicated to Olga Contreras

19672016

The rest is silence

I am from there. I am from here.

I am not there and I am not here.

I have two names, which meet and part,

and I have two languages.

I forget which of them I dream in.

Mahmoud Darwish

Life is a relentless expulsion from where we come from and an ongoing deportation to alien realms. We are in exile and our greatest dream is to return to the lost land. It is the greatest dream because no matter how long our exile is going to last, the dream will remain. It is the greatest dream because when we finally care only for this dream, then our exile will be over.

Franco Santoro

Whats curious, whats absurd is that despite

the fact I save the messages and cries

from all my memories and from

every cardinal point

whats strange whats incredible is that despite

my bleak expectations

I dont know what the wind of exile is saying.

Mario Benedetti

Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.

Marcus T. Cicero

Contents

FACEBOOK, August 4, 2015, 3:22 p.m.

Hector Barajas-Varela

Learning to be a better person thru errors. Far from being perfect. Deported in 2004-present. Life deportation.

Prologue

I heard about Jose Chavez-Alvarez by chance, just after my journalism career crashed in 2009, a casualty of the Great Recession. I survived five rounds of layoffs at a daily newspaper before the sixth round tagged me.

Out of work for months, desperate, I accepted a job as a groundskeeper at a country club for minimum wage. Emptying trash, cutting golf course fairways, raking sand bunkers. My life as a reporter began slipping away. I determined to hang on to it. When the country club closed for the winter, I had a few months to freelance and regain my footing. Until then, I used my half-hour lunch breaks and the hours after work to pitch story ideas to editors.

Initially I thought Id write about homeless Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, a topical subject, good for the holidays when readers are interested in the poor. I had been embedded as a reporter in Afghanistan and knew people involved with social service nonprofits that worked with homeless vets.

You really ought to do a story on deported vets, one social worker told me.

I had no idea that non-citizens served in the U.S. military, let alone that veterans were being deported. My contact gave me the name of Hector Barajas-Varela, an Army veteran and recovering alcoholic and drug addict who was deported to Mexico in 2004. He crossed back into the United States illegally a short time later but was caught and deported again in 2009. He then started a support house for deported veterans in Tijuana nicknamed the Bunker.

My contact also passed on the name of an immigration lawyer representing a Pennsylvania veteran facing deportation, Jose Chavez-Alvarez. According to a brief on his case, Chavez-Alvarez had sexually assaulted a fellow soldier while she was so drunk she was barely conscious. After the assault, shed had trouble sleeping and interacting with other soldiers and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

During his court-martial in 2000, Chavez-Alvarez said, I just want to apologize to my entire platoon and I hope someday, you know, they allow me to redeem myself for what I did wrong. [I] apologize to my entire chain of command, Army, and if [the female soldier] was here, I would like to apologize to her.

In the summer of 2012, nearly ten years after his release from prison, with no other crime on his record, Department of Homeland Security agents came to his house and arrested Chavez-Alvarez, imprisoning him for potential deportation as an aggravated felon. A 1996 law, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, calls for the deportation of immigrants convicted of crimes that meet the definition of an aggravated assault after they have been punished for their crimes by serving time in prison.

The law applies to an immigrant who served at least a year in prison (in most cases) and can be applied weeks, months, even years after his release. In addition to such serious crimes as murder and rape, a great many other offenses resulting in a prison sentence of a year or more can meet the definition of an aggravated felony and lead to deportation.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, does have discretion over whom it refers for removal. But the law does not permit any discretion on the part of immigration judges, who may not take into account a defendants military service or any other mitigating circumstances once he has been convicted of an aggravated felony. The act can be invoked against an individual at any time. Complicating matters further, non-citizens do not have the right to a government-appointed lawyer, though they may hire their own if they can afford to.