In May, President Donald Trump’s administration directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to make a minimum of 3,000 arrests per day. To meet this quota, ICE has resorted to arresting people who pose no risk to public safety.
New data shared by the Cato Institute revealed that 65 percent of people taken by ICE had no previous convictions, and 93 percent had no violent convictions. Since the beginning of 2025, ICE arrests have increased from an average of 215 to 1,100 per day. One tactic used by the agency to increase arrests is targeting law-abiding immigrants during routine appointments, which happened to Paola Clouatre in May.
Clouatre, a 25-year-old Mexican national, came to the United States with her mother more than a decade ago seeking asylum. After meeting Adrian Clouatre in 2022, during his final months of military service, the two married last year. Shortly after, Clouatre began the process of obtaining her green card to live and work in the U.S. legally. But during the green card process, she learned that ICE had issued a deportation order against her in 2018 after her estranged mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing in California—something her husband says she had “no idea” about.
On May 27, Clouatre attended an appointment in New Orleans as part of her green card application and explained that she had requested that her case be reopened. In Adrian Couatre’s video interview with the Associated Press, he said that after they finished the interview, he and his wife were asked to wait in the lobby for paperwork regarding their next appointment. Instead, the couple was approached by ICE agents, who then handcuffed Clouatre and took her into custody.
While she and her family wait to hear back after filing a motion for a California-based judge to reopen the case on her deportation order, Clouatre is being held at an ICE detention facility near Monroe, Louisiana. Despite the distance, Adrian Clouatre, who qualifies as a service-disabled veteran, says he makes the eight-hour round trip from their home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, every chance he gets. He is also concerned for his two young children, a 2-year-old and a 3-month-old, who are being deprived of bonding time with their mother.
Unfortunately for the Clouatre family, the Trump administration ended discretion for veterans seeking legal status for family members earlier this year. In February, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that groups that received more grace in the past will no longer be exempt from potential enforcement.
Alluding to Clouatre’s case, USCIS posted on X that it was a bad idea for her to defy her deportation order and apply for a green card, stating that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “has a long memory and no tolerance for defiance when it comes to making America safe again.” In an emailed statement to the Associated Press, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Clouatre “is in the country illegally” and the administration is “not going to ignore the rule of law.”
But as Clouatre’s arrest and the data show, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has less to do with “making America safe again” and more to do with discouraging immigration to the U.S. altogether. Attempting to meet such an unreasonably high quota has meant that immigration authorities have had to focus less on dangerous criminals on the street and more on low-hanging fruit like the Clouatres of the world, who are taking the steps to become legal residents.
“I’m all for ‘get the criminals out of the country,’ right?” Adrian Clouatre told the A.P. “But the people that are here working hard, especially for the ones married to Americans—I mean, that’s always been a way to secure a green card.”
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