Cesar Lopez dips a roller in black paint and glides it across a wall outside his house in the west Las Vegas Valley. Chickens cluck in the backyard near a flagpole topped by a red U.S. Marine Corps flag that’s waving slightly against the blazing sun.
Lopez was working last week to complete a mural, his tribute to U.S. military service members who have been deported to their native Mexico after getting in legal trouble in the United States.
For now, the only way for the veteran deportees to legally return to the U.S. is when they die and their remains are transported back here for a military funeral.
Or, they can also do what Lopez did after being deported in 2012: Embark on a treacherous and possibly deadly hike across the U.S.-Mexico border to sneak back into the United States illegally.
Lopez, a U.S. Marine veteran who was born in Mexico then came to the U.S. as a child in the 1980s, was deported about eight years ago after a 12-year-old marijuana conviction was discovered during a customs check on a return trip from Central America.
“Guys, we were willing to die for our country,” Lopez said he told other U.S. military veterans deported in Mexico. “I’m willing to die for my family.”
While most undocumented immigrants might hover in the shadows of society amid fear of being deported, Lopez is in the open and actively coordinates with elected officials and presidential candidates with hopes of helping bring about change for deported veterans.
During the lead-up to this year’s Nevada presidential caucuses, he spoke to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg about the veterans’ plight. He also got the attention of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, who form the Democratic ticket challenging President Donald Trump in November.
Lopez’s efforts are featured in the recently released Netflix documentary series “Immigration Nation.”
Lopez said Biden and Harris, like the other Democrats, have made promises of helping veterans in a similar situation. He continues to be vocal to ensure they follow through if they take the White House.
A visit to the Trump campaign office in Henderson nearly got him arrested, so he’s not counting on help from that quarter, he said.
It’s estimated there are 500 to 1,000 veterans exiled to Mexico, about 250 of whom are affiliated with the Unified U.S. Deported Veterans support group.
If Biden wins the election, Lopez said he would attend the inauguration in January and stick around to try to get a pledge that Biden’s administration will do something to help bring the veterans back onto American soil.
Either way, he expects that deported veterans will line up along the U.S.-Mexico border and start their walk back into the American side.
“Go ahead and say no now,” Lopez said. “Go ahead and say no now.”
Lopez was born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. When Lopez was a toddler, his mother left him and his sisters in the care of a friend while she made her way to Los Angeles. The children’s father was absent.
His mother came back to get her children when Lopez was around 4.
In 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. were granted amnesty, his mother became legal. She, in turn, sponsored her children. Lopez was given a “green card,” which granted him permanent U.S. residency.
Growing up in California, Lopez was the target of racist slurs and insults from kids, he said. Being Mexican was a stain in the harassers’ eyes.
Lopez hung around the Echo Park area of Los Angeles, listening to oldies songs and gangsta rap. In his eyes, he was American. When immigration authorities conducted raids in his neighborhood, he felt confident enough to tell them, “I’m going to (expletive) school man, leave me alone.”
After high school and feeling a deep sense of patriotism for the country that took his family in, Lopez joined the Marines in 1993. The racial discrimination followed him into the Marine Corps. There, he was a hot head who fought back, getting in trouble. “I wasn’t able to hold back,” he said. “It took me many years to be able to take insults and look the other way.”
Upon discharge in 1995, Lopez relocated to Las Vegas. After a failed marriage, he worked a minimum wage job, stretching his earnings to live, pay for his college and pay child support.
In 2000, he got busted in New Mexico for transporting a couple dozen pounds of marijuana. Taking his lawyer’s advice, he pleaded guilty and then pleaded with the judge to give him a second opportunity. The judge agreed, and Lopez did not serve jail time.
His conviction was cleared from his record in less than two years, but he didn’t know that admitting guilt also landed him on a deportation list.
He returned to Las Vegas, where he married again, worked construction and became an advocate for homeless veterans. Seeing the way they were treated, he said, filled him with disillusionment for the U.S. government.
It wasn’t until 12 years later, as he was flying back from Costa Rica, where he worked a few months as a translator, that he was detained in Houston and locked up in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
Those facilities shouldn’t be called “detention centers” because if someone is locked up and chained, “it’s a (expletive) prison,” he said.
He was deported four months later to Mexico from Laredo, Texas. Crossing into Nuevo Laredo, Lopez said a Mexican official saw his Marines tattoos and told him, “I feel so bad for you guys.”
That’s when he learned there were other U.S. veterans who’ve been kicked out of the country they served.
“How does this happen?” Lopez wondered.
He knew he had to work his way back into the U.S. In preparation, he hiked 20 miles a day for three weeks in Baja California. He also monitored Border Patrols at crossings into the U.S. Finally, he found a place to cross that only involved him climbing a mountain.
He persuaded an acquaintance to pick him up on the American side, thinking he would be safe and sound and back in America in less than a day — or so he thought.
The acquaintance backed out as Lopez was ready to go down the mountain. Lopez wound up hiking for four nights and three days, keeping an eye out for U.S. and Mexican authorities, and drug cartel members.
Back in the U.S., he became an advocate for himself and his fellow veterans left behind in Mexico. By 2015, his group was visiting Washington, D.C., gaining attention from, among others, then-Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M.
As luck would have it, Lujan Grisham in 2018 was elected governor of New Mexico, where Lopez had been convicted. Lopez saw a ray of hope in a possible pardon.
He visited Lujan Grisham’s office uninvited. The intense scene was highlighted in the Netflix documentary.
The governor wasn’t able to see Lopez, but her staff took his information. Lopez started to cry, asking for mercy and saying his life depended on one signature.
On June 26, Lujan Grisham released a list of 19 names, her first pardons. Lopez was on it.
When he got a paper confirmation soon afterward in the mail, Lopez said he cried out of excitement for days.
Although the documentary showed him as being extraordinarily cautious about immigration authorities, having surveillance cameras positioned outside his house and driving better than a driving instructor, he said he let go of the fear after the pardon.
He’s still subject to deportation because he violated federal law by illegally reentering to the United States.
“I’m at peace with myself,” Lopez said, “in the sense that I got what I wanted, I wanted (it) recognized that the government did me wrong.”
He said he has also been able to live with his past missteps, because everybody has them.
“I believe that life is what you make of it, man, “ Lopez said chuckling. “And if you want to have a life where there’s no mistakes and have no hardships, well (expletive), you better be plugged into the matrix, because life is pain, real life is hard work, and real life is what you make of it … and mistakes happen.”
Lopez said painting the mural, his first piece of art, was cathartic. On one portion of it are the names of a dozen deported soldiers who only came back to the U.S. because they are dead. A portion of the wall shows a river separating two iconic mountains in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez. There’s a silhouette of military boots, a helmet and rifle positioned as a memorial of a fallen soldier. “Rest In Peace: Ur Home.”
Lopez caressed the wall as he explained how he cried the three days as he painted it.
“I (gave) them a home at my home, they’re at peace and I’m at peace.”