Army continues to try to expel immigrant recruits
BOSTON — The Army’s abrupt discharges of immigrant recruits may not be over after all.
Faced with legal challenges from some of the recruits, who said they had been expelled unfairly on specious security grounds, the Army suspended the discharges over the summer and said it would re-examine its policy.
But an internal Army email message obtained by the New
York Times suggests that the Army may be looking for different grounds for expelling the recruits that would sidestep the litigation.
The recruits had signed up for a program known as Military Accessions Vital to National Interests, or MAVNI, which offered legal immigrants with vital language or medical skills a fast track to citizenship in exchange for military service. About 11,000 troops have joined the armed forces through the program since MAVNI started in 2008.
The Defense Department ended the program in 2016.
It cited security concerns, and imposed strict new screening on thousands of recruits who had already signed enlistment contracts for the program but had not yet begun basic training.
The Army flagged many of them as security risks, even when other federal agencies had cleared them for more sensitive jobs in the civilian world.
Declassified reports show that the security threats the Army thought it saw in the recruits were often ordinary aspects of immigrant life.
A group of recruits sued the Army this summer, saying they were being unfairly discharged.
The Army suspended the discharges and said it planned to “conduct a review of the administrative separation process.”
The internal Army email suggests that the Army has been using the time since then to have military lawyers pore through the immigrant recruits’ records, looking for possible crimes that could be used to force them out.
The email, sent to lawyers in the Army Reserve in mid-August, asked for volunteers to search the recruits’ security files “to determine whether the applicants admitted to or provided information about a crime.”
Charging MAVNI recruits with crimes would allow the Army to force them out quickly regardless of the legal challenges over background checks.
Asked about the email, a Defense Department spokeswoman denied that the purpose of the legal reviews of the recruits’ records was to force them out of the service.
The spokeswoman, Maj. Carla Gleason of the Air Force, said the legal reviews requested in the email were canceled a few days after the order went out.