TIJUANA, MEXICO — Jose Velasco is one mile south of the U.S. border but a long way from home. The 74-year-old slowly places one aching, diabetic foot in front of the other to climb the cramped stairwell at the Deported Veterans Support House in the sprawling border city.

For him, home is Rochester, New York; but Velasco has spent the last three years of his life in the Mexican city of nearly 2 million people that is home to the highest murder rate in the world. How he ended up here, far from three newly-born great-grandchildren he fears he will never meet, is a story that hundreds of other military veterans expelled from the United States can empathize with.

For banished veterans like Velasco, there’s often only one way to legally return to America—posthumously. “If I die here, they're going to take me in a pine box and they're going to bury me... that’s all they do. That’s all you get,” he said.

Born in Guadalajara, Velasco immigrated in 1957as a child to upstate New York, where his uncle was a dentist. He joined the U.S. military in 1971, convinced that it provided him a clear path to citizenship. “The recruiter said to me once you complete your service, you’re automatically an American citizen. Well, it didn’t. It was not automatic. That’s the reason I’m here,” he said.

He left the service in 1980 after nine years as an instructor at military bases around the country, which included a stint in the California National Guard. Velasco then worked as a limousine driver for the next three decades. His life changed when police at a checkpoint found a concealed weapon in the vehicle he was driving. He maintains it was not his.

“They couldn't come up with anything. They couldn’t give me any proof that it was mine—DNA, fingerprints, nothing. Just because I'm driving a limo that several people drive?”

After he ran out of money to contest his case, he was eventually deported with nothing but the clothes on his back.

“I guess they thought ‘We got a little Mexican here… It's a grandpa? I don't care. We'll send him right back.’ And they did,” he said. “They took my cell. Every little single paper that I had. They took my wallet—I didn’t get it back. It was another way of saying ‘This is what you get from us.’”

With his military benefits cancelled and without a dollar to his name, Velasco had to sleep on a street corner downtown. “I didn’t remember one [phone] number of anyone. I had family in San Diego but couldn’t get through to them. I could barely walk.”

He was one of the oldest deportees of the Trump Administration. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen a 74-year-old man crying, but I cried a lot.”

THE HOUSE

Velasco’s life was saved by the support house, which provides food, shelter, bureaucratic help and other assistance to vets suddenly faced with life south of the border. “When they found out they immediately went to pick me up [off the street], they brought me here, they fed me, they oriented me,” said Velasco. “They helped me get all the paperwork that I needed as a Mexican citizen.”

Richard Avila is another one of the veterans who has been helped by the support house. Like many soldiers fighting the US war in Vietnam, he came home hooked on heroin. “I was taken to the back gate of Camp Pendleton and told to go on my way. So I was released into civilian life in full-blown addiction,” he said.

Numerous drug-related run-ins with the law culminated in Avila’s deportation. Now clean and sober for 16 years, Avila is angry at the country that he feels let him down. “It’s incomprehensible. It’s hard to understand. It's unimaginable that somebody that served in the military can get deported. We are Americans.”

Emiliano Arce was born in Mexico, grew up in Southern California, and enlisted in the U.S Army after dropping out of Huntington Park High shortly before graduation, under the impression he would gain citizenship. “The only thing they wanted was a soldier,” he said. “I thought it was automatic.”

He served for four years, which included being on standby in Okinawa for the invasion of Grenada in October 1983. Like Avila, Arce became hooked on drugs—in his case, crack cocaine—and was eventually deported. “The United States was my mother, and [she] kicked me out of my own house!”

Even still, he feels intense loyalty to the country that deported him. “If the flag is coming down before it hits the floor I’m going to fold it up. I would never let the American flag hit the floor.”

The Deported Veterans Support House was founded in 2013 by Hector Barajas, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division from 1996 to 1999 but was deported in 2004 after a prison sentence for shooting at an occupied vehicle. It provides immediate needs like food and shelter, as well as longer term services like psychological counseling and legal aid for veterans in their immigration cases.

After a 14-year odyssey, Barajas regained his U.S. citizenship in 2018 after then- Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned him. making Barajas one of a few deported veterans able to legally return to the United States. He now splits his time between Los Angeles and Tijuana, continuing to run the support house and help other deported vets.

The house helped find jobs for Arce, Avila and Velasco in local call centers where the pay is significantly better than manual labor, and they can utilize their fluency in both English and Spanish. It also functions as a hangout spot, where vets can swap stories, watch movies and play board games with each other.

