No Summer Soldier

• Author: Lorelei Laird
• Pages: 66-67

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PHOTO BY JOHN D. & CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION

66 || ABA JOURNAL JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2019

No Summer Soldier

When things go wrong, immigrants serving in the

military look to Margaret Stock

By Lorelei Laird

When Margaret

Stock first

received the

Pent agon ’s

September 2016

memo, she thought someone had

made an amateur mis take.

“I’m an attorney, and I taught con-

stitutional law, so I obviously rec-

ognized immed iately [that], hey,

somebody at the Pentagon didn’t

do their job; they’re putting out an

unconstit utional memo,” Stock says.

But it wasn’t an error. The memo

essentially shut down the Mil itary

Accessions Vital t o the National

Interest program, whic h recruited

immigrants w ith certain highly

desired skills. The prog ram had more

than 10,000 participants , and the

memo ordered extra backgrou nd

checks on all of them. To Stock’s

eye, the implication was that non-

citizens posed a thr eat to national

security. She thought that was ludi-

crous and obv ious national-orig in

discrimination.

But until the checks were com-

pleted—and Stock says the mili-

tary had no c apacity to complete

them—the recruits were grounded ,

ineligible for orders even to basic

traini ng. Furthermore, the me mo

said MAVNIs, as people enli sted

through the program a re known,

were ineligible to be ocers for six to

eight years. Because a ll doctors are

ocers, that insta ntly eliminated all

the doctors the program h ad inten-

tionally recruit ed. Individual ser-

vices were welcome to continue

MAVNI but only after mee ting

requirements that Stock say s were

impossible to meet.

Word got around, and soon mes-

sages start ed coming in from

MAVNIs to Stock’s Anchorage ,

Alaska , law firm, Cascadia Cross-

Border Law. They still come in, and

Stock is doing what she can to help.

“It’s been just a flood of people

with problems calli ng me,” she

says. “People in America would

be appalled if they knew what t he

Pentagon was doing.”

SERVICE TO THE COUNTRY

If Stock seems passionate a bout

MAVNI, that might be bec ause she

helped create it. For 28 years, she

balanced her career a s an immigra-

tion lawyer with anot her as a soldier

in the U.S. Army Reser ve, retir-

ing as a lieutenant colonel when she

reached the statutor y maximum

service. A s an immigration lawyer,

she’s served on the ABA Commission

on Immigration (and served as a

state co-ch air for the American Bar

Foundation Fellows); spoken at ABA

meetings; and created the A merican

Immigration Law yers Association

Military A ssistance Program, which

connects milit ary families to pro

bono immigration lawyer s.

As a soldier, Stock says she “had

an exciting time for 28 years” deploy-

ing to Japan, Korea and around the

United States. The Ar my was what

brought her to Anchorage, where she

was stationed at Fort Richa rdson in

the mid-1980s. It also gave her the

flexibility to ea rn graduate degrees

from Harvar d University and the

U.S. Army War College and later

teach at the U.S. Milita ry Academy

at West Point, New York. She’s been

vocal about her belief that imm i-

grants benefit the mil itary.

That may be why, in 2006, Sen.

John McCain, who died last yea r,

called Stock a nd asked her to tes-

tify before the Senat e about recruit-

ing more immigrants to t he military.

Soon, she was ordered to act ive

duty to help create a program for

recruiting imm igrants with vital

skills—medical sk ills and certain

languages—who the milita ry was

having a hard time findi ng through

ordinary rec ruitment. In exchange

for their service, t hese recruits would

be able to jump to the front of the

line for naturalize d citizenship.

Initially, MAVNI seemed suc-

cessful; it was approved u nder then-

President George W. Bush and

implemented under former President

Barack Obama. W hen Stock hit her

statutorily requ ired retirement date

in 2010, the government kept calling

for advice. But Naomi Verdugo, who

worked with Stock on MAVNI b efore

her own retirement, says cer tain peo-

ple at the Pentagon didn’t trust the

foreign-born, and they kept addi ng

more screenings.

“It seems like an appetite that c an

never be satisfied,” Verdugo says.

“Eventually the program bec omes