Deported veterans part one
Mexican soldier, American corpse
Manuel de Jesus Castano wasn’t welcome in the United States. But his body was.
Dedicated to Olga Contreras
We sit at a round table in the cool of a house with wood floors and a wide living room scattered with dog crates, and behind the crates sliding glass doors open to a back yard patchy with grass and dusty from the play of dogs and the oven-heat of El Paso.
Clavo Martinez and his wife, Rosemary, live here. They operated an animal shelter some years ago and took 100 pit bulls off the street. They even found themselves rescuing lizards and ferrets. At that point, they decided running an animal shelter was a bit too overwhelming and shut it down. But they kept 11 dogs that were too damaged to adopt out, among them a Red Heeler that had been hit by a car and a Chihuahua with liver problems.
“Man or animal,” Clavo says, “you shouldn’t die alone.”
Clavo is 50-years-old and a large man with the rolling, graceful gait of a bear. Here in the kitchen, he folds his arms across his chest and leans back, consuming the chair. He adjusts his glasses and runs a big hand through his black hair. Despite his size, he has a soft voice that grows sharp when he speaks passionately. From an envelope, he pulls out a photograph of a young man in an Army uniform. The man has thick black hair, heavy eyebrows and a heavy black mustache. His gaze strays toward his left shoulder. An American flag hangs behind him.
“This is him?” I ask.
“This is him?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’s Manuel de Jesus Castano,” Clavo says.
I consider the photo. Castano was an army soldier and a deported vet. He passed away in Mexico but because he was honorably discharged he remained eligible for benefits, including burial with full military honors. After he died, his family received a certificate from President George W. Bush commemorating Castano’s “selfless consecration to the service of our country in the Armed Forces of the United States.” The Texas State Senate issued a proclamation in which it called Castano a man of “courage, strength and compassion.” The senate extended “sincere condolences to the bereaved family of Manuel De Jesus Castano.”
I heard about Castano from Hector Barajas in Tijuana, a deported army veteran, who I first interviewed in 2014. He administers a shelter for deported veterans. Barajas told me to contact Clavo to learn the specifics of Castano’s life and death. I did, and a few weeks after we spoke by phone I drove to El Paso.“The day I got the call about him it was May 2012 and I was was driving toward UTEP,” Clavo continues, referring to the University of Texas in El Paso.
He had an appointment with his adviser. He had just turned his car onto Montana Avenue when his cell phone rang. One of those typical southwest Texas mornings. The cool of the desert was fast ratcheting up into a hard heat. Neighborhoods buzzed with the steady hum of air conditioning units, and cars in the distance appeared elevated on wavy heat lines.
The man on the phone introduced himself: Luis Ortiz. He sounded frantic and spoke quickly, Clavo recalls. Luis’ uncle was Manuel de Jesus Castano, who had died in a Juarez hospital just across the border from El Paso. Just as I had, Luis had gotten Clavo’s name from Barajas, whom he had found on the internet.
Clavo had become involved with deported vets only a few years earlier. One day, Rosemary happened across Barajas’ Facebook page full of stories about deported vets. Have you heard of this? she asked Clavo.
“Veterans can be deported?” Clavo said.
“They are being deported,” Rosemary said.
Deportations of undocumented immigrants rose dramatically in the 1990s. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act signed by President Bill Clinton greatly increased the classification of crimes that allow for the removal of immigrants, including veterans. To the surprise of the deported veterans I’ve spoken to, their military service had not granted them citizenship. Immigrant veterans can be deported for a period of years or for life depending on the severity of their crime.
Today, almost any offense that results in a sentence of more than a year in prison can meet the definition of an “aggravated felony” and lead to deportation. The act does not permit any discretion on the part of immigration judges, who may not take into account a defendant’s military service or any other mitigating circumstances once they have been convicted of an aggravated felony. The act can be invoked against an individual at any time, even years after they have been released from prison. Complicating matters further, non-citizens do not have a constitutional right to a lawyer.
In 1988, when the term “aggravated felonies” was first established, it referred to murder and trafficking of drugs and firearms. Since the enactment of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, however, along with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments across the country, the definition has broadened to include less severe crimes such as theft and failure to report a change of address — offenses that can lead to deportation even if they were not considered an aggravated felony at the time they were committed.
Clavo was a vet himself. Desert Storm. Gung-ho patriotic. He continued saluting the flag after he returned home. Put his hand on his chest to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the whole bit. He was proud of his service, proud of his country. What do they say in the Army? Don’t ask questions, do. There was probably something else going on with these deported vets that he didn’t know about, Clavo thought. The government would not just deport them.
Two years later, in 2011, Clavo, an engineer with BNSF Railway, had a head-on collision with another train after its engineer moved it onto the track Clavo was using. Clavo saw its headlight. He jumped out before the trains collided and blew out his right knee in the fall. Laid up, off work with a disability claim, Clavo had time on his hands. He did a lot of reading on the internet, much of it critical of the U.S. and its use of military power. It got Clavo thinking: Why do we go to war? What are soldiers dying for? What was the real purpose of Desert Storm?
He followed Rosemary’s lead and began reading Facebook posts on deported vets. They do a stretch in prison and then are put out on the streets in a country they haven’t seen since they were kids? Wasn’t that punishing them twice? And they’re doing this to vets? How could he be proud of his service when this was happening to vets? He and Rosemary began messaging Barajas to learn more.
Despite their communication, Clavo never fully grasped that veterans could be deported until Luis called him and he was confronted with one family’s loss. Luis told him, etc.
Luis said Castano had been sick. Doctors had given him blood transfusions, but nothing worked and he died. His family wanted to bring his body home.
“What kind of funds do you have?” Clavo asked.
Very little, Luis told him. The family was pulling together what money they could, but Luis worried it would not be enough.
