A disabled former Marine has torn into immigration officials who he claims tricked his wife ahead of her being detained.
Adrian Clouatre, 26, who served five years with the corps and describes himself as “not a very political person,” told the Associated Press his wife Paola, a 25-year-old Mexican national, had been seeking a green card after they got married in 2024.
Though her application initially progressed smoothly, she soon learnt Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had issued a deportation order against her back in 2018, after her estranged mother had failed to appear for an immigration hearing.
Officials asked Paola about the order during an U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appointment at the end of May. When she told them she was trying to have her case reopened, she was told to wait with her husband in the lobby while they filed the paperwork for a follow-up appointment.
Clouatre says this was a “ploy,” given a number of officers soon arrived to handcuff his wife and take her away, though not before she’d handed him her wedding ring for safekeeping.
“I’m all for ‘get the criminals out of the country’, right?” the former Marine, who served five years, told the news agency. “But the people that are here working hard, especially the ones married to Americans–I meant, that’s always been a way to secure a green card.”
Between taking care of their two-year-old son Noah and three-month-old daughter Lyn, he now has to drive eight hours two and from their Baton Rouge, Louisiana home to visit Paola at an ICE detention centre in Monroe.
Given Paola was still breastfeeding when she was detained, he also worries about how their newborn will bond with her mother without having skin-to-skin contact.
Paola is just one among tens of thousands detained and facing deportation under President Donald Trump’s mounting nationwide deportation drive, which the president has lately intensified by pushing ICE to increase arrests to 3,000 people a day.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast that Clouatre’s wife “is in the country illegally,” and that “President Trump and Secretary Noem are not going to ignore the rule of law,” adding the department is now awaiting a decision on Paola’s emergency motion to reopen her case.
“The United States is offering aliens illegal aliens $1,000 and a free flight to self-deport now,” McLaughlin went on. “We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”
Clouatre has said his wife entered the country as a minor with her mother, and that the family subsequently sought asylum in the United States.
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