Seeking citizenship from conflict areas
Hernandez has lived most of his life in the United States. He was brought across the border by his mother as a baby. He currently has three children, all of whom are American citizens.
As of 2022, nearly 731,000 veterans like Hernandez were immigrants. They make up approximately 4.5 percent of the U.S. veteran population.
For decades, the U.S. military, which has faced declining enlistment numbers, has relied on immigrants to serve alongside U.S.-born citizens. An estimated 118,000 immigrant veterans do not have citizenship, although most also have citizenship. Hernandez is one of them.
Like many other veterans who struggle to reintegrate into society after military service, Hernandez struggled to find his place in civilian society.
He was jailed on illegal gun charges shortly after returning from deployment. When he was released several weeks later, he discovered that he had been evicted from his apartment and all his belongings, including military memorabilia, had been confiscated.
“I ended up with nothing,” he told Al Jazeera. With few options left, he turned to selling drugs, received multiple convictions and was in and out of prison.
Without U.S. citizenship, the threat of deportation now looms over him, especially because of the convictions on his criminal record.
His experience is not an outlier. Approximately one-third of military veterans are arrested at least once in their lifetime, and research estimates that as many as 181,500 people are incarcerated each year.
Many veterans suffer from traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse issues, which can lead to criminal behavior.
Hernandez was among those who enlisted after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In the military turmoil that followed, a California high school recruiter convinced him to enlist.
Hernandez was only 18 years old, and the structure, ambition, and steady income of military service appealed to him.
“I was trying to make a difference and protect the land that was supposed to be my country, the land that fed me,” he said.
Hernandez deployed during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and two more deployments after that. He served on the USS Kearsarge LHD-3, a U.S. Navy amphibious assault force.
“They said I would get to see the world,” he said. “It wasn’t. It was just the ocean.”
During his assignment to his first ship, he filed an application for citizenship.
The process was supposed to take only about six months. To increase recruitment, then-President George W. Bush promised to expedite naturalization applications for active-duty military personnel who served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, like other immigrant soldiers at the time, Hernandez’s naturalization was delayed. The U.S. immigration system is chronically overcrowded, and stricter background checks after the Sept. 11 attacks slowed services even further.
By the time Hernandez was finally called for a citizenship interview in 2006, two years had passed since he returned from his last deployment.
He had already been convicted of drug possession. Hernandez’s expedited naturalization case was dismissed because he was no longer a military member.