Clavo heard the distress in Luis’ voice. All the pressure he was feeling taking on this task for his family. The oldest nephew. The man accepting responsibility without knowing what to do.
Clavo did not know what he could do to help, either, but said he’d talk at the American G.I. Forum that night. The AGIF is the nation’s largest Hispanic veterans’ organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. Clavo promised to call Luis afterward.
The highway from Clavo’s house to the home of Luis Ortiz veins its way through the desert, past outposts of mini malls and gas stations and incomplete housing developments, dead ending into barren expanses of scrub brush and sand.
Luis leads me into his living room, and we sit at a table. He is 39 but looks younger. He seems a little uncertain about his uncle, a little self-conscious discussing him, aware, I’m sure, of some of the unsavory details of his life. He tells me he never saw his Uncle Manny in his Army uniform. But his uncle had told him he had traveled the world. Military service was in the family’s blood. Luis is in the Army. Three of his four uncles had joined the military and four of his cousins. One uncle was wounded in Desert Storm. He lives alone and doesn’t talk to the rest of the family much. All of his uncles were citizens.
The Castanos had been a family of migrant workers. Luis shows me brown, grainy photos of them in the fields, squinting before the camera, adults in straw hats with children huddling beside them. Everyone holds a hoe, and a farm field divided into rows of what looks like cabbage stretches far behind them.
Before suburban sprawl consumed El Paso, you could pick jalapeños and watermelon right outside the city, Luis says. The family would get together at his grandparents’ house in Asherton, Texas, and work the fields around Del Rio and Lubbock. As a kid, Luis would hand out water and burritos to the adults out picking. They’d start at 3 a.m. and stay out late. Uncle Manny worked hard. He loved Tejano music and played it loud.
Castano, Luis recalls, left the Army in 1984 and returned to El Paso, where most of the family lived. His service had not granted him citizenship. Years of wandering followed. He was picked up for domestic violence and public intoxication. After he was deported, he often called Luis’ mother, Maria Gonzalez, from Juarez and asked for clothes. Castano had a Facebook account and would send Luis short messages. He’d talk about the Dallas Cowboys and his son Victor, a Marine in Afghanistan. He told Luis a lot of deported vets lived in Juarez.
What’s up mijo how are you doing…when are you coming to Juarez?
Did you watch the Superbowl mijo?
Doing OK, mijo. . . you know how it is in Juarez….but things are looking good for us to come back. . . legally…we have a group that is fighting for us to repeal the law for veterans that were deported…so that is good news…
Luis is an Army supply sergeant. “I’m the one they come to and ask for stuff, and I say no to everyone,” he says. A 21-year-old man from Lebanon works for him. The man has his residency card. When he was in basic training, no one helped him get his citizenship. He has a computer degree. He’s a good kid. Luis helped him apply for citizenship. Luis has friends in the military from Peru, the Dominican Republic. They are all legal residents. He has seen how they’ve been treated. How some of the guys put them down, give them the short end of the stick. KP duty. They didn’t join to do that. Once the Lebanese kid passes his citizenship test, he’ll take the oath in front of the whole command. Luis will think of his Uncle Manuel on that day. Manuel should have been allowed to take the oath, too. He wore the same uniform as everyone else.
About 60, maybe 70 vets gathered in a downtown restaurant for the American G.I. Forum. At the end of the hour-long meeting, the facilitator asked if anyone had any questions. Clavo stood. He described the phone call he had received from Luis. He said the family was looking for help to bring Castano’s body home.
One guy said he would speak to him later.
“Can anyone else help?”
Silence. The meeting adjourned. A few vets walked past Clavo and muttered, “Sorry man.” The guy who said he’d talk to Clavo after the meeting said he ran a homeless shelter. He asked Clavo to refer people to him. Clavo looked at him. What has that got to do with anything? he wondered. Another vet told him that to bring Castano back would involve too much bureaucracy. The Forum can’t take that on, he said.
Clavo stood alone in the restaurant. No one had stepped up. He couldn’t believe it. Not even for a fellow vet. Thank you for your help, he said to himself sarcastically. Well, he wasn’t going to quit on Castano. He couldn’t say, OK, bye. But he also didn’t know what else to do.
Clavo told his friend Luis Sarellano, a Vietnam vet, about Castano. Sarellano listened, clasped his hands behind his head, his thinning gray hair tied off in a ponytail. He thought it was crazy, a veteran being deported. Everyone makes mistakes. Some like Castano end up in the justice system. That should not be a reason to be deported, Sarellano said. He thought if you served the country, at the very least you should be considered a citizen.
Sarellano, 69, was born in Mexico. He came to the States as an infant. His parents took him to farm fields in California to pick cherries. The work could be dangerous. The simplest, most ridiculous things that he would laugh about later could get you hurt. One time when he was 12, he was up on a ladder holding a tree branch, and the ladder wobbled and slid out from under him. He landed on a branch feet first and it held him long enough to break his fall. He doesn’t know how high up he was. High enough.
In 1967, Sarellano became a citizen and joined the Navy as a corpsman at the height of the Vietnam War. He chose the Navy because he thought he would be safe aboard a ship most of the time. He didn’t know the Marines were part of the Navy and that the Navy provided the medical staff to the Marines in the field.
His command suffered 50 casualties the first time he saw combat. “I’m going,” one Marine told Luis. “I’m not staying.” Six weeks later, the guy shot out his right knee with a pistol. He spent 10 months in a hospital. It pissed Sarellano off that this guy didn’t have to go through the crap he went through. He had a duty just like Luis. He had made a commitment. He had signed an oath to, well, these days, Sarellano is not sure to whom, but he signed it. Then he got out of it. Sarellano didn’t. He stayed. He was in Vietnam to do a job and ask questions later and that’s what he did. He returned to the States only when he finished his deployment.
