She believed that the key to being a good recruiter was not just selling the military and its benefits, but herself. Sgt. First Class Rosa Cortez wanted potential recruits to notice the pictures of her smiling children, her college diploma and the awards she had earned in the course of her nearly 20 years with the Oregon National Guard.
Her goal was to “radiate positivity,” she said. “People will see it and want to align with you.”
Lately though, she, along with hundreds of other recruiters around the country, had been offering something else: protection from the government she served.
President Trump’s second term has been defined by an extensive crackdown on undocumented immigrants that has set off waves of fear in places with large Hispanic populations. In many of these areas, a little-known government program called Parole in Place has become a refuge of last resort and a powerful recruiting tool.
Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to enlist in the military. The Parole in Place program, launched in 2013, provides the undocumented parents and spouses of service members protection from deportation, and an expedited pathway to permanent residency.
In early December, Sergeant Cortez was working with six potential recruits who wanted to use the program. One of them was Juan, a 23-year-old with messy, black hair and a gold earring. (Juan requested that his last name be withheld to protect his undocumented family members.)
Juan had seen a video that Sergeant Cortez posted on social media and contacted her about enlisting. “I would like it if you could provide me some more information before I come to a decision,” he wrote in a text message in late September.
Sergeant Cortez sent a message back, asking Juan about his “goals in life.”
“Well for starters I’m hoping to get my mother qualified for PIP so that she doesn’t have to leave the country,” he replied, using the acronym for Parole in Place.
Two months later, masked immigration agents grabbed a longtime resident of the area at a Home Depot a few miles from the small business that Juan’s family operated in The Dalles, Ore., a town of about 16,000 people on the Columbia River.
Now Juan was sitting across from Sergeant Cortez in her small office. He handed over his Social Security card and shifted nervously in his chair. Everything was moving so fast.
National Guard soldiers train one weekend a month and two weeks every summer. During times of war, domestic unrest or natural disaster, they can be mobilized by states or the federal government to full-time duty.
Mr. Trump has also sought to deploy Guard soldiers on policing missions in cities across the country, including Portland, Ore., where the courts recently ruled that he could not send troops over the objections of local officials. On Thursday, Border Control agents shot two people in Portland during a traffic stop, stoking anger and protests.
When meeting with recruits, Sergeant Cortez liked to talk about the pride she felt helping during floods or fires, and the camaraderie that came with military service. But as the child of undocumented immigrants, she also recognized the fear gripping her community.
Her recruiting territory traces a 100-mile swath of central Oregon that has long drawn migrant farmworkers from Mexico, some of whom stayed and put down roots.
Sergeant Cortez had grown up in the region’s cherry and pear orchards. She had close friends who were afraid to leave their homes.
“It’s insane what’s happening,” Juan said as Sergeant Cortez took his fingerprints and finished his paperwork.
Sergeant Cortez shared a link to a practice exam that would measure his math and English skills. He promised to do it later that evening. If he passed, Juan could take the actual test in just a few weeks.
But first he needed to finish his evening shift at his family’s business, where his mother was working the cash register.
A Soldier’s Sacrifice
Parole in Place’s origins trace to May 2007, one of the deadliest months of the Iraq War. Sgt. Alex R. Jimenez’s platoon was patrolling a village south of Baghdad when insurgents attacked and took him captive. His remains were recovered more than a year later.
While thousands of U.S. troops searched for the 25-year-old soldier, his wife, who had entered the United States illegally from the Dominican Republic, was being deported. Amid a public outcry, the Bush administration granted her permanent residency.
“The sacrifices made by our soldiers and their families deserve our greatest respect,” said Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary at the time.
The program was formalized a few years later. The goal was to provide soldiers peace of mind before they went to war. If a service member drops out or is dishonorably discharged, their family member loses protective status. In 2023, about 11,500 relatives of military recruits used the benefit, a 35 percent increase over the previous year, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The agency did not respond to requests for more recent data. But several states reported a recent surge in program enlistees. In Nevada, 79 enlistees, or about 20 percent of the state’s new National Guard recruits in 2025, used the program.
