aton Rouge, Louisiana - When Noah, nearly two years old, asks for his mother at bedtime, his father Adrian Clouatre simply says, “Mama will be back soon.” For his three-month-old daughter Lyn, who was still being breastfed, there’s only the bottle now. Her mother, Paola Clouatre, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in May - during a routine appointment for her green card application. She is one of tens of thousands detained under the Trump administration’s intensified deportation policy. The goal: 3,000 arrests per day. Adrian Clouatre, a former Marine with a recognized service-related disability, has not only lost his partner but is now alone with two small children. Paola is being held in an ICE detention facility in rural Monroe, eight hours away. “I go as often as I can,” Clouatre says. He can hardly grasp what has happened - and even less how to explain it to his children.
The story begins in California. In 2022, Clouatre, still on active duty at the time, met Mexican national Paola in a nightclub. A few months later, they were a couple, tattooed each other’s names on their arms, and got married in 2024. Paola applied for a residence permit based on her marriage to a U.S. citizen. Everything went smoothly at first - until an appointment at the immigration office in New Orleans on May 27, 2025, changed everything. What she didn’t know: In 2018, a deportation order had been issued against her after her mother failed to appear at a hearing. At the time, Paola was still a teenager, her family torn apart, she herself moving through shelters and foster homes. “She had no idea about this case,” her husband says. Nevertheless, ICE agents were waiting in the next room during the green card appointment. Paola Clouatre was taken away - her last act in freedom: handing Adrian her wedding ring.
Military families used to benefit from a certain degree of discretion. But that has been abolished under Trump. An internal USCIS directive dated February 28, 2025, now denies even veterans’ families protection from deportation. Over 26,000 cases have been handed over to ICE since then - including Paola’s. While there is still a special program for military family members, the space for humanitarian exceptions has virtually disappeared. The fact that the Marine Corps was still advertising earlier this year with promises like “Join the military and protect your family” now seems like pure cynicism. “I’m not a political person,” says Adrian Clouatre. “But I always thought that if you marry someone who’s American, you get the right to stay. It’s just brutal.”
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