VOCES: “American Exile” (Latino Public Television, WKAR, PBS-TV, aired November 16, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Black Watch Charles and I watched a quite compelling program on PBS: American Exile, an episode in the VOCES series about Latinos in America (I shall never call them by that hideous, offensive appellation “Latinx”!) about how long-term U.S. residents who served in the U.S. military but were not born in the United States – many of them what today would be called “Dreamers,” people brought into the country without documentation by their parents while they were still children – have been targeted for deportation and sent back to their ostensible “home” countries where they have never lived as adults and know little or nothing of the national culture. I’d heard some reports on this issue and jumped at the chance to see a program that promised an in-depth view of it. Produced under the auspices of WKAR, a public television statement headquartered at the University of Michigan – though the footage ranged from Colorado Springs, Colorado to the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The show’s focus is on three U.S. veterans, brothers Manuel and Valente Valenzuela, who came to the U.S. as children and served in the Viet Nam war (Valente was involved in the infamous “Phoenix Program” in which, under the direction of the CIA, Viet Namese peasants were captured and systematically tortured to death on suspicion of being associated with the Viet Cong), received military honors and honorable discharges, and thought they’d earned the permanent right to stay in the U.S. in exchange for their service.

Then, in 1996, a Republican-controlled Congress passed, and Democratic President Bill Clinton signed (just in case you think “bipartisanship” is always a good thing), a new immigration law that allowed the deportation of U.S. veterans who’d been born overseas and vastly expanded the list of crimes for which they could be deported and permanently excluded from the U.S. Many of these crimes were simple misdemeanors ranging from public drunkenness to possession of marijuana and low-level assaults – crimes many veterans commit as a result of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Valenzuelas both had minor arrest records of this type and had paid their fines, served their probations and thought they had paid their debt to society and been done with it. Then that 1996 law kicked in and U.S. immigration authorities went through America’s criminal record databases looking for people who had broken some of the laws listed in the new bill and targeting them for deportation. Some of them, including the Valenzuelas, hired attorneys and fought back against the deportation orders, while spending literally years living in fear that some day there would be a knock on the door at 3 a.m. or a van pulling up beside them on the street to spirit them away and back “home” to Mexico or wherever they nominally came from. The show included clips of news coverage of some of these cases on both CNN and Fox – and, predictably, the Fox hosts were screaming epithets like, “They committed a crime just by being here illegally!”

The Valenzuelas were the principal focus of the show, but in some ways the third victim of a threatened deportation had an even more tragic story. His name was Zahid Chaudhry and he was an immigrant from Pakistan who came over legally on a student visa and then overstayed it. He married an American woman, Ann, and thought that would enable him to become a U.S. citizen. He also worked as a volunteer firefighter and then joined the military – only his career was short-lived since during a training exercise, he collapsed and the other U.S. military trainees literally trampled over him, putting him pernanemtly in a wheelchair. According to https://keepzahidhome.org, a Web site opened to support him, he was denied his “Earned, Qualified, Expedited Military N-400 application” for U.S. citizenship in 2019, a full six years after he had filed it, and his only hope lay in an application to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. As for the Valenzuelas, Miguel and Valente had very different. Miguel bought a van and had it decorated with slogans and drawings illustrating his plight and demanding that he be allowed to remain in the U.S., and be given American citizenship – indeed, in the show he proudly displays the ballot he received to vote in an election (Colorado is a state that conducts its elections entirely by mail) as proof that the Colorado state government, at least, already considers him an American citizen. He determined to drive the 2,000 miles between Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C. to raise public awareness of the issue and present his demand for citizenship status and relief from deportation directly to then-President Donald Trump. Just what the response to Miguel’s appeal was is not shown here, but he did get chances to appear on local media and express his belief that no one who servied the U.S. by joining its military and fighting in its wars should be forced to leave it.

Valente, on the other hand, ultimately decided to “self-deport,” choosing to cross the border back into Mexico at the same small town where his parents had crossed with him and Manuel over 50 years before. In one of the film’s most heart-rending scenes, he is shown throwing his military service medals into the Rio Grande. He ultimately settles into his new life in Chihuahua, writing a book about his service in Viet Nam and his struggle with the U.S. government over his immigration status, and it’s emblematic of his separation from the U.S. and everything connected with it that he wrote the book in Spanish. He also married a Mexican woman and settled down with her – there’s a funny scene in which he has trouble fitting into his old U.S. service uniform and we wonder if the excellent meals we’ve earlier seen his wife cooking for him have had anything to do with that. The show has an at least temporarily happy ending – an announcement that on July 2, 2021 President Joseph Biden issued an executive order stopping all deportations of U.S. veterans and announcing at least some sort of program to allow already deported vets to return to the U.S. – but as with so many of the wrongs Biden has tried to make right, it could easily be undone by a future President and the penalization of immigrants for serving the U.S. could start all over again at any time.