For Sergeant Cortez, the program had become something bigger than numbers. Her mother had crossed the Mexican border illegally with her family in 1976 at age 7. “Cherries, apples, pears, plums, onions. You name it, we probably picked it,” Sergeant Cortez said.
Home was a tent, or if they were lucky, a barn. Eventually, they settled in a farm labor camp outside Walla Walla, Wash.
The turning point for her family came when one of her uncles, who had obtained legal residency in the 1980s, joined the Oregon National Guard. The entire family — seven people crammed into a car fit for five — drove more than 30 hours to Fort Knox, Ky., for his basic training graduation.
The farm labor camp, Sergeant Cortez recalled, could be chaotic. There were drugs, crime and families fighting to survive.
The basic training graduation ceremony was another world. The soldiers, clad in their dress uniforms, brass buttons gleaming, marched in perfect rows onto the parade ground.
A second uncle followed the first into the military. Soon, both found steady jobs as full-time technicians working on the Oregon National Guard’s fleet of cargo helicopters. Sergeant Cortez and her extended family moved from the farm labor camps to a neighborhood in Milton-Freewater, Ore.
In 2004, when Sergeant Cortez was 16, her uncles deployed to Afghanistan. Two years later, she enlisted and shipped off to basic training.
Now, she was a 37-year-old mother of three and a full-time National Guard recruiter, selling the benefits of service to a nation at war with itself over immigration, and who deserved to be an American.
As a soldier and a recruiter, she had to steer clear of divisive, political fights. As the child of Mexican immigrants in a place that felt besieged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the topic was impossible to avoid.
“Emotions are everywhere for me,” she said.
‘We’re Scared’
The mayor and five members of The Dalles City Council stared out at the crowd that had turned out on a rainy night in early December.
The elected officials were white men. The crowd was almost entirely Hispanic. They filled the meeting room on the second floor and spilled over into the hall and a nearby overflow room, where Sergeant Cortez was watching.
Nine days had passed since Salvador Muratalla, a father of five who came to the country in 2002, was taken from the Home Depot by masked ICE agents. He had been shopping for electrical circuits for a construction job.
Sergeant Cortez had seen the online video of the three agents dragging Mr. Muratalla out of the store by his arms as he yelled his name and phone number.
Now his daughter, Yami Muratalla, was shaking as she addressed the Council.
“Why did they let three masked agents take my father?” she cried. “They went to where he was and took him away from his five children, the youngest being 10 years old, who’s mentally affected, who’s scared to go to school!”
She gasped for breath.
“I’d ask you to wrap it up,” the mayor said.
“That’s all I’ve got to say,” replied Ms. Muratalla, who covered her face with her hands.
The elected officials were not sure what to do. One proposed that they draft a statement. A second said he needed time to reflect.
“I don’t have a lot of Hispanic friends,” confessed a third.
“We’re your new friends,” someone called out from the crowd.
The meeting ended with the Council members deciding that they needed more time to study the situation.
Sergeant Cortez approached Ms. Muratalla in the hallway outside the meeting room. Months earlier, Ms. Muratalla and her mother had attended an information session on Parole in Place that Sergeant Cortez had held at the National Guard armory, where she works.
The two women hugged.
“I’m so sorry,” Sergeant Cortez told her.
Sergeant Cortez recalled the anger, fear and shame she had felt as a child watching police arrest her grandfather at a community festival where he was selling Mexican snacks to make extra money.
He often stole the identities of Americans so that he could get hired and work. Eventually, the police would catch him and send him to jail. Sometimes, he would be deported to Mexico, where he would sleep on the street until the family raised enough money to hire a smuggler to bring him back across the border.
Like Sergeant Cortez’s grandfather, Mr. Muratalla had a theft conviction, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesman.
Sergeant Cortez’s phone buzzed later that evening with a message from Ms. Muratalla. Her father was being moved from Tacoma, Wash., to a detention facility somewhere in Texas.
“I can’t stop crying,” Ms. Muratalla wrote.
“I completely understand,” Sergeant Cortez replied.
An American Dream
One of the soldiers Sergeant Cortez had helped was Lindsey Vazquez, 20. Ms. Vazquez stood only 4 feet 8 inches tall and had needed to gain five pounds just to meet the military’s minimum weight requirement.
