“Here comes another one!”
From his guard booth, Benito Miranda Hernandez enthusiastically waved another car into the overnight car park. But the latest vehicle, like the others before it, drove straight past.
Hernandez was unfazed. Serving others has been one of the ideals he grew up with.
“The satisfaction that I’m helping you makes me feel good. It's like my soul needs something good, you know?” the 42-year-old father told Al Jazeera. “My mother says it well in Spanish: If you don’t live to serve, it’s not worth living.”
Hernandez, an animated man with a trim goatee, is a United States military veteran, having served three tours of duty during the country's war in Iraq. The US has been his home since childhood; he grew up in California, then spent years on the East Coast.
Hernandez’s job overseeing the overnight car park in San Diego comes after years in and out of prison, primarily for drug convictions. It is part of a reentry programme to help former prisoners transition back into society.
Hernandez feels like he's finally headed in the right direction. His sentence will conclude in August.
But there's a worry looming in the back of his mind: that, once he is released, he could be detained by immigration agents and deported. Hernandez does not have US citizenship.
“Just walking on the street, just walking out of the programme where I'm at, I can get picked up,” he told Al Jazeera.
Since President Donald Trump began his second term in 2025, the Republican leader has led a mass deportation campaign that has forcibly removed at least 675,000 people as of January, according to the administration’s own estimates.
The aim of the operation, Trump officials have said, is to expel the "worst of the worst". But some immigrant veterans, particularly those with criminal convictions, fear they too could be swept up in the deportation campaign.
The prospect leaves Hernandez, who was born in Mexico, frustrated and angry.
“I was willing to die for this f***ing country,” Hernandez said. “I went to war for this f***ing country. And you want to try to deport me?”
