During a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was forced to justify her department’s pressure for a military veteran to leave the country as part of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant push.
When asked by Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island how many veterans her department has deported Noem denied it all.
“We have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans,” she responded.
In response, Magaziner held up a tablet featuring a live Zoom call with Sae Joon Park, a former resident of Honolulu, Hawaii. Magaziner explained that Park is a military veteran who was shot twice while serving in Panama in 1989 and that, after suffering from PTSD, Park was arrested for nonviolent minor drug offenses.
“He is a combat veteran, a Purple Heart recipient. He has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have,” Magaziner said. “Earlier this year, you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was 7 years old.”
Magaziner noted that Noem has broad authority to decide who is removed from the country and asked her to reexamine Park’s case, which Noem claimed she would do.
A cartoon by Clay Bennett.
In June, Park left the United States, telling a local TV station that he was pressured to self-deport after DHS said he would be imprisoned for his drug offenses. He left behind a mother suffering through early-stage dementia and his adult daughter and son.
“I won't be there for a funeral, like my daughter getting married, just there's a lot of things connected with it. I definitely know that,” he said at the time.
The Trump administration has been under fire for targeting veterans as part of its anti-immigrant operations. Some estimates indicate that more than 10,000 veterans have been deported by the Trump administration.
“They defended this country. They raised their hand and they swore to uphold the Constitution, and then they come home and we say, ‘Oh, thanks for your service, get out.’ It’s wrong,” Air Force veteran Michelle Byrd explained at a November protest in Arizona,
Unable to meet Trump’s mass deportation goals, the administration has now embraced a self-deportation strategy. The goal is to threaten people with undocumented status with imprisonment or denial of financial services in an effort to force them to remove themselves from the country.
People like Park are being caught in the crossfire. And while Noem tries to busy herself with photo ops and gushing over Trump, pretending that the problem doesn’t exist won’t make it go away.