But at the time he didn’t know he would come back. He didn’t know how long he would live one second to the next. Friends would get killed so often that Sarellano stopped making friends. What was the point? They’d be gone tomorrow. Forty years later he still sees the bodies. He doesn’t need photos to remember. He still hears the things he and his fellow soldiers said about dead Vietnamese. The jokes. He feels disgust with himself, the crass comments he made. The Vietnamese had been fellow soldiers. They were brothers. He wonders sometimes how he still sleeps at night.
Two of his sons served in the military: the Air Force and Navy. One of them has post-traumatic stress disorder, as does Sarellano. A son-in-law joined the Army. If he could go back in time, Sarellano would tell them all, don’t enlist. Don’t do the dirty work of other people. Immigrants do enough of that already. Sarellano’s whole family busted their backs since they were old enough to put pants on. He imagines Castano’s family was no different.
Why deport the guy? he told Clavo. A man joins the military when he is young, giving the country some of the best years of his life. He deserves to be a citizen. Imagine a guy fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan and then being sent back to where he was born.
“It’s unfair,” Sarellano said.
Maria Gonzalez, 60, Manuel Castano’s older sister and the mother of Luis Ortiz, remembers Manuel as funny and outgoing. Her eyes tear up as she recalls her brother. She sits at a kitchen table and sometimes stares into space, a reflective pout on her face. Castano was three years her junior, she says. He loved to make jokes. He would scare his three sisters with stories of spiders hanging over their beds. He liked school. He attended Asherton High School and graduated.
Their father worked on a Texas ranch. Every time he came to visit them in Mexico, Maria’s mother joked, he left her pregnant. When Maria was in the fifth grade, their father brought the family to Texas. Manny must have been in first or second grade then, she says. She remembers crossing the bridge into Laredo all dressed up. Laredo was small and nice. Her mother held her head up, a wide grin on her face. An agent took their fingerprints and gave her mother a paper that he said to keep until they received their permanent resident cards.
Her mother always took care of them. She worked so hard. She went house to house giving immunization shots for a clinic. She did a lot of sewing and knitting, too. Her father worked just as hard. He never cussed. He was a very quiet person but strict in his way. If he wanted the children to quiet down, he would make a tsk, tsk, sound and that was it, no more noise. He spoke in a soft whisper. Their mother was the exact opposite. She would shout at the kids. Shout at her husband, too.
As kids, the Castano children worked in the fields. Manuel would cheat a lot, Maria says. They’d work in a line with hoes and he’d move to the head of the line to get out of work early. Once he chugged a Coke too fast in the heat and passed out. Their grandmother made tortillas at three in the morning. Their father picked them up at high school with a big basket of burritos and drove to the fields. When the children weren’t in school, the family moved around. They hand-planted carrots in Colorado, cotton in Nebraska and onions, pickles and okra in Florida and Texas.
After high school, Manny enrolled in Southwest Texas College in Uvalde. He majored in business administration but wasn’t doing very well. He saw his two brothers enlist in the Army. Looking at them, Maria thought, made him decide he should also enlist. To this day, Maria thrills at the sight of photographs of her brothers in uniform. The way they look. So handsome. So full of strength and authority. She felt excitement when Manuel enlisted. She was so young. Seeing her three brothers in uniform. It was something. She can’t put it into words what she felt. Something very special.
Castano’s DD214 shows that he served in the Army from 1980 to 1984. He enlisted in San Antonio and attained the rank of Specialist 4th grade. His last duty assignment was in Europe with the 574th Battalion. He received an Army Service ribbon, overseas service ribbon, good conduct medal, sharp shooter badge with M-16 and an Army achievement medal. He accrued 58 days of paid leave. He separated from the Army at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
Clavo joined the Army Reserve in 1988. He wasn’t cutting it financially as a student at New Mexico State University and needed the extra money to complete his degree. His younger brother warned him not to sign-up. You know, he said, the U.S. enters a conflict about every 10 years.
“Nothing will happen to me,” Clavo said. “I’m just doing my eight years.”
Two years after he enlisted, Clavo visited his parents in Roswell, New Mexico. While he was there, news broke that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Clavo didn’t think much of it. He was in the Reserves. He wasn’t going anywhere. Then on a Saturday morning, three days before Thanksgiving, Clavo’s phone rang in his dorm room. A Sgt. Rodriguez shouted at him over the line, We have a roaring bull alert. Pack your bags and be at the reserve center at 0600. Roaring bull alert? Clavo thought. Just another exercise, right? But in the back of his mind, Clavo was not so sure. Exercise or not, roaring anything meant you’re close to being activated.
Clavo spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in Saudi Arabia. The first days on the ground were the worst, with several incidents of friendly fire. Then Scud missiles hit 200 yards from his post. Alarms warning of gas attacks went off 24–7. Everyone was afraid to take their masks off to eat, sleep, do anything. One guy finally had enough. Fuck this, he said, and took his mask off to eat a granola bar. Hey, I’m still here, he said.
Clavo waited for shit to happen. He listened to the explosions of Scud missiles, Patriot missiles. Boom, boom, boom, night and day. Stealth fighters roaring overhead. He would be awake for 72 hours straight. The only thing that held his unit together was that all of them, except for two white guys, were Chicano. We’re Chicanos, too, the white guys said. La raza. Brown and white, all in the same fucking boat. They watched flashes of light shake the ground, the horizon orange, everything burning.
Clavo returned home in May 1991, married and moved to El Paso, where Rosemary was from. He was drinking, passing out. He had nerve problems in his hands from exposure to sarin and hauling depleted uranium rounds. In 1997, he was diagnosed with PTSD, but the VA did not tell him he could file a disability claim until years later. He continued drinking. The job at the railroad didn’t help. The noise of the trains, the smell of diesel took him back to Iraq.