“It's a sense of a community, a sense of identity. You can always come here and if nothing else talk to Hector,” said Avila, who has routinely visited the support house for years. “If there's other veterans here, if you've got something on your mind, you can just let it out and then you'll leave here feeling better. Whenever I come here, I always feel better.”

A Way Forward?

Exact figures on how many vets have been deported and to where are hard to come by. “The problem is that I.C.E. is not following its own internal policies to identify veterans,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Takano. The Government Accountability Office attempted to calculate exactly how many veterans had been deported, “and they couldn’t do that because I.C.E. wasn’t following its own policy.”

Barajas testified to Congress that he personally knew the support house had interacted with hundreds of deported veterans, and in 2018, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus estimated that 3,000 veterans of the U.S. military had been deported to countries across the globe. That said, the official tally from a 2019 G.A.O. report is just 92.

In 2019, Rep. Takano sponsored legislation that ultimately could help prevent the deportation of additional veterans, as well as work to bring home deported vets. The bill currently awaits a vote in Congress. “The legislative strategy we’re pursuing is to make sure there’s a way for the veteran’s service to be weighed against any deportation order,” he said.

Once a veteran is permanently expelled from the United States, their pathway to return faces many obstacles, and success is extremely rare. Helen Boyer, an attorney with Public Counsel who represents more than a dozen deported veterans worldwide who are seeking to return, works to get her clients naturalized as U.S. citizens even after their deportation. They remain eligible thanks to a special exemption written into the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

“The problem is my clients are not physically in the United States so they can’t physically attend their naturalization hearings. You would think there would be some process to handle this population of people who are eligible, but there’s no system in place for people to actually access those rights,” she said. “There’s this amazing opportunity and this amazing right that’s been given to a bunch of people, and it’s just so impossible for them to access it.”

Boyer thinks that more needs to be done even beyond the legislation proposed by Rep. Takano. “There needs to be a change in law to allow for naturalization interviews to occur at ports of entry for people who have been deported,” she said.

“My clients joined the military as a way to give back to the United States because they came here as kids and felt welcomed by their communities,” she said. “We put them into these horrible combat situations and then we just discharge them and there’s no support to help them readapt to society.”

Rep. Takano echoes those sentiments. “The bottom line is that if there's anybody who deserves a second chance, it's a veteran; somebody who served their country in uniform.”

Winning a Battle?

Mario Martinez is hoping to avoid the fate suffered by those like Velasco and Avila. The former sergeant immigrated to the U.S. at the age of four and served six years in the army during the Cold War, which included guarding the Berlin Wall in West Germany. Now living in South Gate, California, Martinez has been fighting I.C.E and deportation in various immigration courts since 2014. That is when he completed a four-year prison sentence after a drunken argument with his girlfriend led a court to convict him of domestic violence.

“I never laid a hand on her… she recanted her original statement. By the time we went to trial she was on my side. She pleaded with the judge, she wrote to Congress - nothing ever came of it. Because I took the case to trial they threw an additional three years on top of two.”

Following his release from prison, Martinez was immediately transferred to the El Centro Immigrant Detention Center, an I.C.E. facility near the border with Mexico, where he stayed for six additional months. “I don't know how they get [away with] what they do.

Speaking from experience, he added “They treat you worse than they do in prison.”

As a legal permanent resident and homeowner who supports his family through his work as an engineer, Martinez says he has “a little bit more power and control over [my circumstances] because I have a lot more people who are pulling for me,” he said.

Martinez has been in contact with the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom and personally met with Sen. Kamala Harris about obtaining a pardon that could allow him to remain in the United States, and he is confident about his prospects.

“I'm not saying I'm a poster boy, but if there was such a thing, I think I'd be pretty darn close to it. This is the type of person that they want to pardon: somebody who's got their stuff together and has got a great career, who’s got family, who’s doing well... and made positive changes in their life. That’s why I’m so positive.”

Having looked for people with similar cases, Martinez believes he is one of just a handful of veterans facing deportation who might win the right to stay in the country. His hearing, which had been scheduled for March, has been delayed until November 2020. He hopes Gov. Newsom will pardon him, as the previous governor did with Barajas in 2018.

If so, that would make him an exception.

South of the border, Velasco’s hopes for a happy reunion with the country he grew up in are fading fast. The odds that the septuagenarian spends the rest of his life in Tijuana are high.

“Don’t let me die here. They’re gonna take me back in a pine box. I want to be back before that.”

“This is not my country. I was born in this country, but it's not my country. My country is the U.S.” Velasco says. “That’s where my home is.”