Don’t Single Out Military Deportations, Dismantle the Deportation Machine

Amid the onslaught of dehumanization meted out to immigrants in 2025, it is understandable to look for proof that immigrants do not deserve such treatment. Liberals have long used military service as such proof, celebrating immigrants who volunteer for the military before they even become U.S. citizens. When I started my graduate studies over 20 years ago, one of my professors posted a list of immigrant soldiers killed in the invasion of Iraq as a gesture against President George W. Bush’s anti-immigrant policies. Today, as a scholar of the U.S. military and its immigrant labor force, I watch the latest coverage of military-adjacent deportations pile up, but I reject the temptation to peg deservingness on immigrants’ proximity to the U.S. military.

If veterans and their family members do not deserve deportation, then who are the ​“bad” immigrants who deserve to be deported? That is the central flaw of deservingness politics: the construction of moral hierarchies that require the belief that someone is deserving of deportation. That way of thinking keeps the systems that brutalize immigrants in place, with the fight narrowed to carveouts for specific groups of ​“good” immigrants. The turn toward fascism under the Trump administration keeps shrinking these carveouts. Whereas in past years, many pro-immigrant arguments focused on hard work and family, today, these arguments are not enough to defend immigrants’ access to safety and community. Now, apparently, the model immigrants are those who volunteer for the military and their family members. 

Veterans and their family members have been deported for years, especially after the Clinton-era immigration reforms that made an expansive category of aggravated felonies deportable. And under ​“deporter-in-chief” President Obama ICE pursued mass deportations. Despite poignant appeals by deported veterans, veteran status rarely trumped their status as criminalized immigrants. With the aggressive expansion of ICE deportation efforts under Trump in 2025, and major threats to parole policies that paused the deportation of military family members, there has been an uptick in deportations of veterans and their loved ones. The older arguments that deporting servicemembers’ parents and spouses would hurt enlistment, distract workers from their military labor and undermine national security seem to have lost their traction. 

Appeals to deservingness based on proximity to the U.S. military leave the deportation machine intact — and they are not working. More than that, the liberal embrace of these appeals is harmful to the larger social justice project. The U.S. military is a destructive force across the globe and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Military forces are now being used for immigration enforcement not only on the border but throughout the United States— Marines have been deployed to Los Angeles to crack down on anti-ICE protests and officials in Florida have proposed deputizing National Guard officers as immigration judges.

We should be fighting to shrink the U.S. military’s footprint, including in the working-class immigrant communities from which its labor force is recruited. News of deported veterans and their family members should help strengthen the connections between antiwar and migrant justice movements. Afterall, U.S. aggression abroad increases immigration, both directly and indirectly, through destroying communities across the globe, facilitating capitalist immiseration and climate collapse. 

Veterans and their families should not be deported. But neither should other immigrants. Parsing between ​“good” and ​“bad” immigrants leaves the deportation system intact in its brutality. Hitching pro-immigrant arguments on venerating the U.S. military will only move us backwards on the path to a just world.