Through good times and bad, no matter whether he was angry or sad, Rosemary stood by him. Had he been undocumented and deported to Mexico with PTSD without Rosemary, without any support of any kind, what would have happened to him?
“They stripped Castano of everything,” he says.
One afternoon, Clavo and Rosemary drive me into Juarez to meet deported Navy veteran Juan Valadez at La Nueva Central, a restaurant. Valadez and Clavo are about the same size. Waitresses rush back and forth in a losing effort to keep up with the numbers of people coming in. Ceiling fans whir, and the din overwhelms the music playing from hidden speakers. Together they squeeze into a booth and laugh as they jostle their bulk in the limited space.
I sit across from Valadez. He has short, dark hair and a well-trimmed beard. He wears a T-shirt with “Texas” emblazoned across the front. He tells me he came to Mexico two years before Castano. Valadez had been busted as an accomplice in a scheme to transport 1,000 pounds of pot across state lines. He was out of work at the time, and a friend offered to pay him to drive another friend from Dallas to Columbus, Ohio. That was it. Simple. The guy he was to drop off would then be on his way in another car. Valadez knew what he was getting into wasn’t legal, but he needed the money. He didn’t ask questions.
He served a 28-month prison sentence in Ohio. Then he was transferred to immigration lockup in Seneca County for six months before he was deported to his birthplace, Juarez, in December 2009. His parents had brought him to the States when he was 11. He had a green card. It never crossed his mind he could be deported.
Valadez met Castano through Barajas’ deported vets page on Facebook. He “followed” the page and soon began reading messages from vets seeking advice for a range of subjects ranging from housing to medical care. They also posted notes about newly deported vets. In August 2011, he read that Castano had been removed to Juarez. Valadez contacted him:
8:43 p.m., Aug. 2, 2011Juan Valadez
Hey I’m also a deported veteran, I’m also living in Juarez, what part of the city are you at?Manuel Castano
Over on the Colonia Anahuac…and you?Juan Valadez
I live by Plaza Juarez, Im working at ACS, but the truth thats the worst job I’ve ever had in my life, theres a couple more deported vets working there also.
He was depressed, Valadez recalls of Castano. At that time, he couldn’t find a job. He had applied at construction sites, but the foremen weren’t hiring. It didn’t help Castano was 54. Age discrimination exists in Mexico, too, Valadez says.
Castano told Valadez he had been deported over a drug case. He did not go into specifics and Valadez did not ask. As far as he was concerned, all deported vets had messed up. But they had done their time. No need to dwell on past mistakes.
Castano, Valadez thought at the time, was desperate. He didn’t have any money. He said he needed to go to the VA but didn’t say why. He was thinking of just crossing back over to the U.S. and getting arrested and locked up again. Better than starving in Juarez, he told Valadez. He was renting a small room by a market that sold electric appliances. He had only a pair of jeans and two shirts. Valadez offered him some old clothes that were still in El Paso, but by the time Valadez received the clothes, Castano had died.
I’m tired of this place, Castano wrote to Valadez on Facebook. Is there a lot of vet’s where you work at…maybe we can get something going to where they can send us some clothes, i have been here 4 months, and i’m struggling, this computer is thanks to a friend of mine that also got deported…..so let’s see what happens.
What stands out to Valadez was the tough time Castano had adjusting to Mexico. You get here, you have no money, no car, he says. Castano had an ’83 Volvo, but it broke down. Valadez tried to get him work at a call center that had hired him. Castano applied and aced the typing and English tests, but the center was laying people off. Castano told the call center he had medical issues. Fifty-four years old with medical issues. He didn’t get the job.
It had been hard for Valadez, too, in the beginning. His family supported him. At first he had stayed in an uncle’s house. He got a call center job right away. He didn’t have it as tough as Castano. He started a sushi stand in April 2012. There were already a lot of taco and hamburger joints but no sushi. He got enough business that he opened a restaurant.
With the earnings from his restaurant, he enrolled in the Universidad Tecnológica de Ciudad Juarez. He is studying engineering with an emphasis on renewable energy resources. He married a Mexican woman and now has a 5-year-old daughter, Nicole. He will send her to live with his parents in El Paso so she can attend school in the States. The schools are better there, he says, because they provide computer education. The schools in Juarez don’t unless you enroll in a private school. Valadez can’t afford that. Maybe his daughter can visit him on weekends.
He misses the Navy. He keeps in touch with his Navy buddies on Facebook. He enlisted in 2000 and received an honorable discharge in 2004. For six months he served in the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. Special forces looked for al-Qaida, and the Navy provided air support.
Valadez joined right after high school. He had always wanted to be in the service. He was just drawn to it. He was in ROTC and mini boot camp in high school. He and 12 other friends joined the Navy the same day. The Navy never mentioned his status. Valadez married and did not re-enlist. He and his wife later divorced. He tried getting back into the Navy, but he had to lose 20 pounds first. He was trying to lose the weight when he made the choice to drive that guy to Ohio.
“I left the Navy honorably,” he says. “I should at least be considered a national.”
He never met Castano’s family. He remembers Castano telling him he used to live on a ranch that had a fishing pond. He would drink beer and fish and drive his cars, four-wheelers. He didn’t go out much. He’d always call Valadez for a job. I’ll try to get you in here, Valadez would tell him, but nothing worked out.
“Bad timing,” Valadez says.
8:48 a.m., Aug. 24, 2011Manuel Castano
I went to ACS yesterday, and I passed everything typed 28 words, in about half a minute, couldn’t get started, but still I got 123 on the overall score. . .so just waiting for them to call me, what the heck is CURP. . . they require that also. don’t know what that is. so if i get called I’ll start Monday. . .8:29 p.m.
Manuel Castano
I called ACS, today and I was told that I was not accepted, and I had one of the highest scores, I think it’s because of my age. . .hell I’m going to keep working construction, and save the 3k and go back illegally, hell these people think that you have to kiss their ass for 250.00 dollars every two weeks, shit I can make that in a day. . .
