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 his 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.”
