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u.s. military
Veterans Oppose Mass Deportations and Domestic Military Deployments
Veterans for Peace will support military personnel who question the legality of Trump’s orders.
Feb 10, 2025
Veterans For Peace strongly objects to the Trump administration’s racist campaign of mass deportation of undocumented workers, who are our friends, neighbors, and even our fellow veterans. We condemn the violent raids that are sowing fear and terror in communities across the United States. As veterans, we are particularly opposed to the misuse and abuse of U.S. military personnel, including their illegal deployment to the U.S. border with Mexico.
Since U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, about 1,000 U.S. Army personnel and 500 Marines have been sent to the border, in addition to 2,500 National Guard members already there. Helicopter units are being sent along with U.S. Air Force C-17 and C- 130 aircraft; and Stars and Stripes reports that 20-ton Stryker armored combat vehicles may also be shipped. The number of U.S. military personnel on the U.S.-Mexico border may rise to as many as 10,000, according to the Defense One newsletter.
The use of active-duty military personnel for domestic policing operations is strictly forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act, and legal challenges are being mounted. President Trump says he may invoke the Insurrection Act, which effectively overrides Posse Comitatus by allowing the Executive to declare a national emergency requiring the domestic deployment of U.S. troops. But using the Insurrection Act to override the protections of the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy U.S. troops within the United States to investigate, detain, and remove illegal immigrants would be an unprecedented use of presidential power and misuse of the military, according to a recent report by the New York City Bar.
Just because the president says so does not make it legal.
What we have here is a U.S. president who is willing to engage thousands of U.S. military personnel in what appears—among other atrocities—to be a profit-making scheme based on a contrived border crisis. According to Customs and Border Protection data, monthly migrant apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border between December 2023 and December 2024 were reduced dramatically from 249,740 to 47,326 apprehensions. Nevertheless, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reportedly want to build four new detention centers with 10,000 beds each, along with 14 smaller facilities that each contain around 1,000 beds each. According to the American Immigration Counsel, “That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies,” at least one of whom, CoreCivic, donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee.
Trump is also calling for 30,000 immigrants to be detained at the notorious U.S. gulag at Guantanamo Bay, where U.S. laws and protections do not exist. This would also be another slap in the face of Cuba’s sovereignty over its own territory.
Tragically, this bogus campaign is terrifying, and profoundly disrupting the lives of millions of peaceful, extremely hard-working, tax-paying members of U.S. society. Even as the U.S. government is complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians from Gaza, it is now “cleansing” the U.S. of immigrants, many of whom are Indigenous to North America. According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, the “border deterrence” policy—now being carried out with soldiers and Marines—causes the death of more than 2,500 migrants per year, as they are intentionally forced onto the most perilous routes.
These abuses of U.S. law and human rights put U.S. military personnel in a very difficult position. What can active-duty military and National Guard members do when they do not want to be used in an illegal and immoral campaign against their neighbors, or even their own families?
Veterans to GIs: We Will Support You When You Refuse Illegal or Immoral Orders
Just because the president says so does not make it legal. You swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. You have the legal right and obligation to do so. Veterans For Peace supports U.S. military personnel who choose not to participate in the U.S.-Mexico border deployment, or in sending weapons to Gaza, or in other questionable military activities around the globe. We will put you in touch with trained counselors and lawyers who can advise you of your legal rights.
You can start by calling the GI Rights Hotline at 1-877-447-4487. You can legally contact your congressional representatives to tell them your concerns by utilizing the Appeal for Redress. And be sure to check out the recently updated Know Your Rights guide from the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.
As veterans of illegal, immoral U.S. wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and too many other places, we understand that you are in a tough place. But you do have options—you are still the boss of your own life. When you follow your conscience and stand up for what is right, you will have the support of Veterans For Peace.
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Could the US Military’s Recruitment Problem Be a Good Thing?
Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills?
Feb 09, 2025
Some experts worry that, if the country went to war, many reserve units might be unable to deploy. A U.S. official who works on these issues put it simply: ‘We can’t get enough people.’”
“Vietnam Syndrome” hasn’t gone away! It resulted in the elimination of the draft and ultimately morphed into “Iraq Syndrome”—so it seems—and even though those lost, horrific wars are now nothing but history, the next American war is ever-looming (against Canada?... against Greenland?). And yet, good God, the military is having a hard time recruiting a sufficient amount of patriotic cannon fodder.