Castano also worried about his son Victor, a Marine deployed to Afghanistan. He sent Valadez messages about him. My son has been in Afghanistan for two weeks… I did not get to see him… so I feel bad. Valadez told him Victor would be all right.
“Castano was always hopeful of going back to the U.S.,” Valadez says. “‘I’ll go back,’ he’d say. ‘It’s all bullshit.’”
In their last Facebook exchange, Castano recalled living in Austin.
Feb. 9, 2011
Manuel Castano
How was your new years?Juan Valadez
It was alright, we went to Samalayuca.Manuel Castano
Where is that?Juan Valadez
About an hours drive from Juarez, it’s sand dunes we went on the 4-wheelers.Manuel Castano
Man, I miss that ……I had two four wheelers and a three wheeler. I have a four acres in Austin with a fishing tank.Juan Valadez
Thats cool my sister lives in Austin.Manuel Castano
I lived there for 19 years.Juan Valadez
Never been but I heard its nice.Manuel Castano
Man, it is nice….that is my home and you are welcomed there.
Valadez felt badly when he read on the deported vets page that Castano had died. Kind of ironic he could finally go home, but only as a dead man. It’s just a sad story. Valadez doesn’t know any way else to think about it.
“He didn’t speak Spanish well,” Valadez tells me. “I never spoke to him in Spanish. He wasn’t fluent. He always spoke English. In his mind, he was an American.”
Luis Ortiz last saw his uncle in 2008. He was healthy, a big guy. Luis remembers barbecues with him. The music and laughter. His uncle always had music playing. He didn’t drink in front of the family or on someone else’s property. The Castanos were taught manners.
His uncle was picked up for public intoxication a few times, Luis remembers. Domestic violence, too, but he says the charges were dropped, and that was years before he returned to El Paso. After he was deported, he would call Luis’ mother from Juarez. I need clothes, he’d tell her. He did some construction work in Mexico.
Luis does not know why his uncle joined the Army other than enlisting in the service was always something the men in his family did. Luis joined because of his uncles. One uncle who was in charge of recruiting in El Paso advised him to study helicopters. Be a crew chief, he said. Luis should have listened. Instead, he went into the infantry, straight grunt. His uncle told him, You should have listened to me. He also said, If the higher ups get to you and you want to leave, they’ve succeeded. Don’t let me get to you.
His aunts and uncles were supposed to get their citizenship when they graduated from high school. Manuel had told Luis he had thought he’d get his papers through the military.
After he left the service in 1984, Manuel move to Fort Bliss with his wife, a woman he met while in the Army, Maria says. They divorced and she died in 2016. They had one son. He started seeing another woman in the late 1980s or early 1990s. They had three children together. Manuel was happy. He was working and bought a house in Mexia, a town near Austin.
He didn’t talk about his service. He told Maria years later that he still remembered the smell of gunpowder. He and his Army buddies stuck together. That was that. He said little more about the experience.
He loved old cars. He had a yellow pickup, a Corvette Stingray and a black Trans Am, a “Smokey and the Bandit” kind of thing. The Trans Am had bucket seats. Tejano music blared out of the radio. He was infatuated with singer María Conchita Alonso. He had posters of her all over the place.
Then, Maria said, she lost contact with him. She blames it on the distance from El Paso to Mexia, about a five-hour drive. He would call but would not visit. She says she does not know anything about his arrests, but she concedes that his absence may also have been a result of problems with the law. She knows he liked his beer, but she never saw him intoxicated, never saw him have problems with the police, although she says he told her he had skipped DWI court a few times. She had seen him drink three or four times. He was not an angel, but he did not have a daily drinking problem. He was a good guy, good brother, loved his kids.
Whatever was going on, she lost touch with him. Five years passed. Then, in 2005, Maria, her son Raul and her mother began looking for him. The last they knew he was working for a trailer business. They spent the day in Mexia but could not find him. No one knew him. They were getting ready to leave when they stopped at a gas station. Maria was pumping gas when she saw him. A tall, dark complected man getting something from the store. Her son was standing next to him. She went inside. Pásale, señorita, the man said. At first, she said he didn’t recognize her.
“If you weren’t my brother I’d slap you,” she said.
Castano laughed then and embraced her. Looking out the door, he saw their mother and ran out to her. Maria told Raul, 17, That’s your tio. Come to the house, Castano told them. They stayed and ate dinner. Manuel, she says, had a perpetual grin on his face. He worked building U-Haul trailers. He seemed happy. He had gone to Mexico and returned.
He moved back to El Paso in 2007 when their older brother Nicholas was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Castano painted houses. He stayed with Maria two weeks and then moved in with his dying brother. Around 2010 he moved in with a woman. He didn’t know her that well and didn’t live with her long. They’d drink. The woman would call Maria. Pick him up, she’d say. I can’t have my kids around him.
That same year, Maria says, he called her from an ICE holding facility. Said he needed his reading glasses. She asked him what happened.
“You know,” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
He told her that the authorities had asked him if he wanted to go to jail or be deported. It’s up to you, they said. Your decision.
“I don’t want to go to jail for a DWI and a speeding ticket,” he told them.
Maria said Manuel had liked Juarez at first and traveled all around the city. He stayed with a deported friend. But he had no job, no money, and his enjoyment of the city soon vanished.
“Can you help me?” he’d ask his sister. “I need food, clothes, shoes.”
Castano’s deportation resulted from a history of criminal convictions. On Oct. 18, 2002, he received a 10-year prison sentence for injury to a child and failure to appear in court in Hays County, Texas. Injury to a child can include a variety of offenses against children under the age of 14, from negligence to intentional harm, from minor injuries to serious injuries up to and including death. He was paroled on July 23, 2003.
