THE BROKEN PROMISE: WHO AMERICA SENDS TO WAR, AND WHO IT LEAVES BEHIND
A special midday report
On the USS Abraham Lincoln, somewhere in the Arabian Sea, US Navy Aviation Ordnanceman Airman Jessica Martinez is handling the missiles and armaments of an aircraft carrier at war. She is twenty-something years old, Californian, the daughter of immigrants from Mexico. She joined the Navy in part because service would give her father the chance to apply for a protection program that could shield him from deportation while he pursued legal residency.
On the same day Jessica deployed to the Middle East, her father was deported.
Humberto Martinez was pulled over by federal agents in January and driven south across the border to Tijuana the same day. His daughter’s ship sailed east toward a war zone. His younger daughter Ana, nineteen, a student at Cal State Fullerton, was left to hold the family together alone.
“It doesn’t feel like family,” Ana told CNN. “It feels that we’ve been torn apart.”
The Martinez family had lived what the government’s own recruitment materials describe as the American military compact: a child serves, the family is protected. Jessica had decorated her high school graduation cap with American and Mexican flags and a dedication: “To my parents, who came with nothing and gave me everything.” The wall of their Huntington Beach home displayed her photos in uniform. Her father wore a Navy Dad sweatshirt.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the deportation and described Humberto as a “criminal illegal alien” — citing a 2004 DUI conviction for which he served eight days of community service, and multiple illegal re-entries after being deported following that conviction. “Under President Trump,” DHS said, “if you break the law, you will face the consequences.”
Days after the deportation, Iran fired a drone toward the Lincoln. Iran claimed it had hit the ship. US commanders denied it. Ana told CNN: “Losing my sister is my worst fear now.”
In Tijuana, Humberto told CNN what he would say to President Trump if he could. “Can he give me a chance to receive my daughter when she comes back and then we decide. I want to see my sailor, that’s all I want.”
On board the Lincoln, Jessica won a certificate for best worker. Her sister said she was not proud of it. Her father wasn’t there.
The Martinez case arrived in American media last week. It is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.
In March 2025, Army Sergeant Ayssac Correa was at his duty station outside Houston when his sister-in-law called. ICE agents were handcuffing his wife Shirly in the parking lot of the company where they both worked. Shirly Guardado had been in the United States for a decade, released by ICE to work legally, checking in regularly as required — no criminal record, a soldier’s wife, a mother of young children. They had applied for Military Parole in Place — the protection program for undocumented family members of service personnel — more than a year before her arrest. When ICE came, the application was still sitting with the agency, unanswered. On May 30, she was deported to Honduras. It was her twenty-eighth birthday. Sergeant Correa has since requested a transfer to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras to be stationed near his family.
In October 2025, Marine Steve Rios drove his parents to Camp Pendleton to visit his pregnant sister. ICE agents were waiting at the gate. Both parents were detained, then released with ankle monitors. His father Esteban was later deported. The family said his parents had no criminal record and had a pending green card application sponsored by Steve’s military service. DHS later disclosed a prior criminal charge. The discrepancy between what the family said and what the government said was never publicly resolved.
In June 2025, Narciso Barranco was arrested at his landscaping job in Santa Ana. Border Patrol agents drew pistols while he held a string trimmer. A video of the arrest spread nationally. Barranco is the father of three US-born Marines. An immigration judge dismissed his deportation case in January 2026, ruling that his sons’ military service made him eligible to apply for legal status. DHS immediately appealed, saying it would not comply with the ruling. Barranco currently stays mostly at home. He does not go out if he can avoid it.
In February 2026, Marine veteran Patrick Baja drove his wife Diana to what they both believed was her long-awaited green card interview at Citizenship and Immigration Services — they had waited six years for the appointment. Diana had entered the United States legally. She had no criminal record. She had a work permit and had been complying with all requirements. When they arrived, ICE agents were in the room. She was told she could “self-deport.” She was detained. Her case was still pending at the time of last reporting.
Also in February 2026, a woman who had been adopted from Iran as a toddler by a United States Air Force veteran — raised in the Midwest, Christian, no criminal record, no memory of Iran — received a Notice to Appear from the Department of Homeland Security. She is facing deportation to the country where her father’s service to the United States military would mark her for retaliation. Her father has died. She asked NPR not to use her name. “I fight,” she told the reporter. “I fight for my dad’s legacy and what my dad wanted for me.”
These cases share a policy architecture.
Parole in Place — the program that was supposed to protect all of them — was formalized under President Obama in 2013. Its origin was a case from 2007: Army Staff Sergeant Alex Jimenez deployed to Iraq while his wife Yaderlin faced deportation proceedings. He went missing after his unit was ambushed by insurgents. He never came home. The bipartisan outrage over the near-deportation of a missing soldier’s wife forced the Bush administration to grant her discretionary protection. The lesson was coded into policy: the United States does not deport the families of its deployed soldiers.
On February 28, 2025 — the same date that would later become the start of the Iran war, exactly one year later — the Trump administration issued a directive restricting Parole in Place applications. On April 10, 2025, ICE rescinded its longstanding policy of treating military service as a significant mitigating factor in deportation decisions. Through mid-2025, Marine Corps recruiters were still using family deportation protection as a talking point to recruit non-citizen enlistees. Congress asked when the practice stopped. No complete public answer has been provided.
In September 2025, a bipartisan group of 57 members of Congress signed a letter to the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense demanding an accounting: how many service members, veterans, and their families had been arrested, detained, or deported since January 20, 2025? The letter raised a further alarm: the personal data that military families provide when applying for Parole in Place — home addresses, physical descriptions, country of birth — may be being used by ICE as targeting information for enforcement. People who trusted the government with their data to seek protection are finding that data used against them.
