Trump’s ICE crackdown is hurting America’s armed forces 

Immigrants and the children of immigrants are a crucial source of personnel for the U.S. military. Given events in the Middle East, this is an odd time to go out of the way to alienate them, but that is what the White House, congressional Republicans and Republican governors and legislators in numerous states seem intent on doing. 

Although it goes largely unrecognized, every heavily immigrant high school graduating class is a windfall for the U.S. Armed Forces. Many in this cohort enlist. They are often of high caliber — many children from immigrant families who would make strong college students join the military instead for the economic opportunity. A 2020 Department of Defense poll found that paying for education was second only to income as motivation for enlisting.  

A 2021 poll found that one struggle the department faces in getting young people to enlist is their “dislike of military lifestyle.” The challenging childhoods that kids from immigrant families often face — low standards of living, cutting lawns with dad every Saturday, or helping raise younger siblings, being responsible for helping their families in a way most modern American youth are not — prepare them well for the discipline, privations and self-sacrifice required of servicemembers.

I teach seniors. As I watch my students enlist, I sometimes wonder what their lives would be like had they been born into more fortunate circumstances. For a teacher, it comes as a surprise to see the long-haired, disorganized student with unusual perspectives cut his hair short and serve on a guided missile submarine in the Pacific.

One smart kid in my class from a disintegrated family, who enlisted to get himself out of a bad situation, was sent to Pearl Harbor. He is tall and good looking — in college, he would have been a determined, successful student and probably a girl-magnet. He proudly told me how he quickly became a Marine Air Ground Task Force Planning Specialist. I wasn’t surprised.

The class clown, whose English teacher once told me needed “his own blast radius around him,” is now an interior communications electrician on a ship that shot down Iranian missiles headed for Israel during the 12-Day War. I cannot but help think he would have enjoyed challenging his university professors. 

The same is true of the smart but distracted kid I occasionally shot with a squirt gun to make him pay attention. He later good-naturedly sent me a picture of himself cradling an M16 as a military policeman in Kuwait.

A greatly disproportionate number of my former students join the Marines; I sometimes kid them that if they all came home on leave at the same time, we could probably conquer a Pacific island. Comedian Josh Francis, a Marine veteran, recently joked, “Everybody is Mexican in the Marines. … In my squad of 14 people, we had three Hernandezes.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids alienate these enlistees. Just think: While they are thousands of miles away, they worry that at any moment officers could arrest undocumented family members and steal them away. Some enlisted specifically because their military service can afford them the opportunity to help family members eventually become legal permanent residents.

Republicans are now trying to undermine the Plyler v. Doe decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to refuse children public education based on their immigration status. In a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said, “It’s time for it to go,” calling Plyler “constitutionally indefensible.”  

White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller is pushing Texas Republicans to end public school funding for undocumented students, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agrees. Over the past year, legislators in Texas, as well as in Oklahoma, Idaho, Indiana and New Jersey, have pursued measures contesting Plyler.

This campaign is predicated on drawing a clear distinction between legal and illegal immigrants — yet within many immigrant families, this distinction simply does not exist. Immigrant youth are often a mix of those who are citizens or are here legally under other provisions, and their siblings and cousins who aren’t. I have had students who are only a year apart who are nonetheless divided, one sibling being a citizen and the other here illegally.  

The class clown’s mother was just two when her parents came to the U.S., fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War. She is now 44 with no legal right to be here. He speaks with her from his deployment in the Mediterranean. She tells him she doesn’t go to the grocery store any more for fear of ICE.  

He’s angry. “Imagine serving a country your own family has to hide from,” he says. 

Glenn Sacks teaches government and economics at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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