Immigrants who joined the military under a program granting a pathway to citizenship are being kicked out of the service.
Now they face a precarious fate with their residency statuses now in jeopardy.
Started during the George W. Bush Administration, the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI, was designed to recruit non-citizens into the Armed Forces in order to address a critical shortage of healthcare jobs and fluency in languages deemed strategically important.
Attention on the changes to the program roared back into headlines after an Associated Press article came out July 4.
Alaska Attorney and former independent Senate candidate Margaret Stock helped develop the program.
For months, she’s been contacted by immigrants who joined the Armed Forces in the last few years, now being told they’re disqualified because of failed background checks.
“Nobody will tell them why they failed, nobody will tell them who made the decision to fail them,”said Stock, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, in her midtown Anchorage office Friday morning. “They’re not being offered any evidence, they’re not being given due process. And they’re just simply getting a text message, an email, a phone call, saying that the military has decided after a couple years of background checking that they don’t want to take a chance on you and you’re being kicked out.”
Alaska Public Media’s Zachariah Hughes spoke with Stock, who has been fielding calls from national TV networks and newspapers, about what’s happening to immigrants in the military.
Messages left with the Defense Department seeking comment had not been returned as of our broadcast deadline.
