Amid crackdowns by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, some are turning to serve for the U.S. military in order to receive protections for their undocumented family members. The Parole in Place program provides a protection from deportation for undocumented parents and spouses of military members.
New York Times reporter Greg Jaffe, who covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military, spent eight days in The Dalles, reporting on National Guard recruitments in the city and speaking to members of the community. He joins us to discuss his reporting in The Dalles.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. Military for The New York Times. But he recently spent eight days in The Dalles. He followed a full-time recruiter for the Oregon National Guard and focused on a program known as Parole in Place. It provides protection from deportation for undocumented parents and spouses of military members. Interest in the program is up because of the Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration enforcement. Greg Jaffe joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Greg Jaffe: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Miller: Can you explain the basics of how the Parole in Place program works?
Jaffe: Yeah, it’s pretty easy. The idea is if you have an undocumented parent or an undocumented spouse, you can enlist. Then essentially, your loved one gets protection from deportation. They get put on a pathway to citizenship without returning home. So, normally if you’re here undocumented and you cross the border illegally, you have to return home to apply for a Green Card and usually pay a penalty of 10 years before you’re allowed to come back in. This waives that penalty and puts you on a path towards permanent residency, which is a Green Card.
Miller: Why is it called “parole?”
Jaffe: I think the idea is that you’re being “paroled” for your violation or crime of crossing into the country illegally. So the parole is that you’re allowed to stay here. You’re not forced to return to your home country and reapply for residency.
Miller: Has there been an increase in people signing up for this program over the last year, as detentions, deportations and fears of those have greatly increased?
Jaffe: Yes, there has. But if you’re gonna ask me how much, the answer is, I can’t really say precisely. In part because the U.S. government did not want to share those numbers with me. So most of my reason for saying yes is anecdotal. You talk to folks in Oregon at the Oregon National Guard and they will say they’ve seen a significant increase. I talked to folks in other states [like] Nevada. I think 20% of all new recruits to the Nevada National Guard last year were joining, at least in part, for Parole in Place. And that was a big increase for them.
I spent some time this past summer at Fort Jackson, where the Army does basic training. I was surprised how often I ran into people who said that they had joined in part because of Parole in Place. And talking to drill instructors down there, they just said, “we hadn’t seen this before and now we’re seeing it quite often.”
Miller: You spent eight days with Sgt. First Class Rosa Cortez, who is a full-time recruiter for the Oregon National Guard. You found out that her mother crossed over from Mexico with her family, illegally back in the 1970s, when her mother was 7 years old. What was Rosa’s path to joining the military?
Jaffe: Rosa grew up, and her family grew up, very poor. They made their living in the orchards, picking cherries, pears, plums, whatever it was. And they would move from orchard to orchard. She described some periods of her life where they were living in tents. Others where they were living in farm labor camps. Her mom and her uncles ended up getting Green Cards and permanent residency in the 1980s. Then her two uncles both joined the Oregon National Guard and became full-time employees, working on Guard helicopters as what’s called technicians, but also served as soldiers in the Guard, deployed to Afghanistan.
So a big thing for her that led her to join was joining the Guard for her uncles just changed the trajectory of her family’s life. They moved out of the farm labor camps – which she described as somewhat chaotic places where there was crime, drugs, there were people really fighting hard to make a living – to a nice neighborhood in Milton-Freewater. I think it was her family’s pathway to the middle class. So it became natural, when she was old enough at age 17, she wanted to enlist.
Miller: Can you tell us about a young man that you refer to as Juan who reached out to her and expressed interest in potentially enlisting?
Jaffe: Yeah. I didn’t know that this was the story I was doing when I arrived in The Dalles. I told the Oregon National Guard I was really curious about who is joining the National Guard these days and said, essentially, put me with a recruiter. So they put me with their best recruiter, who’s Sgt. Cortez. She’s so good she made her entire quota in terms of enlistees for the entire year in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, which has never happened before. So she’s signing people up at just a phenomenal rate.
About a week or 10 days before I got there, there was an ICE raid in The Dalles at a Home Depot that was captured on video and rocketed around that community. It was covered by some of the Portland TV stations. It really set off this wave of fear, including Juan, whose parents own a small business in the area. His stepfather is a U.S. citizen, but his mom is undocumented. So they immediately were looking for a way to make sure she was safe. So Juan just showed up in the office one day, I think my first or second day there, and I just sort of followed that process during the time I was there and then a little bit via phone after I left.
