A petition to President Biden to honor veterans and grant their pending pardons before his term runs out

Robert Vivar at Whiskey 8 aid station in the Tijuana River Valley, on September 29, 2023

On September 29, 2023 I met Robert Vivar, co-director of the Unified US Deported Veterans Resource Center, while making turkey and cheese sandwiches for migrants at the US-Mexico border for migrants. When I talked to him last Sunday Nov. 10, at the same border aid station, which is run by the American Friends Service Committee, he told me about his petition to President Biden to pardon US veterans in danger of being deported, and those already deported.  

His petition reads: 

Many people don’t even know that US veterans are being deported! This goes against everything we stand for as a country because US veterans deserve to access their rightfully earned VA benefits. They also deserve to come home to their loved ones and to the country for which they were willing to lay down their lives. As President Biden prepares to leave office, the lives of our recently returned veterans are at stake. Now is the time for us to stand up for them before they are forgotten. Sign the petition below to make sure that veterans who have returned are not deported again and that those veterans who are desperately waiting for approval from Homeland Security can finally come home. Let’s stand up for our veterans, as they have stood up for us.

Unified US Deported Veterans Resource Center, which sponsors Vivar’s petition, is an organization that provides assistance to US veterans who have been deported to Mexico. You can access the petition here. 

Vivar knows more than a little about immigration law. He was born in Mexico in 1956 but he moved to California at the age of six and grew up there. He worked for decades in various cities in the states, including a stint as a station manager for Aeromexico Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport. In the late 1990s, he became addicted to drugs. In the early 2000s he pled guilty to possession of methamphetamine precursors. He pled guilty, thinking he would be placed into a drug treatment program. Instead, he was deported to Mexico, the victim of bad legal advice. In 2018, Vivar filed a motion to overturn his conviction in the California courts, but that motion was denied. The Supreme Court later found that Vivar’s counsel failed to inform him that pleading guilty would get him deported. Furthermore, the Court found that, had Vivar been properly informed, that he would not have pled guilty. Consequently, Vivar was allowed to return to the US in May 2021.  But I didn’t know any of this as we were making sandwiches. Only afterwards did we get into a conversation.

A few years back, I had actually written a story about a project Vivar had been depicted in, the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project which depicted people who had been deported from the US into Mexico.  The series of murals, 20 feet high and 150 feet across, can be found on the Mexican side of the border fence on the Tijuana beach.   
While living as a deportee in Tijuana, Vivar worked as co-director of another mural project, the  Leave No One Behind Mural Project, which portrays the veterans, early-childhood arrivals, and deportee family members who have somehow run afoul of US immigration policy and found  themselves deported to Mexico.  

I mentioned to Vivar that I had been on the other side of the border and that I had seen the work of many muralists on the Mexican side of the border fence.

Vivar appreciates the power of murals to raise awareness. In 2017, when US Customs and Border Protection unveiled eight border wall prototypes in Otay Mesa, next to the border fence on the US side, he worked with artists to draw attention to the plight of migrants, including deported veterans.    

“The reason we painted those murals is because we knew that we would not be able to get our message to the media in protest of the prototype wall,” he told me.  “We thought, well, if we do some murals on the wall in front of the prototypes, the media is going to be here and they're going to see those murals.”