Veterans on the front lines of policing, ICE, and VA cuts

“One of the guys rolled his window down and pointed his handgun at my head and said he was gonna kill me.” — Chris Gentry

Chris Gentry spent six years as a military police officer and four years teaching debate on Chicago’s Southwest Side. He came back into organizing after a violent Midway Blitz response landed on his block and made him realize two things: the tactics Americans see at home are often direct imports from overseas military practice, and veterans have a unique — and underused — ability to change the story.

Why the veteran mystique matters

Gentry calls it the “veteran mystique”: veterans are trusted messengers in this country. Common Defense uses that credibility to argue against militarized policing, deportations of service members, and privatization of VA care.

That trust opens doors. It also explains why the media will amplify a white veteran’s account even when communities of color are suffering far worse. Gentry said that visibility is conditional — it arrives when the spectacle reaches certain neighborhoods — and then fades as fatigue sets in.

"We are doing a war in our cities — it's not new, but it's expanded." — Chris Gentry

ICE, CBP, and veterans: recruitment and consequences

Gentry laid out a clear through-line: many ICE and CBP agents are veterans. He estimates roughly 60 percent of those forces are ex-military in some places. Recruiters tap the same economic pressures that push people into the armed forces — healthcare, steady pay, a path out of a dead-end town.

What follows is predictable: tactics learned overseas—militarized patrols, camo deployments, razzle of force—get brought home. Gentry described helicopters and heavily armed units rolling through Pilsen and Brighton Park, and the chilling moment when an agent aimed a gun at him during a rapid response. He also noted how young some agents are — fresh out of high school in reentry programs — and how that affects neighborhoods when the agents are people’s neighbors.

He tied this to a pattern of invisibility: these tactics drew national attention only after they were used in big cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and DC. Before that, similar actions at the border or in small towns were routine and undercovered.

Deportations of veterans and the politics of erasure

The conversation put numbers and faces on something most readers don’t know: veterans are being deported. Gentry said the coalition working on this has documented more than a thousand veteran deportations since Trump returned to office. He gave the example of a Korean War veteran with two Purple Hearts, deported after 50-plus years in the U.S.

Locally, Chicago’s Manuel Perez Jr. was named as a high-profile case. Gentry framed these deportations as part of a broader contradiction: the state recruits people to fight for it, then uses immigration enforcement to discard them when convenient.

He also pointed to explicit racism inside the enforcement system — stories of agents who publicly embrace white supremacist symbols, then return to work — and wondered aloud how long institutions will tolerate that before they change course.

What’s happening at the VA: 26,000 cuts and a slow bleed

This was one of the conversation’s most concrete policy segments. Gentry walked through how privatization gets engineered: cut positions, drive up wait times, justify outsourcing to private community providers, and siphon public dollars into private hands.

Key figures he offered:

• 26,000 VA job cuts nationwide last year.

• 1,200 VA cuts in Illinois; over half removed from roles the VA itself had flagged as critically short.

• Chicago’s two big facilities each faced more than 300 position reductions.

Those cuts, he said, produce real harms: three-month waits for ultrasounds, women’s health at some sites reduced to one day a month, and nurses pressed into clinical roles they aren’t qualified for. He described a nurse told to “read up” on anesthesia because staff shortages forced her into an expanded role — and her honest fear: "I'm gonna kill someone."

Gentry named House Veterans Affairs Chair Mike Bost as a key political actor pushing through measures that enabled these changes. Common Defense has pushed back — defeating the Taking Care of America’s Veterans Act (TCAVA) changes that would have removed sleep-apnea and tinnitus coverage and loosened community-care rules — and built a public tool, VHAdata.org, to inspect cuts by district.

Organizing during fatigue: what worked and what’s next

Midway Blitz showed what rapid response looks like: whistles, patrols, community watchers and a citywide network willing to show up. But Gentry warned of real fatigue. He said there are more ICE vehicles and detentions now than during the initial blitz year, yet community shifts and patrols have become “hit or miss” as people return to jobs and childcare.

His practical ask is modest and realistic: create many small ways for people to plug in — a single shift a month, sharing information in group chats, or filling an occasional patrol slot — because asking everyone to live in a constant state of emergency is unsustainable.

Common Defense’s immediate work includes a veteran town hall on September 26 with union and veteran partners, educational outreach to student veteran groups, and local coalition building to defend VA services.

The political horizon and why it matters locally

Gentry is skeptical that national parties will suddenly pivot. He argued the center-left has long accommodated corporate and military interests, and that progressives remain a minority within the party. That’s one reason Common Defense focuses on backing progressive candidates — Abdul El-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan, Angie Nixon — where veteran endorsements help blunt attacks that progressives are unpatriotic.

On Chicago politics he fears Susana Mendoza’s mayoral bid has the best runway; her fiscal messaging and absence of glaring gaffes make her a plausible winner unless challengers coalesce.

Closing thought

This is not a narrow veterans’ issue. Gentry’s case is structural: economic precarity funnels people into uniformed power, those same individuals bring militarized methods back to U.S. streets, and political and private interests then marshal resources to privatize care and silence consequences. Organizing — especially when it centers veteran credibility in coalition with affected communities — is how those dynamics get challenged.

If you want to hear the full conversation, Chris Gentry's history and the local stories he names are on the Double V podcast episode. Consider this a field report: how we got here, who’s being used and abandoned, and where organizing is still making a dent.