Seeking citizenship from a warzoneHernandez has spent most of his life in the US. He was brought across the border by his mother as a baby. He now has three children, all US citizens.As of 2022, nearly 731,000 military veterans like Hernandez were immigrants. They comprise roughly 4.5 percent of the US’s veteran population.For decades, faced with declining enlistment numbers, the US military has depended on immigrants to serve alongside its US-born citizens. Most have citizenship, too — but an estimated 118,000 immigrant veterans do not. Hernandez is one of them.Like many other veterans struggling to reintegrate into society after their military service, Hernandez struggled to find his place in the civilian world.He was jailed on illegal gun charges shortly after returning from his deployment. When he was released a few weeks later, he found he had been evicted from his apartment, and all his possessions, including military memorabilia, had been confiscated.“I came out with nothing,” he told Al Jazeera. With few options left, he became involved in selling drugs, which led him to be in and out of prison on multiple convictions.Without US citizenship — and especially with convictions on his record — the threat of deportation now hangs over him.His experience is not an outlier. Roughly a third of veterans are arrested at l …