“We can’t get enough people”—you know, to kill the enemy and to risk coming home in a box. And maybe that’s a good thing! The public is kind of getting it: War is obsolete (to put it politely). War is insane; it threatens the future of life on the planet—even though a huge swatch of the American media seems unwilling to get it and continues to report on war and militarism as though they literally equaled “national defense.” After all, we spend a trillion dollars annually on it.
Indeed, war unites us... in hell.
The above quote is from a fascinating—and troubling—piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, which has long been my favorite magazine. What troubled me was the unquestioned acceptance in the piece of the inevitability, indeed, the normalcy, of going off to war. In that context, war is simply an abstraction—a real-life game of Risk, you might say—and the proclaimed enemy is, ipso facto, less human than we are, and thus more easily reduced to collateral damage.
The article addresses a highly problematic (from a military point of view) diminishing of the military’s recruitment base. For instance: “Recruiters,” Filkins writes, “are contending with a population that’s not just unenthusiastic but incapable. According to a Pentagon study, more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible, because they are overweight, unable to pass the aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental-health issues, or disqualified by such factors as a criminal record. While the political argument festers, military leaders are left to contemplate a broader problem: Can a country defend itself if not enough people are willing or able to fight?”
While this is no doubt a legitimate question—militarism, after all, exists in a social context—what’s missing from this question, from my point of view, is the larger one that hovers above it, emerging from the future. Perhaps the larger question could be put this way: In a world that is hostage to multi-thousands of nuclear weapons across the planet, and on the edge of ecological collapse—with its Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight—can a country defend itself from its greatest risks by going to war? Or will doing so simply intensify those risks?
Here’s a slightly simpler way to put it: For God’s sake, isn’t war obsolete by now? Isn’t militarism obsolete? I’m surprised The New Yorker piece didn’t reach a little further into the stratosphere to establish the story’s context. Come on! This is the media’s job.
Actually, there’s also a second question emerging as well. Let me put it this way: Is it possible that collective humanity is actually turning against war—seeing it more as the primary problem than the solution to our global ills? Could this be so despite the quasi-meaningless borders the world has divided itself into, which must be “protected” with ever more omnicidal violence?
The story notes: “After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a groundswell of patriotic feeling encouraged young people to volunteer for the military. The sentiment held as the U.S. attacked the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and then as it launched an invasion of Iraq, which quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. But, as those wars dragged on, the public mood soured. The troops deployed there were unprepared and ill-equipped, sent to pursue objectives that could be bafflingly opaque.”
The public mood soured? Could this possibly be described in a more simplistic way—with less respect for the national collective awareness? What if something a bit more significant were actually happening, e.g., a public majority began seeing the invasion, the devastation of hundreds of thousands of lives, as... wrong?
And might, let us say, enormous human change be brewing? The same thing happened in Vietnam. It turned into hell, not just for the people of Vietnam—the war’s primary victims—but for the U.S. troops waging it. It became unendurable. “Fragging”—the killing of officers—started happening. So did moral injury: psychological woundedness that wouldn’t go away. Vet suicides started becoming common.
Back to Iraq. At one point the story mentions Bravo Company, a Marine battalion that had led the bloody assault on Fallujah in 2004. Two decades later, some of the surviving members held a reunion, which was permeated with anguish and guilt. For many, the trauma of Fallujah hadn’t gone away, and they remained emotionally troubled, often turning for relief to painkillers, alcohol, and methedrine.
All of which is deeply soul-cutting, but there’s a bit missing from the context: “Twenty years after the U.S. military offensive in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, locals are still suffering from the lasting impacts of the use of internationally banned weapons by U.S. forces,” according to Global Times. This includes such hellish instruments of war as white phosphorous and depleted uranium, the effects of which—on local air, soil, water, and vegetation—do not go away.
And of course the consequences for the locals have been ghastly, including enormous increases in cancer, birth defects, leukemia, still births, infant mortality and so, so much more, including “the emergence of diseases that were not known in the city before 2004.” And these effects will remain present in Fallujah, according to the article, for hundreds of years.
But the U.S. had to defend itself!
This is insane. War, as I have noted previously, is humanity’s cancer. It affects all of us, whether we belong to “us” or “them.” It affects us collectively. Indeed, war unites us... in hell. The mainstream media needs to stop pretending it doesn’t realize this.
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Will US Troops Fight Trump’s War on Migrants?
Trump is counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with.
