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The MAVNI Recruits: The Citizenship They Were Promised for Serving

They were recruited because the Army needed what they had and could not grow at home: native fluency in languages spoken where American soldiers were fighting, and medical training the services were short of. In exchange for an eight-year service commitment, legal immigrants who were not citizens — and not even green-card holders — were offered the oldest bargain in American military history, made explicit: serve honorably, and the country you serve becomes yours, fast. More than ten thousand took the deal. Then, beginning in 2016, the Defense Department froze their program, rewrote the terms after they had signed, withheld the single form that made the citizenship promise operative, and — in hundreds of cases documented in the Army's own filings — discharged the recruits or left them waiting until the visas they had arrived on ran out. It took three federal class actions, spread over six years, to make the government issue the paperwork it had promised at the recruiting station. This page is the record of that promise, of how it was broken, and of what the courts did and did not restore.

The service and the promise

The program was called MAVNI — Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest. Federal law generally limits enlistment to citizens and lawful permanent residents, but 10 U.S.C. § 504(b)(2) allows a service secretary to enlist others when the enlistment is “vital to the national interest.” On December 5, 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates authorized MAVNI as a pilot on that authority, and Army recruiting under it began in February 2009. The Congressional Research Service’s contemporaneous account describes the design: up to 1,000 recruits in a one-year pilot, drawn from people lawfully present in the United States — nonimmigrants on visas, asylees, refugees, and people with temporary protected status — who held “critical skills”: physicians, nurses, and experts in designated languages and cultures. The program was designed with the help of Margaret Stock, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and immigration lawyer, and the Army was always its principal user.

The citizenship side of the bargain was not a recruiter’s embellishment. It was statute. Under the wartime naturalization provision, 8 U.S.C. § 1440, a noncitizen who serves honorably in the Selected Reserve or on active duty during a designated period of hostilities may naturalize without first obtaining a green card, without the ordinary residence requirements, and without filing fees. Executive Order 13269 (July 3, 2002) designated the period beginning September 11, 2001 as such a period, and it remains in effect. One day of honorable service is enough to be eligible. The hinge document was Form N-426: a form the recruit completes and the military must certify, attesting to honorable service, before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) can act. In the program’s working years, certification was routinely issued at or before arrival at basic training, and MAVNI soldiers commonly naturalized around the end of basic training.

The program worked, on its own terms, for years. It was suspended briefly after the 2009 Fort Hood shooting while vetting was revised, resumed in 2012, and was extended and enlarged in 2014. More than 10,000 recruits joined through MAVNI — the department’s own figure was about 10,400. Sergeant Saral Shrestha, a MAVNI recruit from Nepal, was the Army’s Soldier of the Year in 2012. The recruits filled billets — linguists, medics, dentists and other clinicians — that the services had recruited them, specifically, to fill.

The promise, then, had three parts, all written down: a lawful enlistment for people the ordinary rules excluded, an eight-year commitment from the recruit, and an expedited, statutory path to citizenship from the government, documented by a certified N-426. What follows is what happened to the third part.

What happened

In September 2016, the Defense Department imposed enhanced security screening on MAVNI recruits and stopped taking new enlistments; the last recruits entered around October 2016. The department’s stated reason, given by its spokeswoman, Air Force Major Carla Gleason, in 2018, was that several classified assessments had concluded the program “was vulnerable to an unacceptable level of risk from insider threats such as espionage, terrorism, and other criminal activity.” That rationale is the department’s, attributed as such; what is not contested is the effect. The screening — counterintelligence screening and two adjudications the litigation called the National Security Determination and the Military Security Suitability Determination — had no fixed completion deadline. As of April 2018, Gleason told NPR, roughly 1,100 people had signed contracts but had not shipped to basic training. Recruits drilled with Reserve units, or waited in the Delayed Entry and Delayed Training programs, while their temporary visas ran down — and enlistment conferred no immigration status to replace an expiring visa.

In July 2017, the burden shifted from delay to formal hold. Under a July 7, 2017 USCIS policy, naturalization applications from MAVNI soldiers who already held certified N-426s were put on hold until the Defense Department completed its enhanced screening — the policy at the center of the Nio case, filed by ten Selected Reserve soldiers led by Kusuma Nio who had done everything asked of them and watched their applications stop moving.

On October 13, 2017, the Defense Department issued the guidance that broke the bargain in terms. Effective immediately, a foreign national could receive a certification of honorable service only after completing all security and suitability screening with a favorable determination, completing initial military training, and completing at least 180 consecutive days of active-duty service or at least one year of satisfactory service in the Selected Reserve. The previous standard — the one in the statute, and in force when these recruits signed — was one day of honorable service. The guidance also reached backward: certifications already issued to service members whose screening was incomplete would be recalled and decertified. And lawful permanent residents, who were never MAVNI recruits at all, could no longer ship to initial training until a background investigation was complete and favorable, rather than initiated. The department said the changes “reflect lessons learned from the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) Pilot Program.” Secretary James Mattis said the same day the department was “taking the steps obviously to save the program, if it can be saved.” The program’s authorization lapsed on September 30, 2017, and has never been renewed.

