By Andrew Cohen
The bureaucratic hurdles are sometimes vast, often complex, and consistently maddening. Even so, students in Berkeley Law’s Veterans Law Practicum remain committed to clearing a path for deported military veterans to access medical care, disability benefits, and other life-changing services.
The practicum’s new report details how former service members face myriad barriers to gaining these benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), highlights key trouble spots, and describes the hardships many deported veterans face. Joe St. Clair ’23 and classmate Matthew Sardo joined 3Ls Athena Arana, Mike Ebeling, Eric Provost, and Eric Wright, and 2Ls Addie Gilson, Evan Jester, Nicole Leon-Elvir, and Caity Lynch in developing the report.
“Buried in these bureaucratic processes are life-altering consequences for a literally uncountable number of deported veterans, because much of it isn’t tracked,” Lynch says. “Like many, I’ve struggled to navigate military and VA processes to obtain vital support like health care. So I understand the life-changing potential of veterans’ benefits, as well as some of the barriers to access.”
Humanitarian parole and the VA’s Foreign Medical Program present vexing roadblocks, the report explains. While the former allows veterans to reenter the U.S. temporarily to gain VA health care services, applications are regularly rejected and travel costs form another deterrent.
The Foreign Medical Program offers veterans health care services overseas, but only covers treatment for disabilities the VA deems “service-connected.” Often, deportation occurs before veterans finish their disability compensation applications.
“The only way many deported veterans can return to the U.S. is in a box for a military burial. Not when they and their families plead for the VA health care they need to survive. This is unconscionable,” says practicum Director Rose Carmen Goldberg, who oversaw the report. “I’m incredibly proud of the practicum students’ hard work tackling the intersecting military, veterans, criminal, and immigration law issues at the root of this tragedy — and for devising creative solutions.”
Clarifying the landscape
The report makes clear that all veterans have a right to unfettered access to VA benefits, no matter their immigration status. While lawful permanent residents are eligible to enlist in military service — and are entitled to an expedited naturalization process in return — many still leave the military without citizenship.
“If these veterans subsequently come into contact with the criminal legal system, as often occurs when service traumas result in criminalized behavior, they are at high risk of deportation,” the report notes. “The United States has deported thousands of veterans, and this practice is ongoing. Among those exiled are combat veterans and individuals who served honorably in every branch of the military; many bear the scars, both physical and psychological, of their service.”
Obtaining disability benefits for an injury that occurred during military service generally requires medical evidence of the condition, submitting documentation to and extensive communication with the VA, getting evaluated by a VA-selected clinician, and sometimes an adjudicative hearing. These requirements are often too burdensome for deported veterans to overcome.
The report urges changes that include bolstering the VA Foreign Medical Program’s ability to provide health care outside the U.S., simplifying the process to seek disability compensation, giving deported veterans access to remedies for “bad paper” discharges that block access to VA health care and benefits, having the U.S. State Department help facilitate health care access and benefits overseas, and removing obstacles to humanitarian parole.
“I believe that improving the treatment of veterans is a goal shared across the political spectrum, and immigrant veterans are an absolutely crucial part of that group,” Provost says. “The facilities and funds exist to ensure that immigrant veterans and service members have greater access to naturalization. The Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the VA just need to make it a priority.”
After dividing key topics to focus on, the students interviewed current and former deported veterans. Leon-Elvir researched countries that veterans were deported to and those countries’ social, economic, and political conditions, highlighting how many veterans face an array of challenging experiences when removed from the U.S.
“Raising awareness of how their military status exacerbates that was necessary,” Leon-Elvir says. “It was incredibly eye-opening to see how their military background makes them targets in many countries facing political turmoil or corruption. Many veterans were targeted and coerced to train gangs or cartels in order to protect their family, simply because these political groups knew of their military background.”
A vested interest
Many of the students brought meaningful experience and knowledge to the project. Provost served as a Navy submarine officer for eight years, Lynch is a former Army Reserve officer and Afghanistan veteran, and Leon-Elvir is the daughter of immigrants and has a military spouse on active duty. Each is involved in either Military and Veterans at Berkeley Law, the school group Legal Obstacles Veterans Encounter (aka LOVE), or both.
“I thought it would be a good way to merge my identities and help veterans who have literally fought for this country and are being deported to countries they don’t view as their home,” says Leon-Elvir, who has seen the direct impact of deportation on her family.
“The most difficult part was connecting with some of these veterans. Oftentimes, due to the nature of their living situation while deported, their ability to communicate was limited. This made scheduling and conducting interviews an arduous process, but I’m proud of my team for their commitment to hearing as many veterans’ stories as possible in the year-plus that we worked on this report.”
Provost relished both the chance to speak with deported veterans about their stories and the appreciation they conveyed for publicizing their plight. “Each of the veterans with whom I spoke was immensely grateful for our advocacy efforts,” he says.
President Joe Biden has called for passage of the Veteran Service Recognition Act, which in part would generate data regarding the number of veterans deported from the U.S. and strengthen the naturalization process for service members. The House passed the bill in 2022 and reintroduced it last year, but the Senate has not yet voted on it.
While achieving substantive reform remains an uphill climb, Lynch says the practicum’s efforts have helped to develop critical legal skills, important insights, and hope for meaningful change.
“The practicum taught me how these systems and barriers interact with other areas of law, including immigration,” Lynch says. “I am so grateful to Professor Goldberg for teaching us how to break down enormous problems into the manageable steps that led to this report.”