Jan 21, 2025
This country, once a haven for immigrants, is now on the verge of turning into a first-class nightmare for them. President Donald Trump often speaks of his plan to deport some 11.7 million undocumented immigrants from the United States as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Depending on how closely he follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, his administration may also begin deporting the family members of migrants and asylum seekers in vast numbers.
Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: The troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years—more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier’s tour of duty.
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen know what it means to be out of place in a new community or in a country not their own. President Trump and his crew are counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with. As a military spouse myself, I wonder how amenable they will be to the kinds of orders many Americans can already see coming their way.
An Uncertain Future
Donald Trump’s goals have been outlined in countless campaign speeches, rallies, and press conferences, as well as in Project 2025. According to Tara Watson and Jonathon Zars of the Brookings Institution, his administration could, in fact, do a number of different things when it comes to immigrants. One possibility would be to launch a series of high-profile mass deportation events in which the military would collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement, instead of leaving such tasks to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies typically responsible for managing migration. To do so, the federal government would have to expand its powers over local and state jurisdictions, including by imposing stiff penalties on sanctuary cities, where local officials have been instructed not to inquire about people’s immigration status or implement federal deportation orders.
Watson and Zars assume that the policies of the second Trump administration will impact a number of other vulnerable groups as well. For example, about 4 to 5 million people with temporary parole status (TPS) or a notice to appear in immigration court are seeking asylum, having fled political persecution or humanitarian disasters in their home countries. Millions of them would (at least theoretically) have to return to the situations they fled because the new administration may not grant their petitions. It could even try to repeal TPS for the approximately 850,000 individuals who already have it.
As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers—all of them—are migrants of a very real sort.
It might also reinstitute the “remain in Mexico” policy last in place in 2019, which required Central and South Americans requesting asylum to wait on the Mexican side of our southern border—a measure the Biden administration repealed due to significant safety concerns. Also at risk would be the two-year grace period granted to approximately half a million people from war-torn or politically unstable countries like Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela, while new people would probably no longer be admitted under that program and asylum might be denied to those caught up in this country’s backlogged immigration courts.
Additionally, President Trump could try again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a protected status that now covers more than half a million young people who came to this country as kids. His administration would also undoubtedly slow-walk legal paths to immigration, like the granting of student and work visas to people from China, and could institute policies that would make it ever more difficult for immigrants to access services like Medicaid and public education. His divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of this country,” has already created a climate of fear for many migrants.
A Merging of Powers
In the early 2000s, America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, the remnants of which are still underway in dozens of countries around the world, provided an impetus for the U.S. to consolidate its military, intelligence, and law enforcement entities under a behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government since World War II. As part of that reorganization, Customs and Border Patrol has become ever more involved in non-border-related functions like local law enforcement while benefitting from closer resource- and information-sharing relationships with federal agencies like the Pentagon.
CBP officers now use military hardware and training and work closely with Pentagon intelligence. To take just one high-profile example, consider the heroic intervention in May 2022 by both on- and off-duty federal Border Patrol agents, including several from a special search-and-rescue tactical unit, during the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While much has (justifiably) been made of the heroism of those individuals who stormed the building, relatively little has been said about the fact that CBP, state, and local law enforcement agents were all on the scene within minutes and that the presence of hundreds of Border Patrol officers may have actually contributed to the confusion and long period of inaction that day.
Perhaps more to the point, few questioned why Border Patrol agents were better prepared to enter an elementary school than a local police force, or why it seemed like such an obvious thing for them to do in the first place.
Given all that, consider this a distinct irony: The flip side of CBP’s speed in arriving at Uvalde is how regularly it has failed to perform a range of functions it’s supposed to carry out at the border itself in a timely fashion (or at all), especially when such functions are not combative in nature. Take the standoff in early 2024 in Shelby Park, Texas, a 2.5-mile stretch of border along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general. There, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deployed state National Guard members to prevent CBP from actually processing arriving migrants, complaining that “the only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border.” Abbott’s planned standoff marked the first time a governor had deployed a state national guard against federal orders since 1957, when Gov. Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep Black children from attending an elementary school under federal orders.
The Strange Bedfellows Who Would Implement Trump’s Desires
Military troops who would no doubt have to step in to implement migrant deportation plans as massive as Trump’s would occupy a similarly complicated position, both as outsiders on the local scene and as those charged (nominally at least) with protecting innocent lives. Stranger yet, a small but significant slice of any set of troops asked to take part in such deportations would themselves be immigrants. Five percent, or 1 in 20 servicemembers in our military, were not born here. And there’s nothing new about that. Since the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of noncitizens have served in America’s wars. During times of hostility, which (officially speaking) include all the years since the War on Terror began in 2001, the federal government expedited the legal path of those immigrant troops to citizenship. It remains unclear how a military that has long been diverse will respond to orders to brutalize people, some of whom may come from their very own communities.
