The Trump administration is deporting the families of soldiers who serve this country.
More than sixty lawmakers opened an investigation this week into whether the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security are coordinating to deport military service members and their families. The Associated Press found that more than fifty active-duty troops’ spouses and parents have been detained by immigration authorities. The Pentagon declined to comment.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but this don’t pencil out for the soldiers on the ground. You ask a man or woman to sign up, to leave their family, to go to a war zone, and while they’re gone the government they serve tears their family apart. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a betrayal. The law applies to everyone, the administration will say. So it does. But a country that asks people to risk their lives does not strip their families from under them while they are at war.
I was in the Abrams crews of the Third Infantry Division in 2003. The men I served with were the men John Fogerty sang about — the ones with no senator for a father, no silver spoon, no path out of the strip-mall recruiter’s office. They came from small towns in Georgia and Alabama and Texas, from families where the GI Bill was the only path to the next generation. Some of those families had members who were immigrants. The political class that sent them to war did not come from those families.
The men and women who serve this country come from the communities that bear the cost of the wars the political class launches. Andrew Bacevich, in Breach of Trust, named this pattern with precision: the country asks people to serve, then fails to keep the promises that make the service honorable. The deportation of their families is the latest expression of that failure. They are disproportionately working-class, disproportionately from rural and small-town America, disproportionately from families with military connections. Their service is not abstract. It is a contract: the country promises to take care of them and their families. When the government deports their families while they serve, it is breaking that contract.
We reported earlier this year on the case of a U.S. Army staff sergeant whose wife was detained for deportation. That was one case. Now the AP has found more than fifty. The investigative scrutiny of ICE’s own conduct has not produced meaningful accountability.
The letter sent to the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and Veterans Affairs put the point plainly: “These efforts imperil military readiness, weaken service members’ morale, and betray America’s promises to the people who put their lives on the line for our nation.” That is the language of an institution that recognizes what is happening.
The constitutional requirement is simple: when the government asks people to serve, it must protect their families. These families should be released, and the deportations should halt while the investigation runs. The Trump administration is deporting the families of the people who serve it. That is the record, and it demands an answer.