There is no clearer measure of a nation's character than how it treats those who volunteered to defend it.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains U.S. military veterans—as it has done in recent months—it doesn't just make a bureaucratic error. It commits an act of profound infidelity that strikes at the heart of the military covenant and degrades the very meaning of service and citizenship. These detentions reveal a system that has lost sight of what veterans have sacrificed and what the nation owes them in return.
George Retes raised his right hand and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He stood ready to deploy wherever his country needed him, to face whatever dangers that service might bring. And when an immigration raid swept through his workplace in July, he was pepper-sprayed, dragged from his vehicle, and locked up for three days, missing his daughter’s birthday, and denied due process.
Retes claims that he asked for the agent’s badge number before being detained and, while in custody, was denied a call to his family or an attorney. He was released after three days and never charged. Video footage seems to confirm Retes’ story.
This is what betrayal looks like.
Retes joined the Army at the age of eighteen, telling Jon Favreau on the “Pod Save America” podcast that he joined the Army because he wanted “to do something bigger.” After training, he was deployed to Iraq for ten months, and at the end of his service, he was honorably discharged.
Military service, like what Retes signed up to do, is a transformative commitment that asks young men and women to risk their lives and place the nation's needs above their own. When an individual joins the military, they accept that they may be called upon to kill or be killed in defense of their fellow citizens.
Members of our armed services agree to miss births, funerals, and countless ordinary moments that make up a life. They sign away years of their youth to an institution that will demand everything and promise, in return, only that their service matters, that they are valued, that they belong.
When ICE detains a veteran like Retes, when agents tear gas an American soldier and throw him in detention while he pleads that he served this country, every single element of that sacred exchange is violated. The veteran held up his end of the bargain. He did everything his nation asked. And in return, his country treated him like an invader.
Another veteran who was detained in Newark, N.J., had his military documentation questioned by ICE agents. His proof of having served in the United States Armed Forces wasn't enough.
At a recent press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters: “No American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true.”
In response to Noem’s statement, Retes, again to Favreau, said, “People see what’s going on in the world.” Backing up Retes’ claims is a ProPublica investigation, which documented 170 cases of U.S. citizens who have been arrested by immigration agents across the country since Trump started his second term.
Veterans are experiencing real trauma from these encounters, which are taking place not on the battlefield, but here at home. Being detained is not a minor inconvenience—it is imprisonment. Being pepper sprayed by your own government's agents after serving that government is not an administrative mishap—it is assault. Being told your service doesn't prove your citizenship is not an administrative question; it is an erasure of identity.
And it doesn't end when they are released. These veterans must live with the knowledge that their sacrifice was insufficient proof of belonging. They must reconcile having served a nation that would treat them this way. They must carry the psychological weight of being caged by the very system they defended.
The current system under the Trump administration reveals something dark about us as a society—we have allowed an immigration enforcement apparatus that feels free to attack soldiers or dismisses military service as insufficient evidence of belonging, leading to the duplicity of the very people who believed most deeply in what America promises.
And this is not a system that operates in moral ambiguity. It is one that has been explicitly endorsed by the president. In a recent 60 Minutes interview, President Donald Trump was asked whether ICE raids had gone too far. His response was chillingly clear: “No, I think they haven't gone far enough because we've been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.”
We made a deal with our veterans. We asked them to serve, and we promised that service would mean something. When ICE detains them, that promise is broken in the cruelest way possible. There is no policy goal, no enforcement priority, no operational concern that justifies this disloyalty.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