As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers—all of them—are migrants of a very real sort. Culturally, our troops understand both migration and multiculturalism because they have to adapt again and again to new towns or cities where residents don’t see them as real members of their communities, where it’s hard to find doctors and childcare within the military’s anemic infrastructure, and still harder to find these services in communities about which they lack knowledge and connections. In the most challenging of such cases, servicemembers and their families end up in countries where they don’t speak the language or know anyone, and where they may encounter justifiable hostility towards their presence.
Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion, and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.
The experiences of the myriad groups I see in my practice and know in my broad military community overlap in often profound ways that bring images of immigrants to my mind. Many in such populations understand in their bones what it’s like to be the object of local attention, curiosity, even hostility when they venture out each day. They know what it means to constantly translate from your own language and world into that of a local one (or navigate life without knowledge of the native language at all). They also know what it’s like to have all too few resources to handle a medical emergency or an event like the illness or even the death of a loved one that neither the military nor local resources can help with.
I know one military family whose members struggled for two years in a foreign post because one of their children had a physical disability that neither the military nor the local educational system could accommodate, forcing the military spouse to homeschool. When that spouse came down with a severe case of Covid-19 during the pandemic, they searched long and hard for an appropriate doctor to provide outpatient care so that she didn’t have to leave her young children.
Their experiences mirror those of many I see within migrant communities of color here in the U.S., who come up short when they seek educational and health services for children with special needs, and who suffered more gravely during the Covid-19 pandemic due to overcrowded hospitals as well as social isolation and lack of enough connections to care for young family members when one got ill. It’s no wonder that two groups among us with some of the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality are military families and immigrants from poor countries.
Violence Touches Us All
Broadly speaking, what those two distinctive groups have in common is that, in this century, they felt the most pressure when it came to dealing with this country’s global imperial desires, either by fighting our remarkably disastrous post-9/11 wars or by finding themselves forced to pick up and start over amid the never-ending destruction of those very wars. To end that cycle of migration-as-combat and combat-as-migration, a better world would not dream of kicking out the migrants in this country. Instead, it would be working to bring back the troops from all the places where they are currently still engaged, rather than preparing for conflicts that will only help to create more migrants.
The United States should stop organizing military “exercises” in places like Saudi Arabia and Somalia; stop training troops in countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan; and cease drone and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, among other examples of our military involvement abroad. We should just get out. And we should start funneling some of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve channeled annually into weapons production into our education system, healthcare, and green infrastructure here at home, so that there’s room for everyone, immigrants included, to be safe and cared for in the communities where they live.
Otherwise, if President Trump manages to realize even a modest part of the immigrant deportation goals he and his political allies have outlined, the bulk of the work of ejection will be done by those for whom it may be the most morally devastating. Many more of our troops than he could ever imagine will, I suspect, be unnerved by what they have in common with the people they’re charged with deporting from their adoptive homeland.
Yes, this may very well be wishful thinking on my part, but I do believe that, Donald Trump or not, our common humanity is likely to win out in the end. After years of studying America’s post-9/11 wars from a range of viewpoints (and listening to those deeply disturbed by their War on Terror experiences), the largest commonality I find among our troops is not a desire to take up arms or fight terrorists in distant lands, or even the experience of being personally victimized—hunted, shot, tortured, or maimed. Rather, it’s the trauma of hurting another human being. It’s wrought from looking a Taliban soldier in the eye at a checkpoint in Kabul and realizing he’s human just like you, or separating a suspected opposition fighter from his spouse and kids during an arrest. It’s the scream of a child whose parent you shot during a raid to prevent an attack on you.
In no small part, the stress of those experiences also came from having to leave your own children for months at a time, knowing that the youngest might not even remember you when you return, or telling your teenager that she has to abandon everything she knows—boyfriend, school, sports teams—to go to a new military town where no one will even know her name. Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion, and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.
Thanks to Donald Trump, at least some of those troops will undoubtedly face the choice of having to do it all again, this time on our own soil. Unless they pause at the memory of what that may be like, Americans could find themselves in an unrecognizable land. It will be a nightmare if, his second time in the White House, Donald Trump launches a war on terror domestically against migrants, because that would be a war on America itself.
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