She had joined to help her parents, who had crossed the border three decades earlier as teenagers, and because she wanted to prove she could support herself and be a soldier.
Ms. Vazquez was a logistics specialist for the Guard and worked full time as a clerk at a discount department store in The Dalles, with hopes of someday using her military benefits to go to college. She, her parents and two sisters were living in a camping trailer parked next to the nearly finished house her father had spent the last six years building.
During the day, her father, Omar, ran a one-person construction company out of his white pickup truck. At night and on weekends, he built their house. “Whatever I have is what I spend on it,” Mr. Vazquez said of the three-bedroom, two-bath home.
Ms. Vazquez, her mother and sisters helped hang drywall and cut tile.
Ms. Vazquez’s parents had already received work permits and Social Security numbers through the Parole in Place program. As soon as they had their permanent residency cards, her father wanted to go to Mexico to see his 87-year-old mother. His wife had siblings she had not seen in decades.
But their lives, their children and their future were in Oregon.
“All the way to the creek is ours,” Mr. Vazquez said. There were fruit trees, fairy lights and a small barn where he kept a pinto horse and some chickens. A few days earlier, Mr. Vazquez had installed the kitchen and living room flooring, purchased at the same Home Depot where Mr. Muratalla was arrested. The two men knew each other from construction work.
He wanted to build a stone patio with a grill where he would be able to gaze out at the high-desert mountains. “I go step by step by step,” he said.
This was his American dream.
Cold Feet
Juan scored in the 44th percentile on his practice entrance exam, 13 points above what he would need when he took the actual test. But as the prospect of joining the military grew more real, so too did his reservations.
He worried about leaving his girlfriend, who had moved to The Dalles four months earlier from Portland to be with him. He was nervous about basic training.
When Sergeant Cortez suggested setting a firm date for the test, he hesitated. “I was wondering if there’s any chance for you to put my application at a halt,” he wrote in a text message. “I’m so sorry.”
“Absolutely,” Sergeant Cortez replied. “I’ll put you on my back burner.”
She went to talk to Juan’s mother, who had spent 22 years building a life in Oregon and nine years growing a small business with Juan’s stepfather. She did not want her son to join just so she could get legal status.
“We make sacrifices because we don’t want our children to have to sacrifice,” she told Sergeant Cortez in Spanish.
Sergeant Cortez replied that Juan was acting out of “love.” Helping his mother, she said, could bring him “a sense of peace.”
Three days after The Dalles City Council meeting, Sergeant Cortez asked Juan to stop by her office at the armory. Almost all recruits get cold feet. She knew that the best way to overcome such doubts was to keep the process moving.
They talked about basic training. Juan had been watching online videos of new recruits packing before they left, and was thinking about one of his last visits to the airport. He recalled seeing people with military-style haircuts frantically running through the concourse with their green duffel bags, and wondered if that would be him.
“Is it a hassle trying to get the new recruits on planes?” he asked.
“I give you a whole brief before you leave,” she reassured him.
And they talked about his mother’s precarious status. The recent arrests and uncertainty were taking a mental toll, Juan explained.
“It just breaks me,” he said.
Juan scheduled a time to drive with Sergeant Cortez to Portland so he could take the military’s entrance exam. He still was not entirely committed to enlisting. But he was getting closer.
“It’s become more realistic to me,” he said.
He strode out of Sergeant Cortez’s office, passing plaques, streamers and black-and-white photos commemorating Oregon Army Guardsmen’s service over the last 150 years fighting in places like the Philippines, Europe and Afghanistan.
“He’s a good kid, full of energy,” Sergeant Cortez said. “I think he’ll be a great leader.”
Some people join the military for the benefits. Others for adventure, patriotism or to escape a bad situation at home. Juan was motivated primarily by a desire to keep his family together.
To Sergeant Cortez, his reasons made perfect sense.
Juan passed the entrance exam on Dec. 22. He planned to take his physical, the next step in the process, in the new year.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.
The post U.S. Citizens Are Joining the Military to Protect Undocumented Parents appeared first on New York Times.