“I have no personal recollection of the case, which was originally prosecuted in 1993 by a prosecutor who no longer works in the district attorney’s office,” said said Wes Mau, the district attorney of Hayes County.
According to ICE, Castano was deported in September 2003. An ICE spokesman said that the agency assumes Castano returned to Texas illegally because on June 15, 2010, he began serving an eight-month sentence for fraudulent use and possession of false Identification in Limestone County, Texas. He was paroled under mandatory supervision on March 25, 2011. He was deported again the same month.
“His criminal convictions — including two DWIs, felony child abuse and felony identity theft — made him an ICE enforcement priority,” the spokesman told me in an email. ICE, he said, “specifically identifies service in the U.S. military as a positive factor that should be considered when deciding whether or not prosecutorial discretion should be exercised.”
Clavo has dreams of running from people and hiding behind rocks. He wants to kill someone, but he has only his sidearm and it won’t fire. He wakes up. He takes meds to help him sleep, but nothing stops the dreams.
In Iraq it seemed he was always hiding and moving to protect everyone else. He served in an evac hospital with 18th Corp, Army Airborne. One day, some nurses wanted to build a bunker to save lives from incoming fire. Engineers dug a huge pit with a backhoe. They put a long-ass board over it.
Let’s see how many people fit in there, the commander said. They got in, packed tight shoulder to shoulder, butt to butt. This is just a grave, someone said, and they all jumped out. Clavo thinks of that, how they all just piled in without thinking. Fucking lemmings.
He wonders what Castano experienced, what things might have haunted him about his service. Clavo sees images of burned bodies and smells death mixed with burning oil wells. It’s overwhelming. Oil and bodies, oil and bodies.
Clavo, two other guys and a nurse went AWOL for two days. They walked to an amusement park. People loitered around a carnival. Clavo thought they looked just like him. The same skin color, dark hair, everything. He had never thought, I’m fighting people who look just like me and may be as poor as me. He watched kids on a Ferris wheel and an old guy with prayer beads. Clavo had a set of prayer beads, too. They looked cool and he had bought them. The old man offered him black tea. Strong with sugar. They talked without understanding each other. The old man shook his hand.
Clavo remembers the fear he felt when a letter from the VA arrived that would tell him if he would receive disability for his PTSD. He didn’t want to know if something was wrong him. He knew a Vietnam-era vet, Al Soto, who used to walk all over town. He was found dead in his apartment after he got his letter.
Clavo opened the envelope. The VA concluded he should be classified totally disabled. You’ll get this much money but you’ll never work again, the letter read. He hit rock bottom. Why go back to school? Why do anything? Who’ll hire him? It took him a while to get out of depression.
He doubts anyone looks at him and thinks, Oh, that guy is screwed up mentally. He wonders again what problems Castano may have had. If he can remember Castano, then maybe other people will remember him, too. A vet should not be forgotten, no matter his problems. As a soldier, Castano swore to serve and protect. That should count for something. Clavo has talked to a few people about him. Some actually gave a damn.
Manuel Castano never told Maria he was sick until she saw him in the hospital. He was joking even then.
A man who worked with Castano in construction called her in May 2012. Your brother Manuel is sick and he won’t see the doctor, the man said. He’ll call you later on. Tell him to see a doctor.
Castano called later that day. “I’m not sick,” he said. “I’m just dehydrated. Take care.”
A few days later, the same man called.
“Your bother is in the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Which hospital?”
“Seguro Popular.”
She didn’t know the hospital or how to get to it. A friend’s husband took her. The hospital, she recalls, was something else. Ugly. A place you’d go to die. Filthy. The smell like an intense heat, enough to make you melt, enough to shut your lungs. All the people with no money go there, her friend’s husband told her.
A woman led her to intensive care. They told her to put on a gown, a cap and plastic gloves. Oh, my God, what is going on, Maria wondered. Then they led her in. She saw Castano on a bed beneath a sheet, beeping machines on either side of him. She leaned over her brother.
“Manuel,” she said.
He smiled.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The sheet covered only his stomach. She noticed black bruises on his legs down to his toes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“No, you’re sick.”
“Nothing is wrong,” he said.
“What happened to your legs?”
“Nothing, just bruises.”
“Those are big bruises.”
“It’s nothing.”
A nurse stopped and asked what he wanted to eat.
“Steak.”
The nurse smiled.
“I can’t. You might choke. I can bring you Jell-O.”
Then, turning to Maria, the nurse said, “The doctor needs to talk to you in his office. I’ll take you.”
Maria followed her down a long, dank hall.
“You know your brother has Lou Gehrig’s disease? Anyone have it in your family?”
“My father,” Maria said, “and an older brother.”
“Well, it is very advanced. It’s gone up to his chest.”
“What can we do?”
“We need blood for a transfusion and medicine. “
The doctor gave her a prescription. Maria understood she would have to buy his medication and pay for the transfusion.
The nurses would not let her stay over night. You have to wait outside in the waiting room, they said. “We’ll let you know when you can see him again.” Children vomited on the floor around her. She left. She had a job a Kmart. Her supervisors said, “Don’t worry. Whenever you have to go to see your brother, go. It’s OK.”
Maria returned to Juarez the next day. Castano didn’t talk to her. He behaved as if he did not recognize her. A nurse told her to talk to him anyway. He can hear you, she said. Castano pressed her hand. His eyes were closed.
“What happened?” she asked the doctor.
“The disease is progressing.”
She visited daily. One time, when she left the hospital, she walked around Juarez and got lost. She looked at all sorts of buildings with gates. I don’t know where I am, she thought. The street signs meant nothing to her. She called a friend to pick her up.
