ICE detains Marine Corps veteran's wife who was still breastfeeding
their baby
[June 23, 2025]
By JACK BROOK
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre doesn't
know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month.
When his nearly 2-year-old son Noah asks for his mother before bed,
Clouatre just tells him, “Mama will be back soon.” When his 3-month-old,
breastfeeding daughter Lyn is hungry, he gives her a bottle of baby
formula instead. He’s worried how his newborn will bond with her mother
absent skin-to-skin contact.
His wife, Paola, is one of tens of thousands of people in custody and
facing deportation as the Trump administration pushes for immigration
officers to arrest 3,000 people a day.
Even as Marine Corps recruiters promote enlistment as protection for
families lacking legal status, directives for strict immigrant
enforcement have cast away practices of deference previously afforded to
military families, immigration law experts say. The federal agency
tasked with helping military family members gain legal status now refers
them for deportation, government memos show.
To visit his wife, Adrian Clouatre has to make an eight-hour round trip
from their home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to a rural ICE detention
center in Monroe. Clouatre, who qualifies as a service-disabled veteran,
goes every chance he can get.
Paola Clouatre, a 25-year-old Mexican national whose mother brought her
into the country seeking asylum more than a decade ago, met Adrian
Clouatre, 26, at a southern California nightclub during the final months
of his five years of military service in 2022. Within a year, they had
tattooed each other's names on their arms.
After they married in 2024, Paola Clouatre sought a green card to
legally live and work in the U.S. Adrian Clouatre said he is “not a very
political person” but believes his wife deserved to live legally in the
U.S.
“I’m all for ‘get the criminals out of the country,’ right?" he said.
"But the people that are here working hard, especially the ones married
to Americans — I mean, that’s always been a way to secure a green card.”
Detained at a green card meeting
The process to apply for Paola Clouatre's green card went smoothly at
first, but eventually she learned ICE had issued an order for her
deportation in 2018 after her mother failed to appear at an immigration
hearing.
Clouatre and her mother had been estranged for years — Clouatre cycled
out of homeless shelters as a teenager — and up until a couple of months
ago, Clouatre had “no idea” about her mother's missed hearing or the
deportation order, her husband said.
Adrian Clouatre recalled that a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services staffer asked about the deportation order during a May 27
appointment as part of her green card application. After Paola Clouatre
explained that she was trying to reopen her case, the staffer asked her
and her husband to wait in the lobby for paperwork regarding a follow-up
appointment, which her husband said he believed was a “ploy.”
Soon, officers arrived and handcuffed Paola Clouatre, who handed her
wedding ring to her husband for safekeeping.
Adrian Clouatre, eyes welling with tears, said he and his wife had tried
to “do the right thing” and that he felt ICE officers should have more
discretion over arrests, though he understood they were trying to do
their jobs.
[to top of second column]
|
U.S. Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre holds his 3-month-old
daughter Lyn and his nearly two old son Noah at their home in Baton
Rouge, La. on Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Stephen Smith)
“It’s just a hell of a way to treat a veteran,” said Carey Holliday,
a former immigration judge who is now representing the couple. “You
take their wives and send them back to Mexico?”
The Clouatres filed a motion for a California-based immigration
judge to reopen the case on Paola's deportation order and are
waiting to hear back, Holliday said.
Less discretion for military families
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said
in an emailed statement that Paola Clouatre “is in the country
illegally" and that the administration is “not going to ignore the
rule of law.”
“Ignoring an Immigration Judge’s order to leave the U.S. is a bad
idea,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a June 9
post on X which appeared to refer to Clouatre's case. The agency
added that the government “has a long memory and no tolerance for
defiance when it comes to making America safe again.”
Adrian Clouatre said the agency's X post does not accurately reflect
his wife's situation because she entered the country as a minor with
her mother, seeking asylum.
“She was not aware of the removal order, so she was not knowingly
defying it,” he said. “If she had been arrested, she would have been
deported long ago, and we would never have met."
Prior to the Trump administration's push to drive up deportations,
USCIS provided much more discretion for veterans seeking legal
status for a family member, said Holliday and Margaret Stock, a
military immigration law expert.
In a Feb. 28 memo, the agency said it “will no longer exempt” from
deportation people in groups that had received more grace in the
past. This includes the families of military personnel or veterans,
Stock said. As of June 12, the agency said it has referred upward of
26,000 cases to ICE for deportation.
USCIS still offers a program allowing family members of military
personnel who illegally entered the U.S. to remain in the country as
they apply for a green card. But there no longer appears to be room
for leeway, such as giving a veteran's spouse like Paola Clouatre
the opportunity to halt her active deportation order without facing
arrest, Stock said.
But numerous Marine Corps recruiters have continued to post ads on
social media, geared toward Latinos, promoting enlistment as a way
to gain “protection from deportation” for family members.
“I think it’s bad for them to be advertising that people are going
to get immigration benefits when it appears that the administration
is no longer offering these immigration benefits,” Stock said. “It
sends the wrong message to the recruits.”
Marine Corps spokesperson Master Sgt. Tyler Hlavac told The
Associated Press that recruiters have now been informed they are
“not the proper authority” to “imply that the Marine Corps can
secure immigration relief for applicants or their families.”
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
