Lawsuit demands reinstatement of immigrant troops

7, including local man, joined under program that promised quick path to U.S. citizenship

A Houston Army reservist who served with a psychological operations unit until he and other immigrants were booted from the service last year has joined a class-action lawsuit demanding he be allowed to stay in uniform.

Hembashima Sambe, a Nigerian medical doctor, joined the armed services two years ago under the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program, which promised noncitizens with critically needed language and cultural skills a quick path to American citizenship.

Discharged amid a purge of immigrant recruits and troops who had signed up under MAVNI, Sambe and six others claim their discharges were handed down in “blatant violation” of the law.

The suit, filed earlier this month in a Washington, D.C., federal court, alleges the discharges were ordered “not because of any misconduct by plaintiffs, but rather because the Army either did not want to expend the resources necessary to complete the background investigations or they could not do so.”

“We now know that the Army has plans to discharge hundreds of immigrant soldiers who signed enlistment contracts more than two years ago,” said attorney Margaret Stock, who is not part of the suit but has represented Sambe. “The Army’s violations of its own regulations are shocking — soldiers are being discharged without any notice, and in some cases, based on false information.”

More than 10,000 inducted

The suit calls on the Army to revoke the discharges, reinstate the seven to their units, and notify the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies about its actions. It also demands that the Army identify all similar immigrants who were discharged after joining the armed forces under the program, called MAVNI. It asks that the court be given a list of those troops as well as a copy of each soldier’s discharge revocation order.

An Army decision to temporarily suspend discharge proceedings taken against MAVNI immigrants who had joined under the Delayed Entry and Delayed Training programs did not apply to Sambe.

Now shuttered, the MAVNI program recruited noncitizens from 2009 through last year. Though all came in as enlistees, some later became officers.

More than 10,000 immigrants were inducted through the program, with most serving in the Army. Neither Stock nor the Pentagon know how many MAVNI troops have been purged from the military.

Last week, the Army discharged Spc. Yea Ji Sea, a combat medic posted to Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston. Sea, 29, of Gardena, Calif., entered the Army under MAVNI, which the Trump administration killed last year on the basis of potential threats to national security by troops in the program. A study by military contractor RAND was skeptical of Pentagon security concerns, saying it was “unable to estimate the specific” risk MAVNI troops posed to the armed forces. Sea and her ACLU attorneys are scheduled to appear at a hearing Tuesday in a Los Angeles federal district court.

Maj. Carla Gleason, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said that no MAVNI recruits or troops had been deported. She also said that two in every three MAVNI candidates makes it through the security and application process.

The military, principally the Army and Army Reserve, have been releasing troops from their service obligations since MAVNI was suspended in 2016, a year before it ended altogether. Troops are at risk of deportation when they fail the program’s lengthy security review process. Unlike their citizen counterparts, MAVNI recruits and troops on active duty undergo additional checks before becoming eligible for naturalization.

The lawsuit said the Army not only did not complete the exhaustive security reviews of the seven MAVNI troops, but didn’t provide them the notice and process conditions that would be part of a discharge as required by military rules and federal law.

Reflection of ‘chaos’

Sambe, who had signed up for the Army Reserve but hadn’t gone to basic training, lives in southwest Houston.

He moved to the United States in 2012 after practicing medicine in Nigeria to enroll in a master’s of public health program at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. Enlisting in the Army Reserve under MAVNI in February 2016, he signed a contract and started drilling that fall as a private first class, working as a unit supply specialist.

Sambe drilled with the Army Reserve’s 17th Psychological Operations Battalion in Austin and a Houston-area unit, and put off applying for a medical residency program within the first six months of his enlistment in hopes of going to boot camp.

Instead, an interminable wait ensued.

Sambe’s attorneys in Washington did not make him available to the media but Stock, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and MAVNI project officer now practicing law in Alaska, provided a narrative he wrote in which he recalled Feb. 5, 2016, the day he enlisted, as “one of the happiest 24-hour periods of my life.”

The lawsuit said he received an email in May from his unit stating that he had been discharged after failing his background checks. His discharge, which was effective Oct. 1, 2017, did not state grounds for his release but was “uncharacterized.”

Nearly two months later, the Army told Sambe to report for a counterintelligence interview that is part of his background investigation. He continued to drill with his unit from the time of the discharge order until this past May, the suit said.

In July, a member of the Army Recruiting Command told Sambe — who the lawsuit said had been promoted to specialist — that his discharge was a mistake. Later that same month, the suit said he received a letter from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service that informed him he owed the Army more than $1,100 in pay given in the wake of his discharge.

The incident, Stock said, is an example of the lawsuit’s allegation that the Army failed to notify recruits and troops of its actions but in some instances failed to inform units of the discharges, an action that reflected “chaos, disarray and disorder.”