On the day Danitza (“Dee”) walked into the recruiter’s offices to join the Marines, the Marine recruiter, her first choice, was out—so she joined the Army instead. Her parents were migrant farmworkers in California and Arizona; Dee had a green card and was enrolled in college. But college money ran out, and the promise of college money, expedited citizenship, and travel beyond Yuma was enticing. While she was in boot camp in South Carolina, the unthinkable happened: terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
Danitza served two tours in Iraq, including as a 50 cal machine gunner. No one asked about her citizenship, she said. “we were all wearing the same uniform. We all had the American flag on our shoulders and nobody cared, right?” Much like Margaret Stock’s story from yesterday, Danitza, who went by the call sign “Dark Angel,” found herself in combat roles normally restricted to men.
Despite the promise of citizenship, when Danitza left the military, she still had not naturalized—the mission came first, she said—and, worse, her green card was expired. “The checklist we all get [when we leave the military] has a box for your canteen cover, that is probably five dollars, that you better turn in. It did not have a box that said, ‘Did you file for your naturalization that we promised when you enlisted?’”
Still, it wasn’t until years later that she realized that under different circumstances, she might have been deported. She is the president of Repatriate Our Patriots, a volunteer-led organization that attempts to interrupt the military-service-to-deportation pipeline. Dee, who is a naturalized citizen, now provides individual support and advocacy for active duty military and their families impacted by the immigration system, including cases of spouses of enlisted members who are snatched up by ICE during routine check-ins, biometric appointments, and citizenship interviews.
Repatriate Our Patriots also provides critical support to veterans who have already been deported and live outside of the United States, many of whom desperately need their VA benefits, but who have a hard time accessing those benefits despite being entitled to them.
This is not a theoretical problem. Mario Arturo Benito Moreno, a Vietnam veteran living in Mexico, across the border from El Paso, had a medical emergency and died from a ruptured appendix after DHS refused to allow him to enter and access his VA benefits.
Danitza explained: “We are trying to keep them alive so that we can bring them back alive. And with Memorial Day right around the corner, we can account for 45 veterans that have died in exile. And it’s so sad when we can bring them back in a coffin just with a DD-214, no questions asked, and bury them at a national cemetery with full military honors, but we can’t bring them back alive.”
Danitza emphasized how the already deeply unequal treatment of immigrants and citizens in our criminal legal system impacts immigrant veterans, too. “We’ve all made mistakes,” she said. “But the difference between you and me is if we’re driving down the highway and there’s a joint in the car, you go to jail for a night, I go to jail for a night—but you go home after that to rehabilitate. I don’t go home. I go to ICE detention and then get deported. That’s the difference.”
When a family member asked if Danitza would serve in the military again knowing what she knows now, she responded, “I will do it all over again, but I want the system to do better. I know there’s a possibility for them to do better and to deliver on that promise. And this is why I’m fighting.” This is the spirit you’ll see in all four of my interlocutors this week, who are able to live in the space of tension between recognizing America’s profound failures and believing in America’s ability to do better when we come together around a common purpose.
When discussing solutions, out of nowhere, Danitza coined the name of new piece of legislation called the Naturalization Accountability Act, designed to make citizenship tracking a required function at the command level throughout the military, and include checkpoints throughout a service member’s enlistment to ensure that the military is following through on its promise. You heard it here first, folks. Let’s make it happen, Congress.
Danitza’s close our conversation with a clear goal is simple enough—and fundamentally American enough—that no politician from either party should be able to avoid addressing.
“I just want to add that something that we’ve been asking right and we want to be an ally to our military leaders. This is not this is a bipartisan issue right this is not an immigration issue. And this is something that we have continued to say anytime that we meet with a lawmaker, a representative—this should never get to the point where we say ‘deported’ and ‘veteran’ in the same sentence. Ever. Because it should have happened when they’re in the military. The veteran should leave the military with their naturalization. Period. So what I would ask for anyone who’s listening is to call the representatives and ask them to develop or create or make a naturalization accountability program in the military. If the service member is good enough to fight and die for this country, they should be good enough to live in this country.”