Jose Barco in Iraq in 2007.
Tia Barco
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Tia Barco
This week several dozen Venezuelan nationals were transferred from a U.S. immigration detention center in south Texas and boarded a deportation flight to their home country.
Among them was 39-year-old Jose Barco, a decorated American soldier who deployed twice to Iraq, saw horrific combat and received a Purple Heart after an explosion tossed him through the air and left him with a traumatic brain injury.
He was just four years old when his family left Venezuela, a country his father fled to after he was being released as a political prisoner in Cuba. Jose Barco’s fellow inmates in Texas, most of them much younger, simply call him “Cuba.”
How an American veteran, a father of a 15-year-old daughter, found himself inside this sprawling detention center outside Corpus Christi, Texas, waiting for a flight to a country he barely knows is a tortured tale of battlefield trauma, bureaucratic bumbling and eventually, a serious crime.
“His situation is incredibly complex and tragic,” said Anna Stout, a former mayor of Grand Junction, Colo., who is helping his family, told NPR. “It’s the story of multiple failures of the U.S. military when it comes to one of its own soldiers, of a man who fought and bled for the United States believing he was earning his right to be called an American only to find himself in deportation proceedings, and of the tragic intersection of a new age of immigration policy and unfortunate parole timing.”
On Thursday Barco’s journey took another unexpected twist: when he arrived in Honduras en route to Venezuela, the Venezuelan authorities there refused to take him. According to his family, the Venezuelan immigration officials didn’t believe Barco’s birth certificate was genuine; they said it looked too new. They said his accent sounded Cuban to them, plus he didn’t know his Venezuelan national identity card number (called a cedula). One even told Barco it wouldn’t be good for him in Venezuela, because he has no family there.
Barco now sits, again, at a U.S. detention center, this time at Port Isabel, near Los Fresnos, Texas, wondering what country will take him — if not the one he risked his life for in Iraq.
“I feel very scared for him,” said his wife, Tia. “America should not be sending a decorated veteran to Venezuela.”
Now that Venezuela also has rejected him she said, “We have no clue how to navigate this as of now. This whole ordeal has been unimaginable.”
An act of heroism
Barco deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2004 with a unit from Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colo. He was a private with Charlie Company, from the 1st Battalion of the 506th Regiment. His unit was in western Iraq, at a time of fierce fighting against insurgent forces and car bombs. While Barco was on patrol in November with his platoon, a car laden with explosives swerved and went airborne, erupting in flames.
