By JACK BROOK, Associated Press/Report for America

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.

“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.”

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.