BATON ROUGE, La. (BN24) — The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has left one Marine Corps veteran scrambling to care for his infant daughter after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested his breastfeeding wife during a green card meeting last month.
Adrian Clouatre, a service-disabled Marine veteran, said he is struggling to explain to his children why their mother, Paola Clouatre, has vanished from their home. The arrest has forced him to bottle-feed their 3-month-old daughter Lyn, who had relied on breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact, while trying to comfort their nearly 2-year-old son Noah, who keeps asking for “Mama.”
“She’s just gone,” Clouatre said, still stunned by how swiftly immigration officers acted. “We were trying to do everything right.”
Paola Clouatre, 25, a Mexican national who entered the U.S. as a child seeking asylum, is now in ICE detention and faces deportation, a fate that could separate her from her family indefinitely. Her arrest comes amid a surge in detentions under President Donald Trump’s directive to ramp up deportations to 3,000 per day, targeting undocumented immigrants — even those married to U.S. citizens.
Paola’s arrest came during what was supposed to be a routine green card appointment with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on May 27. There, she disclosed that a 2018 deportation order had been issued after her mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing — a fact Paola, estranged from her mother and raised in shelters, had only recently discovered.
After the couple was asked to wait in the USCIS lobby, Paola was handcuffed and taken away by immigration officers, handing her wedding ring to her husband before being led out. Adrian, 26, said he was blindsided.
“They set her up,” he said. “We were told we’d be called for a follow-up. That was just a ploy.”
Immigration experts say Paola’s case illustrates a sharp shift in how military families are treated. Under past administrations, veterans’ spouses often received special discretion from deportation. But a February 2025 memo from USCIS declared the agency “will no longer exempt” military-connected families from removal.
According to military immigration attorney Margaret Stock, Paola would previously have been allowed to remain in the U.S. while reopening her deportation case. Now, such discretion appears all but vanished.
“They’re arresting breastfeeding mothers married to Marines,” Stock said. “That says everything about where we are.”
Paola’s attorney, Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge, echoed that outrage: “It’s a hell of a way to treat a veteran. You take their wives and send them back to Mexico?”
The couple has filed a motion to reopen the deportation order with a judge in California and await a decision.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Paola is “in the country illegally” and said the administration has “no tolerance for defiance” of immigration orders.
In a June 9 post on X, USCIS appeared to reference her case, writing: “Ignoring an Immigration Judge’s order to leave the U.S. is a bad idea. The government has a long memory and no tolerance for defiance when it comes to making America safe again.”
But Adrian Clouatre insisted his wife’s situation was misunderstood.
“She didn’t even know about the order. She was brought here as a child,” he said. “If she had been defiant, she’d have been deported years ago.”
While Marine Corps recruiters have promoted enlistment as a way to protect undocumented family members, immigration law experts say that promise no longer holds. Social media ads aimed at Latino recruits still suggest joining the Corps offers “protection from deportation” for relatives.
“That’s incredibly misleading,” said Stock. “They’re giving hope that doesn’t exist under current policy.”
In response, Marine Corps spokesperson Master Sgt. Tyler Hlavac said recruiters have now been instructed to stop implying military service guarantees immigration protection.
Adrian now makes an eight-hour round trip from Baton Rouge to the rural ICE detention center in Monroe, Louisiana, whenever he can, bringing updates from home and photos of the children. But the hardship of Paola’s absence is growing heavier by the day.
“I’m not political,” he said, “but I believe if you’re married to an American and trying to do the right thing, you should have a path to stay.”
For now, his only answer to Noah’s nightly question — “Where’s Mama?” — remains:
“She’ll be back soon.”
