The four men in jeans and tactical vests labeled Police: U.S. Border Patrol had Narciso Barranco surrounded. Their masks and hats concealed their faces, so that only their eyes were visible. When they’d approached him, he was doing landscape work outside of an IHOP in Santa Ana, California. Frightened, Barranco attempted to run away. By the time a bystander started filming, the agents had caught him and pinned him, face down, on the road. One crouches and begins to pummel him, repeatedly, in the head. You can hear Barranco moaning in pain. Eventually, the masked men drag him to his feet and try to shove him into an SUV. When Barranco resists, one agent takes a rod and wedges it under his neck, attempting to steer him into the vehicle as if prodding livestock.
Barranco is the father of three sons, all of them United States Marines. The eldest brother is a veteran, and the younger men are on active duty. At any moment, the same president who sent an emboldened ICE after their father could also command them into battle. That president has described Latinos as “criminals” and “anchor babies,” but the Barrancos and so many like them, immigrants or the children of immigrants, are not “invading” America; they’re defending it.
In 2015, 12 percent of active-duty service members identified as Hispanic. By 2023, that number had increased to 19.5 percent. In the Marine Corps, the proportion was closer to 28 percent. Latinas are more represented in the military than in the civilian workforce—21 percent of enlisted women compared with 18 percent of working women. (One explanation might be the military’s guaranteed equal pay: In the civilian workforce, Latinas earn just 65 cents on the dollar compared with white men.)
Communities of color have long been targets for military recruitment. When I went to public high school in Brooklyn in the ’90s, recruitment officers used to visit classrooms. The military offers financial stability, a route to college. But for many Latinos, as for other immigrant groups, it offers more: a path to belonging, whether for citizens who have been treated as outsiders in their own nation, or for the undocumented. Immigrants who serve at least a year in any branch of the armed forces can become eligible for naturalized citizenship.
In 1917, just before entering World War I, the United States passed the Jones-Shafroth Act, bestowing citizenship (but not a right to representation) on Puerto Ricans. This would have the effect of making them eligible for the draft when it was instituted a few months later. An estimated 18,000 to 20,000 Puerto Rican recruits were soon shipped off to fight in Europe.
During World War II, approximately 15,000 Mexican nationals fought in American uniforms, many earning citizenship. This was in addition to the 500,000 American Latinos of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent who enlisted and fought for their country, including my own grandfather. He was a decorated member of the 9th Infantry Division who fought in Tunisia, landed in Normandy, and was one of the first American soldiers to make it into Germany. He was proud of his role in history, but also of the lifelong friendships that he, a Puerto Rican man from Brooklyn, had with veterans from across the country.
In one oral history, Armando Flores, a veteran of World War II, recounts a lieutenant scolding him in his early days of service: “American soldiers stand at attention.” Rather than feeling chastened, Flores was stunned. “Nobody had ever called me an American until that time.”
Hispanic veterans came home to a country where signs were posted in Texas restaurant windows announcing: No Dogs Negroes Mexicans. Like their African American counterparts, many were the victims of redlining that prevented them from buying homes. Latino veterans created the American GI Forum to demand that benefits such as medical care and burial rights be available to Latino as well as white veterans. During the Vietnam War, Latinos were about 5 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for an estimated 20 percent of the 60,000 American casualties.
This country has a long history of treating the veterans who have served it shoddily. And yet what’s happening now—as Donald Trump’s agents violently detain some Latinos in the streets as other Latinos serve their country in strikes against Iran—feels extreme.
Johnathan Hernandez, a city councilman in Santa Ana, where Barranco was beaten, describes what’s happening in his community as a kind of war itself. Santa Ana is 77 percent Hispanic. It has become a popular target for ICE. Hernandez told me that he is seeing “a culture of fear, a culture of people not feeling safe, and people feeling under attack.” He said he worked to get the video posted on social media because no one knew who the man in it was, and he hoped that someone in the tight-knit community could identify him. “Because of the fact that these agents are unidentified and they’re taking people without due process, it means that you’re leaving very little for a family to be able to put the pieces together and find their loved ones,” he said. A woman saw the video on Instagram and commented that it was her friends’ father.
Nearly 24 hours after the violent encounter, Barranco’s eldest son, Alejandro, was able to finally make contact with his father, who said he still had not received medical care, and that he was hungry and thirsty. (The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Barranco had “assaulted” agents with his string trimmer—sharing a video in which he can be seen turning toward the agents and briefly lifting it—and that he had declined medical care.) In interviews with news agencies, Alejandro said that he and his brothers “feel hurt; we feel betrayed.” Their father taught them to “respect this country, thank this country, and then that led us to join the Marine Corps and kind of give back to the country and be thankful,” he said.
Alejandro was deployed to Kabul in 2021, when the U.S. was evacuating from Afghanistan.
Had a Marine treated a detainee the way that the Border Patrol agents treated his father, he told MSNBC, it would have been considered a war crime.
He also spoke with Task & Purpose, which covers the military. “I don’t believe that they followed their training,” he said about the agents. “Repeatedly punching a man in the face while he’s on the ground while he’s been maced or pepper-sprayed, I don’t believe that that was in their training.” (He also noted that the agents could be seen running with their weapons, which is “a very unprofessional way of holding a firearm.”)
Many Latinos are sharing in the Barranco family’s trauma. We are a highly diverse identity group, whose common bonds can feel tenuous at best. Forty-eight percent of the Latinos who voted in the 2024 election chose Trump—and many Latino members of the military, which tends to lean more conservative than the general population, were probably among them. And yet even some of those Trump voters, seeing on a daily basis the violence and haphazard cruelty with which the Trump administration is executing its mass-deportation agenda, must share my terror and anger. (ICE’s recent actions have already led some of Trump’s supporters to regret their vote.)
How can any Latinos feel secure if “looking” Hispanic or speaking Spanish or even going to Home Depot puts you at risk? How would you feel if you were deployed half a world away and wondering each day if your mother or father or sister or brother or wife might have been snatched up by ICE?
This is a personal question for Latino soldiers, but it is a personnel question for the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, who have to worry about military morale as an essential dimension of combat power. The psychological toll of ICE raids isn’t borne only by the new immigrants whom Trump calls “invaders,” but also by many of the Americans tasked with protecting us from real foreign threats. In the barracks at Camp Pendleton where the younger Barranco brothers sleep, they must be struggling to focus on their mission while fearing for the safety of their father in the hands of the very government they are sworn to defend.
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