Days passed. Castano stopped eating. Fluid dripped into his right arm from an IV. He needs blood, the doctor said. Maria began paying for transfusions. The nurses would not let her stay with her brother. She stuck around the hospital, waiting to be allowed to see him again. When she could put up with the odors, she sat in the waiting room. Other times, she paced outside. She had no idea what the doctors were doing. It was stressful, not seeing him. She knew it was bad.
More days folded into one another dominoing forward. One morning she could not find her brother. He wasn’t in his hospital room. She asked almost a dozen people, where’s my brother?
A doctor showed her to a room on the second floor. That’s him, the doctor said. Her brother looked shrunken and impossibly small, Maria recalls. I don’t think he’s going to make it, she remembers thinking. She spoke to him. He squeezed her hand. The doctor wouldn’t let her stay.
“I’ll be back,” she said. The next morning she drove to work and the doctor called to say he had died.
She returned to Juarez. She felt guilty that she had not been with him when he died. When the doctor had asked her to pay for the blood transfusion she had known then it would be a miracle if he survived. And if he had, what then? What would she have done if the doctor told her, You have to take him home? Quit her job and take care of him around the clock? How would she have supported her family? Manuel would have suffered. He would not have wanted that. If he had not been in Mexico, maybe he would have lasted longer. Her father went through a lot, but he was in the U.S. and lasted a long time. She wondered how she would tell her mother.
At the hospital, the doctors took her to his room where he lay dead, eyes open to the ceiling. Maria closed his eyes. The hospital gave her his wallet. There was nothing in it except his Mexican ID. He also had a Bible and his discharge papers. The hospital told her it needed $16,000 to release his body. She felt as if she had just been punched. Sixteen thousand dollars? Where would she get that kind of money? She struggles to get by. Her life, she says, is not easy. People think it is easy for immigrants. It’s not.
“We can’t release the body without the money,” she was told. “We can bury him in a common grave.”
“What can I do?”
“You have to pay something and then sign a contract to pay the rest. Ask your family.”
“They are doing what they can do.”
She returned home and pawned all the jewelry she had. Her children gave her money. Her son Luis made phone calls asking for help but got nowhere. Maria managed to pull together $3,200. She hoped the hospital would work with her.
A friend told her, “Don’t tell them you have this money. Offer them $50 and negotiate.”
“But they won’t give me his body.”
Her son Luis said, “Tell them you only have 300.”
“OK.”
“You were buying all his meds,” Luis said. “What more do they want?”
Maria returned to the hospital. She decided against negotiating with the hospital. She wanted her brother’s body released so she could bury him. So he could rest in peace. She offered the hospital all the money she had collected. The hospital administrator, she recalls, didn’t hesitate. He accepted the payment without question or reference to the $16,00 he had originally asked for. Maria’s pawning of jewelry would provide for the transfer, plot and burial of her brother. The man just wanted whatever she would give him.
“He probably had not expected this much,” she says now.
Maria’s son, Luis, told Clavo the family had raised enough money to take control of the body. He told Clavo he would get back to him about a church service for his uncle. Meanwhile, the body was transferred to a Juarez funeral home. The San Jose Funeral Home in El Paso agreed to coordinate with the authorities in Mexico so the body could be removed to Texas. Maria paid the Juarez funeral home $500, and the director said he would put Manuel in a cardboard casket. Bring black socks and a suit to dress him, the director said. On a Sunday, the San Jose Funeral Home called.
“The body is here,” they told Maria.
Her friends chided her for spending so much money, but what else could she have done? She didn’t want her brother buried in Mexico. He had been unhappy in Juarez. It was hot and violent.
Maria had kept the news of Castano’s death from her mother until she knew his body would be sent back. Now, she needed to tell her. She asked her two nieces to be with her when she spoke to her mother. You be strong, she told her mother. You can’t get sick on me here. You have to strong for me.
A funeral mass was held at Saints Peter and Paul church in El Paso. Just family and a few friends. A friend of Castano who had worked with him on some Juarez construction projects approached Maria. She can’t recall his name. He was a man Castano had lived with for a while. One day, the man told her, he had asked Manuel for a measuring tape. Manuel attempted to throw it but dropped it instead. That was a while ago, the man said. He was sick even then.
Maria had always thought her brother would cross the bridge connecting Juarez to El Paso and return to the States. He’ll beat this, she thought. He’ll come back. He did, finally, but not the way she expected.
His death was a relief. He’s close now and Maria can visit him. She just wanted him to have what he deserved.
Renwick Dozier, the director of the San Jose Funeral Home on Virginia Street in El Paso, served in the Army from 1974 to 1994. He was discharged with the rank of sergeant first class.
He and I speak by phone. He comes across as a gentle soul who feels badly for every family that comes to him suffering from loss. His deep voice has a soothing tone, and although I was not coming to him to arrange a funeral, I felt he was reaching out to me anyway as if to say should I need him he would be there for me.
When Maria called about her brother, he told her as long as he was honorably discharged he was eligible for burial at Fort Bliss. He had handled a number of body transfers from Mexico to Texas. It wasn’t uncommon. He thought a burial at Fort Bliss was Castano’s right. He wasn’t coming back to the U.S. to live but to be interred by his family. Renwick is grateful to all veterans, no matter what mistakes they may have made after their service.
He remembers some delays because of Castano’s status as a deportee. The U.S. and Mexican consulates had to talk to one another. The U.S. consulate offered some resistance. The people there didn’t realize he was eligible for a military funeral.
Renwick’s first thought was, He’s a vet. He didn’t care about Castano’s status. Whatever mistakes he made, he was still a vet. Vets are a brotherhood.
“Whether you served two years or 30,” Renwick says. “All vets understand that.”
While I am in El Paso, I try to reach Castano’s son Victor but am unsuccessful. Finally, we connect through Facebook and arrange a time for me to call him. A photo on Facebook shows him in his Marine uniform. His grandmother is handing him the flag that had draped his father’s coffin. Victor appears to be holding back tears, his face strained and about to crumble. His grandmother, too, looks distraught.
