BATON ROUGE: Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre doesn’t know how to tell his children where their mother went after US 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 illegally 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 US Adrian Clouatre said he is “not a very political person” but believes his wife deserved to live legally in the US
“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 US 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.
“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 US is a bad idea,” US 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.”
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 US 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.”
ICE detains Marine Corps veteran’s wife who was still breastfeeding their child
https://arab.news/r6y59
ICE detains Marine Corps veteran’s wife who was still breastfeeding their child
- The husband says Paola Clouatre accompanied her mother illegally into the country from Mexico more than a decade ago
- Trump administration pushes for immigration officers to arrest 3,000 people a day
’Only a miracle can end this nightmare’: Eritreans fear new Ethiopia war
- Now the fractious Horn of Africa rivals have begun trading barbs and accusations of war-mongering once more
- It is extremely difficult to gather testimonies from Eritrea, where dissidents often disappear to prison
ADDIS ABABA: Tewolde has fought multiple times for Eritrea, one of the most closed societies on Earth, and is now praying another war is not about to break out with neighboring Ethiopia.
“If the war starts, many people will go to the front and, as before, many children will lose their fathers, mothers will lose their husbands, parents will lose their children,” said Tewolde, who is in his 40s and lives in the Eritrean capital Asmara.
He fought first in the late 1990s during Eritrea’s horrific border war with Ethiopia, and more recently during clashes against rebels in the Ethiopian region of Tigray.
Now the fractious Horn of Africa rivals have begun trading barbs and accusations of war-mongering once more.
“We’ve already experienced this (before) and we know the losses are severe,” said Tewolde, who gave a false name to protect his identity in a country regularly described by rights groups as the North Korea of Africa.
It is extremely difficult to gather testimonies from Eritrea, where dissidents often disappear to prison. To obtain a few words from Tewolde, AFP had to pass questions and answers through an intermediary.
- ‘Incessant aggression’ -
Eritrea, a country of around 3.5 million, has been ruled by President Isaias Afwerki since independence from Ethiopia in 1993 and ranks near the bottom of every rights indicator.
Civilians are conscripted into the army for life or forced into a national service program that the United Nations has compared to slavery.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for signing a long-awaited peace deal with Eritrea shortly after coming to power and, in darkly ironic fashion, the two sides joined forces in the brutal war against the Tigrayans from 2020 to 2022.
Eritrea was not pleased that Ethiopia sued for peace without its input and has accused its landlocked neighbor of planning to seize its port at Assab.
For its part, Ethiopia has lately complained that Eritrea has been “actively preparing” for renewed conflict.
Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos last month said that “Eritrean aggression and provocation is making further restraint more and more difficult.”
- ‘Fleeing en masse’ -
Mehari, an Eritrean in his 30s, fought in the Tigray war, where his army was accused of horrific war crimes.
“Young people are fleeing en masse to Ethiopia... and to Sudan to avoid a possible war,” he told AFP.
Another Eritrean, Luwan, left the country several years ago and now lives in an east African country, which she did not want to name for fear of reprisals against her family back home.
She says her family are terrified after a relative was summoned to a meeting and told to “prepare herself, her sons and daughters because she was told Abiy will start a war against her and the Eritrean people,” she said.
Some mothers at the meeting “still haven’t been informed about where their children are from the last war in Tigray, but still they are being asked to send their remaining children to the front,” Luwan added.
Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Ghebremeskel did not respond to a request for comment from AFP.
A former independence activist now in exile, researcher Mohamed Kheir Omer, said young people are split between their fear of conflict and of being overrun by Ethiopia, whose wartime atrocities are still in recent memory.
“We are torn between Isaias who does not care about his population, and Abiy who thinks only of his own legacy,” he said.
Luwan said she was desperate.
“Only a miracle can end this nightmare.”
