Immigration and veteran advocates are concerned that military families have a new worry under the Trump administration: whether they will be detained and deported while family members are enlisted.
The U.S. has long given extra consideration in immigration enforcement for noncitizens related to service members and veterans. But as stories about Immigration and Customs Enforcement detaining military family members garner more public attention, some members of Congress and outside groups are worried that the administration’s crackdown will take a toll on current military members’ ability to do their job and on the military’s ability to recruit.
Rep. Salud Carbajal, a California Democrat and a Marine Corps veteran with two military bases in his district, said the administration’s approach “absolutely” threatens the U.S. armed forces’ morale and recruitment efforts.
“This will certainly weigh on the minds of many of these service members, let alone those that might be inclined to serve,” Carbajal told NOTUS, pointing to a FWD.us estimate that as many as 80,000 undocumented spouses and parents of active-duty personnel and veterans are living in the U.S.
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The Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not comment for this article.
But every advocate interviewed for this story pointed out that the Trump administration appears to be departing starkly from the precedent set during George W. Bush’s administration, when the federal government started granting service members’ families discretionary parole after a missing soldier’s wife was nearly deported in 2007. The incident sparked bipartisan outrage, forcing the Bush administration to change its course, granting her discretionary parole and allowing her to apply for a green card.
Lawyer and veteran Margaret Stock said protections and benefits like those, including pathways to parole, legal residency and even naturalization offered to service members and their families, have long been “a strong motivator for many people” to join the military. But she said that’s changed since President Donald Trump retook office. She said she’s even heard that “recruiters are worried because this was a big incentive for them” to offer potential enlistees.
“All of the presidential administrations post-9/11 have been treating military family members with discretion. They’ve been exercising their discretion to help them obtain their immigration benefits,” Stock told NOTUS. “The current administration has reversed that long-standing policy of taking care of military members and their families, and has decided that deporting people is more important than military readiness.”
Anwen Hughes, a lawyer and director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, said Republicans are largely unconcerned about this.
“There was bipartisan concern about the fact that it’s really not in the national interest to have a situation where people, for example, are hesitant to volunteer for combat deployments because they’re afraid that their immediate family members could get arrested and detained behind their backs at a time when they’re overseas and unable to do anything about it,” Hughes told NOTUS. “That was generally understood, at the time, as being bad.”
When NOTUS last week asked Republican veterans in Congress whether the families of military members should be offered more protections from Trump’s mass deportations, some bristled at the idea.
“If you start making carve outs, I think that’s a really slippery slope,” Rep. Eli Crane told NOTUS. “I say this as a veteran myself. I don’t think that just because you have a family member who’s a veteran, I don’t think that gives you the right to break our laws.”
Other House Republican veterans also deferred to the need to abide by current immigration laws, even if they weren’t exactly sure how USCIS is currently applying or implementing them.
“Following the law is important. There’s lots of difficult situations. That’s what’s so painful about immigration. I mean, there’s hundreds of these cases where it’s just really painful,” Rep. Tony Gonzales said. “But whatever the law is, I think we need to make sure that we enforce the law.”
But Gonzales also said he wasn’t familiar with the Trump administration’s change in approach to how it implements those laws for service members and their families, telling NOTUS that he’d “have to look at the numbers and the details” before commenting.
The Department of Homeland Security has always had discretion over determining who gets parole. But USCIS’s own policy manual, which guides agency decision-making, lays out the stakes of denying deportation protections for the relatives of service members and veterans.
It says that while parole in place is only used “sparingly,” being immediately related to a U.S. armed forces member or a veteran “weighs heavily in favor of” an applicant’s application being granted.
In the section describing what counts as extreme hardship, it says that “the denial of an applicant’s admission often causes psychological and emotional harm that significantly exacerbates the stresses, anxieties and other hardships inherent in military service by a qualifying relative.”
Danny Vargas, president and CEO of the American Latino Veterans Association, told NOTUS that Trump’s apparent approach will affect recruitment and worsen some service members’ mental health.
“We know that there are many immigrants who choose to serve in the military as a way to serve their new country, but also as a way to find access to citizenship,” Vargas said. “All of that has an impact when we take into account the challenges associated with service, but also then having to worry about family members and your own immigration status.”
Carbajal last month reintroduced the Protect Patriot Parents Act, which would make service members’ parents eligible for lawful permanent resident status, and co-sponsored a measure that would protect military spouses from deportation.
Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Salazar, whose offices did not respond to a request for comment, co-sponsored both of those proposals.
Carbajal said he’s pleaded with his GOP colleagues to set aside their hard-line immigration stances and back offering service members and veterans some reprieve from Trump’s mass deportation agenda. He argues it should be a bare-minimum ask on behalf of the nation’s military personnel and veterans, and pointed to the fact that it used to be a stance shared by both parties.
But it’s unclear whether his proposal, which was referred to the House Judiciary Committee more than a month ago, will gain any more public support from Republicans. The offices of Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise did not respond to a request for comment on their plans for the legislation. A spokesperson for House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan’s office also did not immediately respond.
That inaction from Congress is new, too: When Trump during his first administration signaled he would eliminate the program, lawmakers responded by including discretionary parole for service members’ immediate relatives into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2019.
“Disruption to military family unity should be minimized in order to enhance military readiness” and to allow service members to “focus on the faithful execution of their military missions and objectives, with peace of mind regarding the well-being of their family members,” Congress explained at the time.
The bill passed with broad bipartisan support in both chambers while containing that language, and Trump signed it.
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Emily Kennard and Casey Murray are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and NewsWell, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.
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