Miller: And just to be clear, Juan was very explicit about safeguarding his mother as his main reason for even showing up there?
Jaffe: Yeah, that was his only reason, to be honest. There were some people who, I think, were leaning towards it anyway and then this opened up the opportunity, and this was the kind of tipping point for them. For Juan, it was pretty clear that he would have had no interest in going this route had he not felt it was necessary for his mom. They didn’t know a lot of people in the military. He didn’t have a lot of understanding or experience with the military. But he’s a good kid, hard worker, bright, smart. He’s exactly the kind of person they’re looking for.
There’s a little bit of a funny story. So the first time he met Sgt. Cortez, which was, I think, about a year before he came in the office. This was before he was really thinking seriously about the – thinking at all – about the military. I think it was Halloween of 2024. Sgt. Cortez walked into their business in her uniform, because she was coming from work, and Juan’s mom asked her if that was her Halloween costume. She was like, ‘no, I’m a recruiter.’ So it just goes to show that the military does not have a big presence in that area. So to the extent it has one, it’s often Sgt. Cortez.
Miller: How do people like Juan’s mom feel about these decisions that their kids make or are thinking about making?
Jaffe: She was pretty mixed on it. There was one point where I went with Rosa to their business and she met with Juan’s mom. And Juan’s mom was, I think, broken up about the idea of her son enlisting. I think Rosa had gone down there because she knew that Juan was on the fence. He was vacillating and not sure this was something he wanted to do. And so Rosa wanted to meet with his mom just to understand, one, where his head was, and two, to make sure that she would qualify for Parole in Place, because not everybody gets it. If you’ve got a criminal record or problems of that sort, you don’t qualify. So she met that standard.
But she says something to Rosa, which I found moving. She said, “We came here and we sacrificed so that our children wouldn’t have to sacrifice. So I don’t want him sacrificing for me.” Rosa responded at the time, “Well, look, he’s not sacrificing for you. This is what he wants to do. So he can have peace of mind. So your family can stay together. This is what will make him happy.” That was the back and forth that I saw.
Miller: How much did Juan or other potential PIP enrollees that you’ve talked to or heard about … How much have they talked about the duties that they may be assigned? I mean, whether that’s say patrolling an American city now or policing an ICE facility, if a court says “yes, you can do that,” which obviously didn’t happen here but the administration tried very hard. Or, being a kind of militarized backup for immigration enforcement, the very reason that people like Juan are considering joining up in the first place. How much do they talk about what they might be asked, be ordered, to do?
Jaffe: When I was there, the potential Portland deployment was still on the table. The Supreme Court hadn’t ruled yet. So they had mobilized folks, but they weren’t out in front of the ICE facility. So I did ask that question to several of the folks, some who enlisted for Parole in Place and some who were weighing it. I said, “how would you feel guarding that ICE facility or supporting ICE operations?” I think for the most part, nobody was excited about it. Nobody was joining for that prospect that I mentioned. But they said, “if we’re assigned that duty, we will do our job.”
I think people who were joining, at least in part for Parole in Place, had more immediate problems. I will say General Gronewold, who’s the Adjutant General, essentially the one-star officer in charge of the Oregon National Guard; he’s been really interesting and I think very thoughtful on these deployments. I think when the initial Portland deployment came out, he sent a letter to the Oregon Guard folks and said, “look, I understand this deployment is not popular with many of our neighbors, but we’re going to do our duty.”
He essentially said, “We’re there to make sure everyone’s safe. We’re there to guard the ICE facility, but we’re also there to protect and ensure that people have the right to protest. We’re there to protect people’s First Amendment rights.” So I thought he defined the mission ... He’s got two bosses. One is the Governor of Oregon and the other is the President of the United States ...
[Audio cuts out]
Miller: It seems like we have lost him. But, we are almost at the end of that conversation anyway. I’m up against the clock, so I will sadly say goodbye to him in absentia.
That was Greg Jaffe. He covers the Pentagon and the U.S. Military for The New York Times. He joined us to talk about his recent article about the Parole in Place program. He spent eight days in The Dalles. This is a program that encourages people to enlist in the military as a way to prevent their undocumented parents or spouses from being deported.
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