One of the first professors I got to know outside of my own studies was Dr. John Troyer. I met John not through the Ohio State University, where he was a visiting professor at the time, but through cycling. In those days, my main extracurricular activity was finding creative ways to promote active transportation, and John was a fellow avid cyclist. John is also a leading researcher on dead bodies. Over cups of coffee that year, he explained the cultural, political, and legal controversies surrounding dead bodies: is a dead body a person or a thing? when is a body “dead”? who owns a dead body? what can you (or can’t you) legally do with a dead body?¹ I said that John studies death; but what he really studies is life after death, the perplexing and unexpected lives that bodies live after they are no longer living.²
I thought of John last week for the first time in years, when Danitza James, president of Repatriate Our Patriots, told me that the only way many deported veterans can return to the United States is in a coffin. As we talked about the growing number of military veterans who are deported, many to countries they have never truly known, Danitza explained that veterans who are forbidden from returning to America alive (presumably because of bars to reentry) are nevertheless able to return once they die. Many of them are even buried with military honors. This is what happened to Corporal Enrique Salas, Marine Corps veteran of the Persian Gulf War, who was honorably discharged after four years of service but later deported for a drug conviction. Salas—him or his body? do we call dead bodies by their living name?— was later repatriated and buried in California with military honors. Danitza said she knows of at least 45 veterans who have died abroad. Some, like Salas, are brought back; others leave clear instructions not to be buried on American soil.³
Memorial Day is a day of remembering those who died in military service. My evolving views on military service, my own and military service writ large, have not insulated me from recognizing and honoring the sacredness of this day. One need not endorse every aspect of American foreign policy nor lazily buy into militarism to feel a sense of solidarity with those who died in uniform and compassion for their families. At the same time, the sacred can also be a story we tell others, and tell ourselves, to mask the profane—in this case, to mask the ways in which the memorialization of death does not unfold entirely independent from systems of social hierarchy. Inequalities in life often become inequalities in death, although a dead body may occasionally be free in ways its former resident never dreamed of. Thus, if we learn anything from John and Danitza about Memorial Day, the lesson might be that to honor the dead and to memorialize the dead are not always the same thing.
My conversations with John about the cultural lives of dead bodies combined with my grounded research on the legal geographies of immigration enforcement in the Obama years led to an abiding sensitivity toward, and curiosity about, weirdness at the intersection of law, immigration, and real life. Anyone with hands-on experience with the immigration system knows that it operates with the eerie anti-logic of a dream (or nightmare) sequence. But what really interests me are the manifestations of the immigration system as mundane phenomena in places that should be external—yet are somehow tethered to the system, as if the threshold between inside and outside has eroded. (This, by the way, is my complaint about the overuse of the term Kafkaesque to describe the immigration system. Kafka wasn’t unique in writing about convoluted, nonsensical bureaucracies—lots of people did that; what made Kafka unique was his ability to illuminate the dissolution of the boundary between bureaucracy and everyday life.) You can see evidence of this interest in a previous social media post that turned into a blog post that turned into a Mother Jones article about immigrants who die while facing removal proceedings.
I’ll give you an example. I used to live on the Hilltop in Columbus, Ohio, near the largest Latino community in the area, while I was finishing my dissertation and working with friends to stand up the Central Ohio Worker Center. At the end of one day, several of us went to a nearby taco truck to eat and debrief. While we were ordering, I noticed a tin canister sitting on the stainless steel ledge collecting money to support the repatriation back to Mexico of a young man who had died suddenly. A pixelated picture of his face and a short message in Spanish to please give were held to the tin can with two rubber bands and packing tape. It was the first time it had occurred to me that although we mostly talk about migration north, there must be corresponding migration south, not only of returning migration (which has always been the less talked-about trend) but also the southward migration of some number of migrants who die not in the desert but simply as a part of routine life in the United States—traffic accidents, heart attacks, old age. I wondered: what does it cost to transport—migrate?—their bodies back to Mexico or beyond? can a dead body be “illegal”? would filing a death certificate for a child put a parent at risk of deportation? whose death gets memorialized?
Danitza’s comment about the afterlife repatriation of veterans and posthumous citizenship prompted me to read more about this topic. Section 329/A of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides the possibility for citizenship for immigrants who die in service. Kendell Frederick, an Army Reservist from Trinidad, was killed by an IED in Iraq while driving to get fingerprinted for his citizenship application. He was granted citizenship posthumously. Staff Sergeant Ayman Taha from Sudan was also killed in Iraq; he gave up pursuing a PhD to join Army Special Forces and was particularly useful to allied forces given his fluency in Arabic. Last Monday I explained that the U.S. military is not monolithic, but full of unexpected diversity. Reporting about Ayman’s death said:
“Taha was a devout Muslim who strongly believed in the message of Islam, which focuses on believing in God and performing good deeds. “He strongly agreed that what they were doing is good and that they were helping people in the Middle East,” Ayman’s father told the Washington Post.
We don’t know exactly how many service members died in uniform, although a previous Migration Policy Institute study puts that number at 300 between 2001 and 2013. And we don’t know exactly how many veterans die abroad or how many of those deaths are due to the fact that it is so much harder to access their veterans’ benefits from outside the country. Danitza said a big part of what she does is try to keep deported veterans alive so that they can bring them back alive.
No specific provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows for the repatriation of veterans who die abroad. The INA is only for the living (except when judges rule on cases of people already dead, as this Charlotte immigration judge did last week). Instead, as far as I can tell, anybody—any body—can migrate across a border as long as they are dead and are accompanied with the right paperwork, which seems easier and more perfunctory than getting a visa. We have open borders—just not for the living. Once you cross over, you can cross freely, but not before. And this appears to be true in both directions. Enrique Salas, the veteran above, returned to the United States posthumously, but he did not return as a veteran—he returned simply as a body. His burial reflected his service but his entry into the country did not. I think of this as I also think of that young man from Columbus from years ago, still a son and grandson, still a brother, perhaps, but no longer a migrant. The bodies of men passing each other at the border once again—one going north, one going south—no longer subject to suspicious stares or secondary screenings, but waved through for the first time.
To honor the dead and to memorialize the dead are not always the same thing. There are many ways to do both on Memorial Day. I believe in honoring anyone who paid the ultimate sacrifice, but let’s not use that as a mechanism for obliterating difficult truths. We should remember that the burden of our propensity for war often falls on working families who can’t fake-bone-spur their way out of a draft, Black Americans, who are overrepresented in the armed forces, and smaller numbers of immigrants who, Margaret Stock explained, often arrive better prepared to serve and acclimate to military culture than their US-born counterparts. The military does not always follow through on its promise of citizenship for immigrants who enlist, and this is just one reason why non-citizen veterans can be deported—and appear to be deported in larger numbers right now. We can memorialize the dead in ceremonies, but to honor the dead means to learn lessons from our past failures and fix a dishonorable system that treats immigrants as second-class—even when they serve in our armed forces