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Just before dusk, Carlos Torres gets ready for work on the night shift.

The memories of his former life hang all around his concrete box of a home in the Aquiles Serdan section of Reynosa, one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous cities. A black POW/MIA flag hangs over the bed in a cramped bedroom; yellowed photos of Fort Bragg, N.C., sit on a dresser; an Army jacket rests on a makeshift clothes rack.

These days, Torres, 61, puts on a different kind of uniform: He tucks a blue button-down shirt, emblazoned with "Seguridad,” into crisp black jeans, adjusts his black baseball cap and makes sure his ID card is clipped on tight. Every afternoon he gets in his used Ford sedan, the suspension shot to hell, and navigates the rutted streets of this border city, which has been locked in a cycle of drug cartel violence for half a dozen years.

He points the car toward a drab industrial park on the edge of town where he earns a little over 80 cents an hour making sure employees who earn even less building air compressors don’t pocket the parts.

Forty-four years after he volunteered for the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, Torres is among an untold number of U.S. military veterans who’ve been deported to Mexico over the past decade after arrests or prison sentences. In cities and towns up and down the Mexico-Texas border, former soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines, who fought in conflicts from Southeast Asia to Iraq, try to make a living in the midst of a grinding drug war.

Nearly all the deported veterans in Mexico were legal residents of the United States who, for a variety of reasons, failed to finish the naturalization process and then were convicted of crimes after they got out of the service.

Immigration experts and lawyers say the number of veteran deportations has increased in recent years, as veterans have been caught in the same dragnet that has led to the removal of record numbers of convicted criminals who were staying in the U.S. without legal permission.

In recent weeks, lawmakers have joined immigration advocates in raising fundamental questions about the issue: Should legal immigrants who serve honorably in the U.S. military during wartime receive protection from deportation if they run afoul of the law? Should veterans ejected from the U.S. after serving prison time for nonviolent felonies ever be allowed to return?

Last month a group of congressional Democrats introduced a bill that would make it easier for some veterans to avoid deportation. But that legislation, like previous congressional attempts, is likely to fall victim to the current political paralysis over immigration. In this climate, even advocacy groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars express little sympathy for immigrant veterans who commit crimes.

Regardless of the politics surrounding them, many deported veterans say they feel like strangers in a homeland they left as children.

"A lot of people look at me funny when I speak Spanish because I mispronounce some words,” Torres says. "They’ll laugh.”

He left Mexico when he was an infant and grew up in Texas and California. At 18, as a permanent legal resident but not a citizen, he volunteered for the Army toward the end of the Vietnam War, and he served four years, until 1976.

Though he hoped to go to war, his unit never deployed. He had nine children in the United States, including four sons who would go on to serve a combined 11 tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1994, he went to prison on charges of marijuana possession and delivery, and he was deported after a four-year term in state prison. He returned to the U.S. illegally a couple of times he says, to see children and an ailing mother, and in 2010 he was deported again to Mexico. He has lived in Reynosa ever since.

He says it will never feel like home.

"I look American. I act American. I dress American,” he says. "I am an American.”

Andy Lopez, a Desert Storm veteran who was deported two years ago after serving a five-year sentence for drug trafficking, said his new home of Nuevo Progreso, across the border from the Weslaco area, feels similarly foreign. "I don’t think I’ll ever get used to living here,” he said “I won’t. I don’t belong here.”

Some deported veterans say they find themselves targets of cartel recruiters attracted to their military training.

Bibiana Marín, whose husband is a Marine veteran deported in 2008, said traffickers approached the couple after they settled in Ciudad Acuña, across the border from Del Rio. "They knew he was in the military,” she said. "We were watched all the time, threatened. I was bringing the kids to Del Rio every day for school and they wanted me to carry drugs.”

She said the couple, fearing for their safety, returned to Texas soon afterward. Her husband was charged with illegal re-entry and found guilty by a federal jury in February.

"You worry that if you stand out, they’re going to investigate you and see what you’re about and try to get you into their business,” Lopez said. "I don’t bother anybody. I don’t go to places I don’t need to go. I don’t really go out after dark.”

Deported veterans say they are paying too high a price for what were often nonviolent crimes.

"I screwed up. I understand that,” said José María Martínez, a Vietnam veteran who was arrested on marijuana trafficking charges in 1997 and later deported. "I did my five years (in federal prison). You’ve got so many U.S. citizens who do worse, and they are still there. But I was deported. That’s twice I’m being punished.”

Deported veterans also lose access to Social Security and some Department of Veterans Affairs benefits. The Social Security Administration stops sending benefits checks once they receive notice of a deportation by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the agency. Veterans can still receive VA disability and pension checks but lose access to VA clinics and hospitals (in some cases, the VA reimburses foreign medical care).

Despite their deportations, many veterans in Mexico remain steadfastly patriotic, their bedrooms full of military regalia. Old uniforms haunt Mexican closets.

"The hardest part is being told you’re not wanted, being told you’re useless,” Torres says. "I swore allegiance when I raised my right hand.”