Fwd.us, an immigration advocacy group, estimates up to 80,000 undocumented spouses and parents of active-duty personnel and veterans are currently living in the United States.
The same logic that governs these cases governs another population — one that lives not in California or Texas or Honduras, but in Afghanistan and its neighboring countries, waiting.
During twenty years of war, the United States employed tens of thousands of Afghan nationals as interpreters, guides, intelligence sources, logistics personnel, and cultural advisers. Without them, the war could not have been fought. Many were identified by the Taliban as collaborators. Many were threatened, beaten, or killed. Many watched colleagues die. For their service, Congress created the Special Immigrant Visa program — a formal legal promise that those who helped America could come to America.
The promise has been systematically broken across multiple administrations, and under the current one it has been largely abandoned.
As of August 2025, 178,110 Afghan nationals had received Chief of Mission approval — the formal US government determination that they qualify for an SIV — but had not yet been issued visas or permitted entry. On January 1, 2026, the State Department fully suspended Afghan SIV issuance under a presidential travel ban proclamation. On February 6, 2026, a federal court ruled that the suspension of case processing was illegal and ordered it to resume. Processing is now legally required to continue. Entry is not.
The people in those 178,110 files are approved. They are vetted. They passed every security screening the United States government required of them. They are not permitted to come.
The organization No One Left Behind, which tracks deaths of SIV applicants, counted more than 339 killings of applicants by the Taliban through late 2021 — before the full Taliban takeover — and considers that figure an undercount. The killings have continued since.
Mohammad worked for twelve years alongside American forces. He applied for his SIV. He received years of bureaucratic delays. He was killed by the Taliban in front of his ten-year-old son while he was waiting. His widow and children are still waiting.
An interpreter identified only as Omar was tortured by the Taliban for weeks because of his known work with the United States. His SIV application was denied. He believes the denial was triggered by a polygraph administered eight years earlier. “They intentionally make you a criminal,” he told CBS News. “You are only allowed to answer their questions with yes and no, and they don’t give you a chance to explain.”
Army veteran Mark Kirkendall worked with Afghan engineers for over a decade. He has been trying to get them to safety since the Taliban takeover. He has lost two of them to the Taliban. Three remain in Afghanistan. Kirkendall voted for Trump. “US policy has always been to take care of our allies,” he told NPR, “and we’re not doing a good job of that; we’re failing the Afghan people.”
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The Martinez story broke in American media last week and received significant pickup in the UK, Germany, Australia, and Canada — countries that also deployed forces to Afghanistan and Iraq, and whose own citizens’ decisions to trust American military promises were made on the same implicit basis. The Guardian ran the story under the frame of what it reveals about the gap between American military recruitment and American military conduct. The Afghan SIV failure has been covered for years in European and Australian press as a question of Western credibility — when America abandons its interpreters, every country that contributed forces to American-led operations absorbs a share of that betrayal. Germany, which had its own interpreter corps in Afghanistan, has faced its own version of the same accountability question.
The international framing of these stories is consistent: this is not an immigration debate. It is a question about the value of American promises during wartime — to the soldiers it sends, to the families of those soldiers, and to the foreign nationals who trusted their lives to American words. That question is being watched most closely in the capitals of countries currently deciding whether American security commitments are worth anything.
🇺🇸 WHAT AMERICAN READERS NEED TO KNOW: Jessica Martinez is at war for the United States right now. Her ship is in the Arabian Sea. She works on the weapons of an aircraft carrier. Her father is in Tijuana. The program that was supposed to protect him was dismantled. The recruiter who told her family that service would help him may still be telling other families the same thing.
Forty-seven thousand Afghan allies have been killed, abandoned, or left in limbo by the SIV program’s failures over twenty-five years. One hundred seventy-eight thousand have been formally approved and are waiting while the system that would bring them here has been shut down by executive order.
The United States is currently asking Pakistan, Turkey, Oman, Egypt, and Qatar to stake their diplomatic credibility on brokering a deal with Iran. It is asking those countries to trust American commitments. It is asking Iran to trust American commitments. The rest of the world is watching what American commitments are worth. The answer is visible in Tijuana, in Honduras, in Kabul, and in whatever third country Mohammad’s widow is currently living in.
Sources: CNN (US — Martinez family reporting, Ed Lavandera, March 19, 2026; Correa/Guardado case); The War Horse (US, independent military journalism — Guardado deportation, Correa case, Barranco case, Alejandra Juarez case, military PIP architecture); NPR (US — Barranco case, Afghan SIV suspension, Kirkendall interview, Iranian adoptee case); Military.com (US — Rios case, DHS criminal record statement, Barranco immigration judge ruling); Task & Purpose (US — Barranco ruling details); PBS NewsHour (US — Patrick Baja/Diana case, marine veteran); International Refugee Assistance Project (independent — Mohammad case, SIV legal challenges, 178,110 figure); AfghanEvac.org (independent advocacy — SIV current state explainer, January 1 2026 suspension, February 6 court ruling); State Department (primary — January 1, 2026 SIV suspension notice); CBS News (US — Omar interpreter case); No One Left Behind (independent — 339+ killed figure); Congressional letter to DHS/DOD, September 2025 (primary — 57 signatories, Kelly, Warren, Duckworth, Durbin, Padilla); Fwd.us (advocacy — 80,000 estimate); NOTUS (US — Guardado case, PIP termination, Margaret Stock quotes)