US Navy Veteran Benito Hernandez Faces Deportation After Finishing Prison Term

On Thursday morning, a handful of supporters stood outside the United States federal courthouse in San Diego, California. One man gestured toward a poster showing a young serviceman in a US Navy uniform, three gold medals fixed to his chest.

"This is my brother, Benito Miranda Hernandez, US Navy veteran," said James Smith, who founded Black Deported Veterans of America. Smith and the others had arranged the protest for Hernandez, who at that hour remained inside an immigration detention facility some distance away.

Hernandez was brought from Mexico to the United States as an infant and later completed three deployments with the US military during the Iraq war. He had expected his time in uniform to open the door to citizenship. Instead, he now sits among immigrant veterans facing removal under US President Donald Trump.

"These men and women were promised that they were going to get their citizenship if they served," Smith said. "Help this brother come home."

Trump has said his drive for mass deportation will focus first on immigrants with criminal records. Yet groups backing military members warn that veterans are especially at risk, pointing to their disproportionate presence in prisons and jails. Most have also reported mental health struggles after leaving service.

Hernandez himself said re-entering civilian life proved difficult once he left the military. On June 14, however, he finished a lengthy sentence tied to a drug conviction. While he waited for his mother, Maria Miranda, to collect him, agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took him into custody. Miranda and another son arrived only after the detention. They spent much of that day searching for him without knowing where he had been taken.

"He was doing things right," Miranda told Al Jazeera in Spanish. "He had so many hopes, so many dreams."

Hernandez has since been moved to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. He now faces deportation even though he received a green card granting permanent residency earlier this year. He had spoken with Al Jazeera about his story for a piece published in April.

His case fits a wider pattern under the Trump administration. The precise count of deported veterans is hard to establish — ICE has for years not properly recorded the veteran status of people it holds, despite being required to do so — but several advocates told Al Jazeera they are seeing more removals of US veterans during Trump's second term. The New York Times reported in March that at least 34 veterans entered deportation proceedings over the past year.

Some cases draw public notice. Others stay quiet, advocates say, because veterans worry publicity could harm their immigration matters.

"As the ICE raids continue and revamp across the country, there's going to be people that are veterans that have not become US citizens that unfortunately will end up falling through the cracks," said Robert Vivar, cofounder of the Tijuana-based Unified US Deported Veterans Resource Center.

Danitza James, president of the advocacy group Repatriate our Patriots, said veterans, like other immigrants nationwide, have been picked up while following required steps in their immigration process. They are frequently flagged over outstanding warrants or criminal convictions that courts have not cleared. James said she is in touch with roughly six veterans detained by ICE in 2026 alone.

"Our government, they don't place any value in the service that our immigrants have," James, a veteran and naturalised citizen herself, told Al Jazeera. "They honestly see us as disposable."

For decades, the US military has turned to immigrants to fill staffing gaps in overseas conflicts. Recruiters often present enlistment as a fast track to naturalised citizenship. On paper, that pathway exists. In practice, many immigrant soldiers, Hernandez included, have reported hold-ups in the naturalisation process while deployed.

When Hernandez was scheduled for a citizenship interview in 2006, two years had already passed since his final deployment. By then he had a criminal conviction, and authorities rejected his citizenship application.

Advocates such as Smith say the failure to safeguard immigrant veterans reflects broader breakdowns in how the government handles those it sends to war.

"The United States government is failing to take accountability for what they've created," Smith told Al Jazeera. "You bring us in and strip us of part of our humanity so that we can kill without repercussions."

"Then, when you get out, there is no process that gets you ready to be in the civilian world."

Congress is now weighing several bills aimed at shielding immigrant veterans. Even so, recruiters still approach immigrant communities with pledges of quicker citizenship.

What happens next for Hernandez remains uncertain. At Thursday's rally, an attorney from a local immigration nonprofit told Smith and fellow advocates that the organisation might take up his case.

Meanwhile, Miranda is working to lift her son's morale. She accepts his calls from the ICE detention centre and visits on Saturdays when the facility allows it. The two-hour journey from Anaheim to San Diego weighs heavily on her health.

"On Saturday, when I saw him, he was very, very depressed," Miranda told Al Jazeera. "He said, 'I don't want to cause you any more problems. I don't want to upset you any more, Mom. I'm doing things right. I'm praying for myself,'" she recalled, in tears. "They clipped the wings of a bird, and all the hopes he had. They threw them in the trash."