For the recruits already in the pipeline, the consequences compounded. Without a certified N-426 there was no naturalization application; without a pending application, recruits lost the practical protection against removal proceedings that a pending case had provided; and without a ship date — which the unfinished screening controlled — there was no way to start the new 180-day or one-year clocks. Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, who presided over Kirwa and Nio, summarized the original exchange: the recruits had been told that “in exchange for eight years of military service, they would be able to pursue an expedited path to citizenship shortly after enlistment,” and the new rules extended that time “by two or three years,” exposing them to discharge and possible deportation — and, she noted, to severe repercussions in some home countries for having tried to join a foreign military.

Then came the discharges. In the summer of 2018, the Associated Press reported that immigrant reservists and recruits were being abruptly discharged — some told they were security risks because they had relatives abroad, others told only that the Defense Department had not completed their background checks, which by the department’s own design meant they had failed a requirement the department itself controlled. Immigration attorneys told the AP they knew of more than forty such discharges at that point. The Army’s own list, filed in federal court in the Calixto litigation and unsealed at the AP’s request in October 2018, put the documented number at 502 MAVNI service members discharged between July 2017 and July 2018, about two-thirds of them recorded as “refuse to enlist” — a characterization recruits who had signed contracts, taken the oath, and drilled for years while begging to ship disputed in case after case. One was Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who had come to the United States at twelve, enlisted in the Army Reserve in Massachusetts in 2016 for his Portuguese, and been promoted to private second class shortly before discharge papers arrived bearing no stated reason beyond “MAVNI — Military Personnel Security.” He had, his complaint alleged, been given no chance to defend himself or appeal. Panshu Zhao, a Texas A&M doctoral candidate from China serving in the Army Reserve since 2016, was told he had failed a background check, without specifics or an appeal: “It is just like you’re dropped from heaven to hell,” he told the AP.

USCIS numbers reported by Military.com show the pipeline closing in the same months: military naturalization applications fell from 3,132 in the last quarter of fiscal 2017 to 1,069 in the first quarter of fiscal 2018, and approvals from 2,123 to 755 — figures covering noncitizen service members generally, which both agencies attributed to the new requirements.

What the institution did afterward

The first corrections came from a court, not from the department. On October 25, 2017 — twelve days after the October guidance issued — Judge Huvelle granted a preliminary injunction in Kirwa v. U.S. Department of Defense, 285 F. Supp. 3d 21 (D.D.C. 2017), the class action brought by Selected Reserve MAVNI soldiers Mahlon Kirwa, Santhosh Meenhallimath, and Ashok Viswanathan, who had drilled since 2016 and been refused certification. The injunction barred the department from refusing N-426s to Selected Reserve MAVNI enlistees under Section II of the October 13 guidance, and from refusing to certify as honorable the service of an enlistee who had served one day or more, except on conduct grounds generally applicable to all soldiers; an amended order directed best efforts to certify or deny within two business days. On December 1, 2017, the court certified the Kirwa class. The certifications then flowed under court supervision. The department’s April 22, 2020 status report states the total plainly: 1,693 N-426 requests submitted, and 1,693 granted.

The Nio class — soldiers who already had their N-426s but whose naturalizations USCIS had frozen — won in stages. The court certified that class in October 2017. On May 22, 2019, in Nio v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 385 F. Supp. 3d 44 (D.D.C. 2019), the court granted the plaintiffs summary judgment in part and vacated, as arbitrary and capricious, the requirement in the July 7, 2017 USCIS policy that a MAVNI soldier’s Military Security Suitability Determination be complete before USCIS would adjudicate the naturalization application. On August 20, 2020, the court converted its preliminary relief into a permanent injunction: the Defense Department was permanently enjoined from implementing Section III of the October 13, 2017 guidance — the decertification provision — and from decertifying, rescinding, recalling, revoking, or otherwise invalidating the class’s duly issued N-426s, except on conduct grounds generally applicable to members of the military. The court entered judgment for the plaintiffs, and in November 2020 the government voluntarily dismissed its appeal.

