From Draft NOtices, October-December 2016
— Isidro Ortiz, Ph.D. 
“Support our troops” has been a popular slogan in many circles. As observers like Noam Chomsky have noted, it has been an effective public relations slogan in support of militarism even though it has little meaning and distracts from a critical focus on policies that lead to U.S. American men and women fighting in the Middle East and other regions of the world.
Recently, thousands of former soldiers have discovered that a better slogan to describe their experiences might be “deport our troops,” for they have been deported after serving in the U.S. military. Their experiences are the focus of a report titled “Discharged, Then Discarded: How U.S. Veterans are Banished by the Country they Swore to Protect,” which is based on an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California. The catalyst for the study was Hector Barajas, who is a deported veteran and director of the Deported Veterans Support House (also called the “Bunker”) in Tijuana, Mexico. In the spring of 2015 Barajas contacted the ACLU of California to explore whether the ACLU “could provide legal and policy support on two priority issues:
- Immigration relief for deported veterans seeking to return to the United States and, by extension, reform to stop the deportation of veterans; and
- Assistance obtaining medical benefits owed to them by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, but difficult to obtain outside of the United States.”
