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Le Roy Torres: He Won at the Supreme Court for a Job Congress Had Already Promised Him

Le Roy Torres did everything his country asked — twenty-three years in uniform, fourteen as a Texas state trooper — and came home from Iraq with lungs that no longer worked. This page is the documented record of what he asked for when he got back (a job he could still do, which federal law already guaranteed him), what his own state did instead, and what it took to make Texas answer for it: a wife who would not quit, a nonprofit built out of a hospital promise, a 5-4 win at the Supreme Court of the United States, a unanimous jury — and, after all of that, one more appeal by the state.

The service, and the promise

Le Roy Torres, of Robstown, Texas, enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1989 and served twenty-three years in all — seven on active duty, sixteen in the Reserve — before being medically retired with the rank of Captain. In 1998 he also became a Texas state trooper with the Department of Public Safety, and he wore that uniform for fourteen years. He was, in his own later words to Congress, a soldier, “a husband, a father and a first responder.”

The promise made to citizen soldiers like Torres is written into federal law. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA), enacted under Congress’s constitutional war powers, guarantees a returning servicemember the right to reclaim his civilian job — and, if a service-connected disability keeps him from performing that job, it requires the employer to make reasonable efforts to accommodate the disability or place him in a position he can perform. See 38 U.S.C. § 4313(a)(3). That was the whole promise. Everything on this page happened because Texas would not keep it voluntarily.

What happened — Balad, 2007–2008

In 2007 Torres was called to active duty and deployed to Balad, Iraq — Joint Base Balad, known to the troops as Camp Anaconda — where his unit lived within a mile of a ten-acre open-air burn pit. The pit burned around the clock: trash, human waste, medical waste, tires, computers, aircraft engines, all of it doused and set alight, its smoke drifting over the work sites and the quarters where the soldiers ate and slept. Torres began having severe headaches before he ever left Iraq.

He was honorably discharged in 2008 and came home already sick; within weeks he was in an emergency room with a severe respiratory infection. A lung biopsy — performed at Vanderbilt, after the VA’s own system could not tell him what was wrong — gave the condition a name: constrictive bronchiolitis, a scarring and narrowing of the lungs’ smallest airways, the signature injury of the burn-pit generation of veterans. Later diagnoses added toxic encephalopathy — a toxic brain injury, confirmed in 2018 after a decade of cluster headaches — and autoimmune disease. The VA, for its part, told him his illness was not related to his service; his benefits were denied for years and were not granted until early 2013, by which time, reporting on the family records, the Torreses were deep in debt and had faced foreclosure.

Torres still wanted to work. He asked DPS to reemploy him in a role his lungs could handle — he has said he was briefly given a temporary, modified assignment, and that the fight began when he asked for a permanent one. The court record states what the department offered instead: no different position at all, only a “temporary duty offer” of continued employment in his previous capacity as a trooper — the road job his doctors said he could not perform — and, per his Supreme Court briefing, notice that he would be fired if he did not report for it. He says he was encouraged to resign so he could apply for disability retirement. He resigned. The state then denied the disability retirement too. By 2011, the trooper’s fourteen years of state service were over.

What the institution did afterward

What DPS did next is the reason this page exists, and it comes in two parts — the department’s, and the state’s.

Torres sued DPS in Nueces County in 2017 under USERRA. Texas did not, at first, defend what it had done to him. It argued it could not be sued at all: as a sovereign state, it claimed immunity from a private lawsuit under a federal statute, and it argued Congress had no constitutional power to authorize one. The trial court rejected that argument. The Thirteenth Court of Appeals reversed it — Texas Department of Public Safety v. Torres, 583 S.W.3d 221 (2018) — holding that USERRA’s protection simply could not be enforced against Texas by the veteran it was written for. The Supreme Court of Texas declined to review the decision. A federal job guarantee, it turned out, stopped at the state line of the state that employed him.

Meanwhile, the second institution — the benefits system — had been failing the family in parallel, and that failure produced the other half of this story. Rosie Torres had worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs for twenty-three years; she knew the system from inside, and it still would not acknowledge what the burn pit had done to her husband. In 2010 the couple founded Burn Pits 360 and built an independent registry of burn-pit-sick veterans — the data the government had not collected — and Rosie carried it to Congress for over a decade. NPR recorded the promise underneath it all: “For my husband — 13 years ago, I made him a promise as they were wheeling him into the operating table to have his lung biopsy.” The registry the Torreses started in 2010 helped force the creation of a federal burn-pit registry in 2013, and their advocacy became a leading force behind the burn-pits legislation that followed.

The legal fight climbed:

And then the State of Texas appealed the verdict.

Where it stands now

On November 20, 2025, the case was argued again — this time before the Fifteenth Court of Appeals in Austin, in Texas Department of Public Safety v. Le Roy Torres, the state’s appeal of the jury’s $2.49 million verdict. Count it: a man deployed in 2007, forced out of his job by 2011, was still, eighteen years after Balad, sending lawyers into a Texas courtroom to defend what a jury had already decided — against the same state he had served as a trooper for fourteen years. Burn Pits 360 invited veterans to fill the courtroom, noting that the outcome could shape employment protections for veterans nationwide. Rosie Torres: “This is more than a legal case — it’s about justice for thousands of veterans who came home sick from their service and were met with indifference.”

The Supreme Court holding itself is settled law and cannot be appealed away: no state may again raise sovereign immunity to escape a USERRA suit, in any of the fifty states. That much, Torres won for every reservist and Guardsman who comes home hurt to a state job. What remains contested is only his own remedy — the money a jury said Texas owes him for the career it ended.

The rest of the work continues. Burn Pits 360 still runs its independent registry and its Warrior Support Center in Robstown, still testifies, still publishes guidance for the clinicians now treating the burn-pit generation. In 2023, Congressman Joaquin Castro formally recommended Le Roy and Rosie Torres for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, writing that through them “millions of veterans impacted by burn pits have the health care they deserve, and veterans have recourse against state government discrimination.” Le Roy Torres lives with terminal lung disease and a toxic brain injury, on supplemental oxygen, having told Congress years ago what the whole fight cost: “As a husband, a father and a first responder, I have been deprived of my dignity, honor and health.”

The job protection was written into law in 1994. Getting Texas to honor it took a lung biopsy, a wife’s promise, a nonprofit, a Supreme Court case, an act of Congress, and a jury — and Texas is still, as of the last argument, asking an appeals court to take the jury’s answer back. That is the pattern this site exists to document.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Six films: the man himself, his story told at length, the case on its way to the Supreme Court, the law explained, the signing his family helped win, and the fight — still — in a Texas courtroom.

The man himself. Le Roy Torres tells his own story — Balad, the biopsy, the lost trooper career, the toxic brain injury — in a long-form interview with the Ruderman Family Foundation (2023).

The telling. Torres recounts the deployment, the exposure, and the aftermath in his own words for the Warriors In Their Own Words oral-history series (audio).

The road to the Court. CNN's report on Torres and the burn pits as his fight with Texas moved toward the Supreme Court, posted by Rosie Torres (2021).

The case, explained. Quimbee's brief of Torres v. Texas Department of Public Safety — the facts, the sovereign-immunity question, and the 5-4 holding, in under two minutes.

The signing. The PACT Act becomes law in the East Room, August 10, 2022 — with Rosie and Le Roy Torres, whose registry and decade of advocacy helped carry it there, standing beside the President. (The White House.)

The fight, still live. The state's appeal of the jury verdict, argued before the Texas Fifteenth Court of Appeals on November 20, 2025 — eighteen years after Balad. (The court's own recording.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.