Gung-ho Citizen : 36-Year Mistake Leaves Ex-Marine a Man With Two Countries

While serving as a U.S. Marine during World War II, Martin Velasquez Venegas contracted a rather benign case of mistaken identity:

His honorable discharge said he was a U.S. citizen.

For 36 years, Venegas, a native of Mexico, mistakenly believed he was.

While building an auto upholstery business near downtown Los Angeles, Venegas headed his neighborhood American Legion post. He voted regularly and traveled freely back and forth to Mexico.

No one challenged the El Sereno man until he went to a passport office in 1982, while trying to arrange a trip to England. Passport officials demanded that he produce a U.S. birth certificate or a certificate of naturalization.

Venegas had only his honorable discharge.

“No way could I get a passport,” he recalled.

Venegas has been trying to straighten things out ever since.

“I always thought I was a citizen,” he said.

“It won’t hurt my life (if I can’t get formal citizenship),” the 70-year-old acknowledged. “But it’s just that--acting like a citizen for so many years--and then finding out that you’re not, that you can’t get a passport. It kind of gripes you.”

The mix-up began after Venegas was drafted into the Marines in 1945.

“I was in Camp Pendleton and I went to my CO (commanding officer) and told him that I wanted to be naturalized,” Venegas recalled. “I filled out a (naturalization) form--the clerk there filled it out--and then he said, ‘Do you swear that the information was the truth.’ I said ‘Yeah.’ ”

Venegas said he thought he had just been sworn in as a U.S. citizen. But Venegas has since learned that if he had really been made a citizen, he would have been sworn in in a court.

“When I got my discharge and it said ‘citizen,’ I went and got my GI (Bill) schooling in flying,” he recalled.

Then, with a partner, he bought his own plane.

“All these years I been flying back and forth to Mexico,” he said. “If they ask me anything, I say, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen.’ The only proof I have shown is a pilot’s license. . . . When I’m driving I say, ‘U.S. citizen.’ That’s all.”

Venegas, who came to this country legally when he was 5 and was issued his own green card when he was 16, also said he has voted for the last 40 years.

After his failure to obtain a passport, he asked the Marines and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to get to the bottom of his situation.

“I was trying to get the original form that I filed and why was it thrown in the wastebasket or whatever.”

He said he got no response.

He said he filed another request for records under the federal Freedom of Information Act, but again he got no response.

Then he wrote to the commandant of the Marine Corps requesting “anything in my service record that would indicate that I was sworn in and am a U.S. citizen.”

The Marine Corps sent him a “report of separation” that has blanks that say “citizen--yes or no,” with the “yes” checked.

Venegas knew, however, that the separation report would not be enough for the passport people.

So he took the advice of a clerk at the passport office and went to the Mexican Consulate, where he said he obtained a Mexican passport in one day. He took his trip to England to visit his British son-in-law’s parents in August, 1983.

Received Answer

A year later, back in Los Angeles, he finally got an answer to his Freedom of Information Act request. The INS told him that it had not yet found his records.

“This process is very tedious and time consuming,” the agency pointed out.

Venegas decided to file a new application for naturalization in 1984. He noted that he had served in the U.S. military, that he had a wife and two daughters all born in this country and that he had lived in the country since legally crossing the border at El Paso 65 years ago.

Military service does not automatically result in citizenship, but Venegas certainly qualifies. Legal aliens married to U.S. citizens can apply for citizenship after only three years.

In 1986, nearly two years after applying, Venegas was summoned to appear at an INS citizenship hearing in downtown Los Angeles, where he recalled the examiner asking him if he could speak English, among other things.

“I passed everything,” Venegas said.

“The last thing (the examiner) said was, ‘I need some more information.’ ”

Needed Records

The examiner said he needed the records of Venegas’ original crossing at El Paso to make sure that he had come to the United States legally.

That hearing was more than a year ago.

Impatient, Venegas said he contacted his brother’s wife’s cousin, who used to be an INS agent in El Paso. He prevailed upon him to ask another agent to read him the microfilm records over the phone.

“He’s reading the names of my mother, my sister, my brother and everybody (including me) when we came in in 1922. . . . I said, ‘How can I get that record?’ He says the only way you can do it is go through INS in Los Angeles. . . . Well, I went and told INS in Los Angeles that the record is over there, and they’re still waiting for it. . . . Once El Paso sends the record, then they call me in and I’m sworn in.”