Updated April 04, 2025 at 16:06 PM ET
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.
Ryan Krebbs was the company medic. As he was treating a wounded soldier amid the dust and smoke, he spotted Barco lifting the front end of the burning car, which had two soldiers pinned underneath it. "They were unconscious when he pulled them out," Krebbs remembered. "[Barco] was on fire after lifting the car."
Barco said he remembered none of that, only being thrown against a wall.
"I kind of remember the impact of the explosion," Barco told the PBS series Frontline, which aired a story in 2010 about his unit called . "They told me I was just walking around. Walking around in circles or whatever, just cursing out loud. But I don't remember that."
Barco was treated for burns to his hands and thigh, as well as a lacerated lip. But Frontline reported there was no record that he lost consciousness for several minutes or any suspicion of a possible brain injury. So Barco soon received further treatment at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas for burns but no treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Months later, Barco noticed ringing in his ears, and military doctors at Fort Carson realized he had a head injury stemming from the November 2004 explosion, according to Frontline. He could have received a medical discharge with benefits, but he wanted to go back to Iraq, telling them he was fit for duty.
Barco was told that his burns and hearing loss qualified him for an honorable medical retirement from the Army, which would leave him with a lifelong pension and free healthcare with the VA.
But Barco pressed his doctors to let him return to his unit,
even though he was suffering from nightmares and sleeplessness.
"I told my doctors, 'Hey, I want, like, to go back," Barco said in the documentary. "They were looking at me like, 'No way, you're crazy, you should get evaluated, psychologically. They worked with me and they lowered my profile and they dropped everything. Cause, you know, if you want to go, they're going to let you go, unless you're paralyzed or something like that. They need people."
Barco made it back to Iraq in the fall of 2006, during the surge of forces meant to tamp down the increasing sectarian violence. A few months before this, on July 6, one of Barco's commanding officers, Lt. Col. Michael "Hutch" Hutchinson, helped him fill out the forms to become a naturalized citizen. For noncitizens, one of the promises of joining the military is that it's a path to U.S. citizenship.
"I distinctly remember Jose Barco completing and submitting his application for United States citizenship," Hutchinson wrote in a February 2025 memo for immigration officials. "He was fully eligible and with processing timelines at USCIS at the time should have been approved by the end of calendar year 2006. … At some point the packet was lost and we have not been able to find a chain of custody document."
Criminal behavior
By the time he returned home in December 2007, Barco's TBI symptoms worsened after he was exposed to still more explosions in Iraq, telling doctors he felt dazed and had memory problems. He was prescribed a variety of drugs, from Tylenol to Buspar, a psychoactive anti-anxiety drug. Barco said the drugs didn't help. He was discharged in 2008, when he was 23.
Steve Xenakis, a retired Army brigadier general and psychiatrist, said Barco's injuries happened when the Army had yet to understand these types of hidden wounds.
"This was at a time when the Army was not acknowledging the significant effects of blast concussions," Xenakis said, adding that such a head injury can aggravate PTSD. "You really can't control your emotions. You become irrational, impulsive."
What happened next with Barco, Xenakis said, was "not surprising at all." His mental health problems turned into criminal behavior.
In April, 2008, Barco was driving past a house party in Colorado Springs, where he had earlier that night been kicked out for firing a bullet into a basement ceiling.
Barco pulled out a handgun and shot into a crowd of teenagers standing on a porch. A bullet struck 19-year-old Ginny Clemens, who was pregnant. It left her with a serious leg injury. Clemens declined to speak with NPR through a relative. Barco has said he has no memory of what happened.
Barco was eventually charged with two counts of attempted first-degree murder and one count of menacing. Fourth Judicial District Judge Larry Schwartz sentenced him to 52 years, calling the crime "stunning in its lack of compassion. It brings considerable dishonor upon the uniform you wore," according to a story in the .
Barco ended up spending 15 years in prison, where he was a model prisoner, teaching English and math. And for good behavior, his sentence was reduced. A parole board released him on his first hearing. He walked out of prison on Jan. 21, 2025, one day after President Trump was inaugurated where he vowed to crack down on crime and illegal immigration.
Barco planned on heading to a family reunion in Florida. Instead he saw agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) waiting for him. He was hustled into a van.
"I was shocked. I told my case manager, 'This is a joke, right? I'm a retired veteran,' " Barco told the Gazette.
Ryan Krebbs, the former Army medic, and Barco's wife, Tia, said they hired a private lawyer and paid $400 for a consultation, then found a pro bono lawyer in Colorado to help with his case. But when Barco was transferred to Texas they searched in vain for another pro bono immigration lawyer. The ones they contacted were too busy.
They reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union but were told the ACLU does not take individual immigration cases.
Barco was ordered to be deported to Venezuela by Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Mathew Kaufman in February at Aurora, Colo. Barco said he was not interested in appealing, even though the judge asked, "Are you sure?" Barco later told his brother he was "disillusioned and tired. Send me to a country that will accept me, since my country doesn't," according to the Gazette.
"Jose's spirit's just broken," said Krebbs, the medic. "They defeated him for sure."
Krebbs and the other supporters tell NPR they won't give up. They hope he can maybe get to Mexico where he can get access to better health care and a better life. They are also hoping that Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will pardon him, opening Barco up again to possible American citizenship.
"He's an American and that's how he sees himself," Krebbs said. "He's a disabled combat veteran who saved people that day. In my eyes he's an American hero."
Krebbs can understand how some, including Ginny Clemens and her family, could find no sympathy for Barco. "What he did was awful. He knows what he did was wrong. He served his time and should be allowed another chance," Krebbs said.
Hutchinson, the Army officer, said in his February memo to immigration authorities that Barco's "peculiar legal residence status puts him at extreme risk of personal harm if he is extradited."
In an interview with NPR, Hutchinson said, "If you cherry pick the facts of his story we could call him a hero or a villain."
Still, he called Barco an "upstanding person," who did his time, adding his story is "a symbol of how the prison system is supposed to work."
"It boggles the mind. How you can pin a Purple Heart on someone and not give them citizenship," said Danitza James with the League of United Latin American Citizens. The organization is tracking some 400 hundred veterans who have been deported or are in that process, going back to the early 1990s.
James is a two-tour combat veteran who served as a gunner on convoys in Iraq. She held a green card at the time, and twice had her citizenship ceremony cancelled because the Army ordered her to redeploy. When she left the military she was still not a citizen, James says, and she was later naturalized when she married another soldier.
" I left the military with an expired green card," says James.
James says LULAC is urging politicians in Texas and Colorado to intervene and let Barco be moved to a VA hospital for medical evaluation.
Tia Barco, who is American, said ICE agents earlier this week asked her husband about his citizenship application from 2006.
"But he didn't ask why they were inquiring," she said.
NPR reached out to ICE for comment, but they didn't respond.
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