A Korean-born soldier at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston learned Thursday she is being kicked out of the Army, a casualty of heightened scrutiny of immigrants in uniform, because immigration officials said she illicitly obtained a student visa years earlier.

Army Spc. Yea Ji Sea, a combat medic who has served for four years and recently re-enlisted with an unblemished record, is unsure how long she’ll have before being ordered off the post, where she lives.

“I’m kind of numb right now. I’m sure it will hit me tomorrow,” she said, recalling her reaction to being told of her discharge in her commander’s office. “I’m trying to just accept reality. It’s just it’s very surreal.”

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California said it was filing a lawsuit late Thursday contesting the government’s delay in processing her application for U.S. citizenship, along with a request for a temporary restraining order to force a hearing and a decision on it.

It’s an honorable discharge — but would still subject Sea to arrest and deportation because of her lack of immigration status, the lawsuit states.

Sea, 29 of Gardena, California, entered the Army under a program called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI. Now being phased out, it recruited noncitizens with critically needed language and culture skills from 2009 through last year.

MAVNI recruits like Sea are facing possible deportation after failing the program’s lengthy security review process. Unlike their citizen counterparts, recruits in the MAVNI program undergo additional checks. They can become citizens after finishing their background checks.

The federal lawsuit in Los Angeles seeks to force U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to settle Sea’s two-year-old citizenship application, asserting that the delay in deciding it violates the federal Administrative Procedure Act requiring processing within a reasonable time.

Sea came to the United States with her parents when she was 9 in January 1998 and stayed 10 years as a dependent under their visitor and investor visas. In 2008 she filed an I-539 application that included an arrival/departure form indicating she had last arrived in the U.S. on Oct. 27, 2007 as a B-2 visitor. Citizenship and Immigration Services alleged the accompanying I-94 form had been fraudulently obtained as part of a larger scheme involving the Neo-America Language School and other institutions.

The lawsuit said Sea was unaware that the owner of the school, Hee Sun Shim, and U.S. Customs & Border Protection agent Michael Anders had created false I-94 forms that allowed people to obtain F-1 student status. Shim, Anders and others were indicted in 2013 for their roles in the scheme.

“Spc. Sea, who was only 19 years old at the time when her I-539 application was filed, … believed that her F-1 status had been obtained lawfully,” the lawsuit states.

Citizenship and Immigration Services officials asked her about the I-94 form and I-539 application during an April 2, 2014 interview during a first, unsuccessful attempt to obtain citizenship. Sea told them she had never given false information to any U.S. government official during the immigration process. She repeated those statements in an interview later that month. “Nervous, scared and unaccompanied by counsel, Spc. Sea stated that the I-94 form was an accurate record of a lawful entry to the United States from South Korea on Oct. 27, 2007, even though it was not,” the lawsuit stated.

“She made a mistake,” one of her ACLU attorneys, Sameer Ahmed, said.

Sea was allowed to apply for naturalization again after showing good moral character for at least a year. The government has not acted on her latest application.

Sea works as an operations planner at Brooke Army Medical Center. She entered the Army in February 2014. The MAVNI program began in 2009 and ended last year over Pentagon concerns that some of those recruited through it could be security risks, with many of its recruits still waiting for a chance to enter basic training. Participants have to pass a security review required of those seeking top-secret clearances, though as non-citizens they would be unable to get such a clearance.

Immigrants who legally reside in the United States still can join the military without entering MAVNI and have long been a part of the military.

The Pentagon killed MAVNI last year on the basis of potential threats to national security by troops in the program, but a RAND study said it was “unable to estimate the specific security risk” posed by those in it, noting, “There are no publicly available reports of MAVNI recruits engaging in terror-, sabotage- or espionage-related activities.”

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Maj. Carla Gleason, cited documents submitted by government lawyers in justifying the decision to boot MAVNI recruits and soldiers. She said a review found that “some” MAVNI soldiers may have engaged in criminal activity that included making or possessing fraudulent student visas prior to being recruited. Those recruit applicants, she said, posed “a significant counter-intelligence security threat.”

Sea’s lawyers, meanwhile, said she’s earned two Army Achievement Medals, served as the sole pharmacy technician at the Camp Casey Combined Troop Aid Station when she was on a tour of duty in South Korea, during which she completed a 25-mile foot march over mountainous terrain in her combat gear.

“Spc. Sea continues to be a person of ‘good moral character,’” the lawsuit stated. “As Spc. Sea’s current supervisor has written in a character statement: ‘She claims this country, the only country that she (has) known for the majority of her life. She is doing something that only one percent of the population … has done and is continuing doing; fighting for a country that she is willing to (d)ie for…”

“Another supervisor said she ‘has the drive and professionalism needed to bring the U.S. Army to new heights. She represents the best the Army has to offer: a smart, agile young leader capable of handling immense challenges with marked success.’”

Both Sea and Ahmed, her lawyer, fear that now that she has been cut loose from the Army, she could be taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I do think that’s a possibility,” Ahmed said.

Sea said she had a plan when she reenlisted for two more years in December - work to obtain her citizenship and prepare to take her Medical College Admission Test.

In the meantime, she was working on an online bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Arizona State University and is three classes short of earning it.

She wanted to stay in the Army.

“I had a vision of what I wanted to be in the military,” Sea said. “I wanted to be a doctor in the Army to help soldiers, to help victims of war.”

“Right now what I’m scared of the most is driving back home. You know, there are like immigration points and they ask, ‘Are you a citizen?’ and I’m going to have to tell them no and you know, my home’s in California, it’s 48 hours away but I’m scared to go. I think that’s just ridiculous, but like, it’s my reality.”

sigc@express-news.net