Two Army veterans convicted of drug offenses have appealed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn deportation rulings by lower courts.

Attorneys say that if the judges hand down a ruling in favor of the veterans, it would chip away at the list of crimes that legal residents can be automatically deported for breaking. Legal residents who are not citizens can be deported for a wide range of crimes, stretching from turnstile jumping to manslaughter.

In both cases, lawyers argue there should be more leeway for offenders who are veterans with regard to proving good moral character, a requirement for citizenship, than for other immigrants.

“The idea that a person who has served this country honorably in the Armed Forces for eight years could possibly lack the lasting loyalty necessary to establish permanent allegiance is an insult to all United States military veterans,” a public defender in the Bronx, Peter Markowitz, said.

Mr. Markowitz is representing Jose Marquez-Almanzar, a native of the Dominican Republic who enlisted in the 1980s,and is facing deportation because he was convicted of cocaine possession.

When Marquez, who immigrated at 12, enlisted, he renounced his Dominican citizenship, since at the time dual citizenship was not available. If deported he could be rendered stateless.

The Bronx defender’s case is two-tiered. First, he argues that Marquez should fit into a small category of noncitizens who are defined as American nationals, a category reserved primarily for persons living in outlying possessions of the United States. Besides those who gain the status from birth, an even smaller group of individuals receive it from proving their allegiance to America. Alternatively, Mr. Markowitz, in a brief before the court, argues Marquez, who was called to active duty during the first Gulf War, is eligible for American citizenship under a special naturalization provision for veterans who served during designated times of hostilities.

Marquez applied twice for naturalization. The first time was while he was serving at Ft. Hood, in Texas, as a young recruit. Court papers say that because of “a clerical error,” the application “was never fully processed.” On his second application for citizenship, following his cocaine conviction, the government said he was ineligible because he had been convicted of an aggravated felony and therefore could not establish good moral character.

Despite its name, an aggravated felony need not be either aggravated or a felony. Generally the crimes the term refers to are considered serious, but it has been expanded to include lesser crimes, such as turnstile-jumping or theft of a $10 video. If convicted of an aggravated felony, a legal resident can be automatically deported, without a chance to prove good moral character or family ties.

The lawyers are asserting the punishment for committing an aggravated felony should not be applied in the same way to legal residents who are veterans.

“The aggravated-felony term has been expanded and expanded by Congress,” a law student at the New York University Immigrant Rights Clinic, Naomi Sunshine, said. “Our point is it’s not meant to apply to wartime veterans, for whom, throughout history, there have been special laws as an inducement to serve and also as rewards for their services.”

The NYU clinic is representing the other veteran contesting deportation, Hollis Boatswain, a 62-year-old Trinidadian immigrant who voluntarily enlisted during the Vietnam War. Yesterday, opening arguments of his case were heard in a Manhattan court.

Boatswain, who has five children, all of them American citizens, served nine months after he was convicted of allowing someone else to use his Medicaid card, to fill a fake prescription, in return for $300. Previously, he had served a few months in jail on misdemeanor marijuana convictions.

Before he completed his sentence for Medicaid fraud, the Immigration and Naturalization Service shipped him to a detention center in Louisiana. That was a shock to Boatswain, who, like Marquez, said he thought he had been granted citizenship while serving in the military.

For more than five years, Boatswain has lived in detention centers, fighting deportation. As a veteran, he claims, he should have special rights to citizenship.

“He is over 60 years old. He has lived through years of detention,” the supervising attorney for Boatswain’s case, Nancy Morewitz, said. “Our case is he has a right to be looked at for who he is now.”