Baton Rouge, La. – The veteran of Marines ‘body, Adrian Clouatre, does not know how to tell his children where his mother went after the immigration and customs’ immigration agents of us, arrested them last month.
When his almost 2 -year -old son, Noah, asks his mother before bedtime, Clouatre says: “Mama will return soon.” When his 3 month old daughter, Lyn, infant, Lyn is hungry, he gives him a bottle of baby formula. He worries how his newborn will join with his mother in the absence of skin to skin contact.
His wife, Paola, is one of tens of thousands of people in custody and faces deportation, since the Trump administration presses so that immigration officers will arrest 3,000 people a day.
Even when Marines’ recruiters promote enlistment as protection for families that lack legal status, directives for the strict application of immigrants have expelled deference practices previously granted to military families, they say experts in immigration law. The Federal Agency in charge of helping members of the military family to gain legal status, now refers to deportation, according to government notes.
To visit his wife, Adrian Clouatre has to make a round trip of eight hours from his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a rural ice detention center in Monroe. Clouatre, who qualifies as a veteran with disabilities of service, passes every time he can obtain.
Paola Clouatre, a 25 -year -old Mexican national whose mother brought her to the country in search of asylum more than a decade, met Adrian Clouatre, 26, in a nightclub in southern California during the last months of her five years of military service in 2022. In a year, the names of others in her arms had been tattooed.
After getting married in 2024, Paola Clouatre looked for a green card to live legally and work in the United States, Adrian Clouatre said that “he is not a very political person,” but believes that his wife deserved to live legally in the United States.
“I am in favor of ‘taking out the country’s criminals’, right?” said. “But people who are here working hard, especially married to Americans, I mean, that has always been a way to secure a green card.”
Arrested at a green card meeting
The process to request the green card of Paola Clouatre was without problems at the beginning, but finally knew that ICE had issued an order for deportation in 2018 after his mother did not appear at an immigration audience.
Clouatre and his mother had been separated for years, Clouatre cycled in shelters for homeless people when she was a teenager, and until a couple of months ago, Clouatre had no “idea” about the lost hearing of his mother or the deportation order, her husband said.
Adrian Clouatre recalled that an employee of citizenship and immigration services of the United States asked about the deportation order during a May 27 appointment as part of his green card application. After Paola Clouatre explained that she was trying to reopen her case, the employee asked her and her husband to wait in the paperbuster with respect to a follow -up appointment, which her husband said she believed she was a “ploy.”
Soon, the officers arrived and handcuffed Paola Clouatre, who gave her wedding ring to her husband for custody.
Adrian Clouatre, eyes sprouted with tears, said that he and his wife had tried to “do the right thing” and that he felt that ice officers should have more discretion about arrests, although he understood that they were trying to do their job.
“It is an infernal way to treat a veteran,” said Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge who now represents the couple. “Do you take your wives and send them back to Mexico?”
The clouatres presented a motion for an immigration judge based in California to reopen the case in Paola’s deportation order and are waiting to receive an answer, said Holliday.
Less discretion for military families
The spokeswoman of the National Security Department, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement sent by email that Paola Clouatre “is in the country illegally” and that the administration “will not ignore the rule of law.”
“Ignoring the order of an immigration judge to leave the US. The agency added that the government “has a long memory and has no tolerance to challenge when it comes to making the United States again.”
Adrian Clouatre said that the agency’s publication X does not accurately reflect the situation of his wife because she entered the country as a child with her mother, looking for asylum.
“She was not aware of the elimination order, so she didn’t challenge her to know,” he said. “If I had been arrested, I would have been deported a long time ago, and we would never have met.”
Before the impulse of the Trump administration to boost deportations, USCIS provided much more discretion for veterans looking for legal status for a family member, said Holliday and Margaret Stock, an expert in military immigration law.
In a memorandum of February 28, the agency said that “it will no longer exempt” from deportation people in groups that had received more grace in the past. This includes families of military or veteran personnel, said Stock. As of June 12, the agency said it has referred to more than 26,000 cases to ICE for deportation.
USCIS still offers a program that allows family members of military personnel that illegally entered the United States to remain in the country while requesting a green card. But there seem to be room for maneuver, such as giving a veteran spouse as Paola Clouatre the opportunity to stop his active deportation order without facing the arrest, Stock said.
But numerous recruiters of Marines have continued publishing advertisements on social networks, directed towards Latinos, promoting enlistment as a way to obtain “deportation protection” for family members.
“I think it is bad for them to announce that people will obtain immigration benefits when it seems that the administration no longer offers these immigration benefits,” Stock said. “Send the wrong message to recruits.”
The spokesman for Marines, Sergeant Master. Tyler Hlavac told Associated Press that recruiters have now been informed that “they are not the right authority” to “imply that Marines’s body can ensure the relief of immigration for applicants or their families.”