The discharge cases took longer and ended in a settlement rather than a judgment. Calixto sued in late June 2018; in July 2018 the Army revoked his discharge, and in August 2018 the Army’s acting assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, Marshall Williams, ordered an immediate suspension of involuntary separation processing for MAVNI soldiers. At least three dozen discharged recruits were reinstated as the suits mounted. But the Calixto class action continued for four more years, resolved only on September 22, 2022, when the court certified a class and approved a settlement with the Army. Under it, class members — everyone who enlisted through MAVNI on or before September 30, 2017 and either had not been discharged or had received a discharge not characterized as honorable, general, other than honorable, bad conduct, or dishonorable — became entitled to a certified N-426 even if they had never shipped to basic combat training, through a dedicated Army process with class counsel copied on each request. Counsel’s litigation site states the effect in its own words: the settlement “removes the last known military service-related impediments to naturalization for MAVNI soldiers” and removes, for those already naturalized, any risk of denaturalization based on their Army service or a past or future “uncharacterized” discharge.

Two neighboring rulings complete the picture. In Samma v. U.S. Department of Defense, the ACLU’s class action for noncitizen service members beyond the MAVNI Selected Reserve classes, Judge Huvelle ruled on August 25, 2020 that the October 2017 policy’s minimum service requirements were contrary to law, vacated them, and enjoined the department from withholding certified N-426s for failure to meet them — restoring the one-day standard for that class as well. The government appealed; while the appeal was pending, the department rescinded the time-in-service requirements itself, in a June 17, 2021 memorandum. And in Tiwari v. Mattis, in the Western District of Washington, Judge Thomas Zilly ruled after trial — following an April 2018 preliminary injunction — that the department could not subject naturalized MAVNI soldiers, by then United States citizens, to continuous monitoring and recurring security checks not imposed on U.S.-born soldiers, noting that the department’s own witnesses acknowledged no naturalized MAVNI soldier had ever been charged with or convicted of espionage or any other criminal offense, or been denaturalized.

Class counsel at Morgan Lewis, which with Fried Frank carried the three cases pro bono — more than 24,000 hours by the firms’ own accounting in fee filings — summarized the campaign in February 2023: complete victories including a permanent injunction and summary judgment, resulting in the naturalization of more than 2,000 class members, and the Calixto settlement enabling hundreds more to obtain certifications. That 2,000-plus figure is counsel’s; it is larger than the 1,693 Kirwa-class certifications the government itself reported in April 2020 because it spans all three classes.

What the institution did not do is equally specific. The Defense Department never revived MAVNI and never announced a successor program. No recruit who lost years — to drilling in limbo, to a visa that expired while a check sat unprocessed, to a discharge later revoked or settled around — was compensated for them, and no apology to the class appears in the record this page can cite. The remedies were paperwork remedies: necessary, hard-won, and exactly as large as the promise’s paperwork dimension — and no larger.

Where it stands now

As of October 2026, the litigation architecture is complete and the program it defended is gone. The Kirwa certifications were granted — 1,693 of 1,693 requests in the government’s status reporting located for this page. The Nio permanent injunction stands. The Calixto settlement remains the operative channel for class members who still need a certified N-426, and Morgan Lewis funded a two-year legal fellowship, announced in 2023, to guide hundreds more noncitizen soldiers and veterans through naturalization. The Samma requirements were vacated in 2020 and rescinded in 2021, though the government’s appeal was argued in the D.C. Circuit on January 30, 2025, and no later ruling was located for this page — a live loose end concerning a policy the department has already withdrawn.

MAVNI has not been reauthorized; no program accepting non-permanent residents for enlistment in exchange for expedited naturalization is operating. The roughly 10,400 people who came through MAVNI include soldiers who naturalized before the freeze and served full careers, soldiers naturalized only because a court ordered the paperwork, and a remainder — never publicly totaled by the department — whose contracts were cancelled, whose visas lapsed during the backlog, or who were among the 502 discharged in 2017–2018 and did not come back. Advocates reported individual deportation cases among enlistees who fell out of status while waiting; no official count exists in the record reviewed here, and this page does not invent one. The Nepalese-born recruit who wrote in 2021 about signing in May 2016, being told to turn in his military ID in September 2017 as a “MAVNI loss,” and naturalizing in 2018 after more than two years put the residual claim in one sentence: an administration “cannot ignore foreign-born recruits who put their lives and livelihoods on the line to fight for America.” No legislation restoring MAVNI or compensating its recruits had been enacted as of this page’s research.

The government designed the offer, wrote it into recruiting contracts, and benefited from the skills it bought. When the program became inconvenient, it did not go to Congress to change the statute, and it did not honor the contracts while winding the program down; it changed the definition of honorable service by memorandum, applied the change to people already serving, recalled certifications already issued, and discharged recruits for failing checks it had not completed. Every element of that sequence that was tested in court was stopped, vacated, enjoined, or settled away. What was never restored was the program — or the years.

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

The MAVNI story was told on camera while it was happening — in news reports from the recruiting stations and Reserve drill halls where the recruits waited, in the Associated Press’s July 2018 reporting on the abrupt discharges, and in later accounts from the recruits themselves and the lawyers who carried the class actions.

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Sources

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.