The Trump Administration Just Deported a US Army Veteran Who Received the Purple Heart

This story is heavy, so consider this your trigger warning.

Jose Barco VIA NPR

Jose Barco is a Venezuela-born US Army veteran who served tours in Iraq and earned a Purple Heart. On Friday morning, he was deported from an immigration detention facility in Florence, Arizona. Although he was born in Venezuela, his family had fled initially from Cuba as refugees.

Even with Barco’s service, his family told the Guardian they had no confirmation of his current location and only knew he had arrived in the city of Nogales, Mexico. That update was from ICE, not from Jose himself.

Barco’s father was a political dissident in Cuba and spoke out against communism, forcing his family to flee to Venezuela eventually. Four years after Barco was born, his family successfully entered the US on asylum and later received permanent resident status. At 17, Barco joined the army and served his two tours in Iraq. He was then critically injured by an IED explosion during one of those deployments, which led to him earning his Purple Heart.

While he was in the military, Barco completed the paperwork for citizenship, but for unknown reasons, his application was never processed.

After coming back to America, Barco then ended up serving 15 years for a felony conviction of attempted murder, and in 2009, was sentenced to 52 years after being convicted of firing a gun at a house party in Colorado Springs. According to reports, he was suffering from PTSD, and one of the bullets he fired hit a 19-year-old woman in the leg. He was later released on parole in January after serving 15 years due to good behavior. Once he was released, ICE detained him and took him straight to a detention center in Colorado.

And listen, I’m not saying Barco is necessarily an innocent man. He served his time, both in prison and as a part of this country. As a Middle Eastern woman who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have my own internal battles about American veterans. I understand that many of them join out of necessity, not out of morality. This story made me significantly upset, though, because I think it highlights many issues that we have in our society right now. How veterans and their needed medical treatment are subpar, but somehow we have billions of extra dollars to pour into ICE raids.

Jose Barco’s story is not one of simple heroes versus villains, but of the systems that fail people far before they fail us. A veteran who risked his life for a country that never completed his citizenship, a man whose untreated trauma led to violence, someone who served his sentence only to be discarded at the border without dignity or transparency.

His deportation pushes us to grapple with uncomfortable truths: that we tend to invest more in punishment than in prevention, more in enforcement than in healing, and more in drawing lines around who belongs than in honoring the complicated realities of those who have given so much.

Whether or not one believes this makes Barco deserving of sympathy, his story lays bare deep fractures in how we treat immigrants, how we treat veterans, and human beings who stand at an intersection of both. And if we cannot grapple with those fractures, we’ll continue making them, at the cost of countless lives just like his.