On the phone, he speaks in a low, flat voice that rarely rises or falls. He is direct but what feelings he has he conceals or had drained from him long ago from his time in Afghanistan.
In 2008, Victor tells me, he saw his father Manuel Castano for the last time. Victor had joined the Marines and was in boot camp at the time. Boot camp was easy. His father had taught him what to expect. Don’t talk back. Listen. Take orders. They’re given for a reason. Do it. Don’t ask questions.
His father jumped around a lot from job to job. It seemed he did a little bit of everything. He never talked about the Army, but he was always proud of having been a soldier. It is something you carry forever, Victor says. He doesn’t know if his father saw combat. He knows his service affected his life. But his father wouldn’t talk about it. Instead, he laughed and smiled. You can be in shitty situations, but you can still look at the bright side of things, Victor says. He remembers being shot at in Afghanistan, lying in holes, explosions going off around him. He remembers the hungry kids he saw over there. He doesn’t talk about his service either. He has PTSD. His unit was hit by quite a few IEDs. He looks at every single person and doesn’t let his guard down.
“You risk changing who you are because you want to serve your country,” he says.
His father thought it was his country. He was good at masking his feelings. He was always this way. Now, Victor is, too. In his head a million things are going on, but at the end of the day Victor just wants to be happy. He could have died. Every day in Afghanistan might have been his last. He had no guarantees he would be here tomorrow.
Whether his father saw combat or not doesn’t matter to Victor. His father is still a vet. It is a sense of pride a man carries. Veterans come up to Victor and tell him they know he’s a vet by the way he holds himself. Chest out, head high. It’s always in the back of his mind he served, that he did something special. He knows his father felt the same way. He taught Victor to walk with pride. He taught him how to march and play soldier when Victor was a kid. He taught him how to shoot, how to build a fire, cut a tree, find food, water, shelter. He always treated Victor like a man. He was father, teacher and best friend. His father wasn’t there much, but the little bit that he was left a big impression.
Victor says he had an off-and-on childhood because of his parents’ divorce. But the time he spent with his father was always good. Victor never asked his father about his divorce from his mother. His parents seemed to get together and then split up every other day. Loving, fighting, loving, fighting. His father would leave and come back, leave and come back. But he never just disappeared. He’d be around. He’d call.
“You’re taught in military that if you’re involved in a domestic dispute, the safe bet is to leave,” Victor says. “It may not be the right decision, but it prevents you from getting in trouble.”
His father would get in trouble a little bit with the police because of drinking. Victor grew used to it. Whatever his father did, Victor didn’t want those things to ruin his idea of who his father really was. The cool, laid-back man who loved to barbecue. From Victor’s point of view, his father was an adult. He knew what to do and what not to do. He was a grown man. He didn’t need a young guy to tell him how to behave.
The deportation of his father infuriated Victor. To do that to a vet. Send him to jail, OK, but don’t deport him. Like spitting on his service. He earned his citizenship. Victor wonders if he should trust the government. What keeps it from sending him to Mexico?
His father called him from Juarez and they talked a little here and there. He was the same guy. Telling Victor to take care. Be careful.
“You be careful,” Victor said. “I got Marines watching me. You’re by yourself.”
“I can handle myself,” his father said.
That was the kind of person he was, Victor says. His father told him stories. Fourteen people shot in Juarez. Body parts thrown out of a car warning witnesses to be quiet. Those kind of stories.
He knew his father was a little sick, but he didn’t pry. When his father died, Victor’s brother called and told him. He took an emergency leave and drove home from Camp Pendleton.
After the church service, a hearse carried his father to Fort Bliss. Four Army soldiers carried the coffin. They presented the flag to Victor’s grandmother. She gave it to Victor. The soldiers fired a 21-gun salute and lowered the coffin into the ground. They played “Taps.” The music reminded Victor he had lost quite a few Marines.
He has not visited the grave since.
On my last day in El Paso, Clavo and I stand among the graves at Fort Bliss and look down at Castano’s white marble tombstone.
Manuel De Jesus Castano
Spc 4
U.S. Army
October 1, 1957 June 14, 2012
Beloved father, son and brother
Clavo attended the funeral mass at St. Peter and Paul Church in El Paso. He felt very sad. Only a few people other than the immediate family attended. Clavo invited other vets but none of them showed up.
We look at the two tombstones on either side of Castano. Reynaldo Garcia. U.S. Army, Vietnam. Beloved husband, father, brother and son. Jose Luis Alarcon. USAF. Loving husband, father and grandfather.
Clavo raises his gaze beyond these two graves to the many others standing in line, one after another. A stark blue sky domes the cemetery. Brown gravel absorbs the sun. Tree branches sway, casting lean shadows over small flags and plastic flowers. A woman stands off in the distance, staring at a tombstone. Watching her, Clavo imagines all the stories held here never to be told. He thinks of his own story, too. He screwed up in ways similar to Castano. He drank. But he was fortunate. He didn’t get picked up by the police. But even if he had been stopped, charged and convicted of the same crimes that put Castano in jail, he wouldn’t have been deported. He can’t help but feel how privileged he is. His family moved to the U.S. from Mexico. He was born in New Mexico. He has a U.S. birth certificate. He has the rights that come with it. Life is different for him than for so many others because he can say, I’m a citizen. That saved him.
He imagines Castano enlisting in the Army. A young man in his dress uniform on the parade ground, a future before him as bright as the light glinting off the stands. Clavo assumes Castano probably felt like a citizen, too, patriotic and gung-ho, but some higher-up felt differently. Well, that was then.
“You’re home now, brother,” Clavo says.
Parts of this article were updated by the author for style and clarity.
Read the second and final part of our deported veterans series Nov. 4. Follow Latterly, and we’ll let you know when the story is published.
