Opinion. Military City USA can honor service without creating a family exemption from immigration law.
San Antonio calls itself Military City USA, and it has earned the name. Generations of soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines have built this city, and the city has honored them in return. So when Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Oct. 21, she was speaking from a tradition every San Antonian respects.
Her request deserves to be read precisely, not caricatured. She asked both departments to stop apprehending and detaining service members’ spouses and qualified family members “as they lawfully seek permanent residence or citizenship,” and to give those families the strongest possible preference for approval. She praised the family members who make service possible, “irrespective of citizenship,” and warned that enforcement could dampen interest in military service.
No one wants a recruit in basic training wondering whether his wife will be home when he graduates. But the letter raises a harder question that Military City cannot dodge: does one family member’s enlistment create a special shield for relatives who are in the country unlawfully? American law, and two thousand years of history, give the same answer. Reward the person who serves. Do not suspend the rules for everyone connected to him.
The cases behind the letter
The trigger was Giovanna Perez. Brought from Mexico at age 6 and now a mother of four, she had applied for military parole in place through her husband, Pedro Gutierrez, who recently enlisted in the Army and is in basic training at Fort Benning. According to the San Antonio Report and The Atlantic, ICE agents detained her in September at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi when she went to pick up military ID cards.
In August, ICE detained Maria Rocio Rocha, mother of Naval Academy midshipman David Garcia, at her green card interview. She was held at the Dilley facility and then deported to Mexico. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-San Antonio) said she “was doing everything the right way.” The Department of Homeland Security gave Border Report a different account: that she was a “criminal illegal alien” who had been removed from the country and re-entered illegally afterward, which is a federal felony.
These are hard stories, and the families involved deserve respect. They also show exactly why discretion is applied case by case. A sympathetic headline does not tell an officer whether there is a prior removal order, an illegal re-entry or a criminal record. Only the file does.
What parole in place actually is
Military parole in place grew out of a genuine tragedy. In 2007, while Army Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez was missing in Iraq, the government moved to deport his undocumented wife. Public outcry stopped it. By 2013, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had issued a memo allowing parole for undocumented spouses, children and parents of service members and veterans, and a 2016 memo expanded it further. Some branches began pitching it to recruits.
But parole in place has never been a right. It is a discretionary use of the parole authority in Section 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a tool that lets a relative who was never lawfully admitted be treated as paroled so he or she can pursue a green card from inside the country.
It also helps to be clear about who actually wears the uniform. The military does not offer enlistment to illegal aliens. Federal law, 10 U.S.C. 504(b), limits enlistment to U.S. citizens and nationals, lawful permanent residents holding green cards, and citizens of three Pacific nations under compact agreements with the United States. The only exception lets a service secretary admit a person with a critical skill or expertise, capped at 1,000 per military department per year, and the program that used it, MAVNI, has been suspended since 2017. So the mayor’s letter is not about who may serve. Everyone in uniform is here lawfully. The real question is whether one lawful service member’s enlistment should shelter relatives who never had legal status at all.
When Congress addressed parole in place in Section 1758 of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Trump, lawmakers told DHS to “consider, on a case-by-case basis” whether a grant would advance military family unity as a significant public benefit. A 2019 House amendment had proposed making service members’ relatives categorically “eligible.” The enacted law chose discretion instead. That choice matters, and it is the choice the mayor’s letter would quietly reverse by asking for a standing preference.
The current administration has drawn the same line. A 2025 ICE policy states that “U.S. military service alone does not automatically exempt aliens” from the consequences of breaking immigration law. It replaced a 2022 policy that had treated service as a “significant mitigating factor.” DHS put it more bluntly to the San Antonio Report: a family member in uniform “is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws.”
The services are drawing that line too. The Marine Corps and the Navy told the San Antonio Report that parole in place is not a Department of War program or an enlistment incentive and that they no longer advertise it. According to The War Horse, the Coast Guard has also stopped. The Army and National Guard still mention it. When most of the sea services say a benefit is not theirs to promise, recruiters should not be promising it.
What the numbers say
The reported figures cut in more than one direction, and conservatives should be honest about all of them.
| Measure | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Military naturalizations, 2020 to 2024 | About 4,500 rising to 16,200 per year | USCIS data, via San Antonio Report |
| Military naturalizations, FY2025 | 16,064 | San Antonio Report |
| Military naturalizations, first half FY2026 | 5,948 | San Antonio Report (not yet checked against USCIS quarterly data) |
| Military parole in place processing time | 4.5 months (FY2025) to 12.5 months (FY2026) | USCIS processing data, via San Antonio Report |
| Parents and spouses of active-duty members detained | More than 50 in the second Trump term | Associated Press investigation |
| DHS arrests reported to senators (Feb. 2026) | 125 veterans (34 placed in removal) and 150+ immediate family members | DHS letter to Senate Democrats |
The number that should trouble conservatives most is the first-half FY2026 naturalization count. If the person who actually swore the oath is waiting longer for the citizenship he earned, that is a failure worth fixing, and fixing it is fully consistent with enforcing the law against relatives who never had status.
What Rome actually teaches
Rome is often invoked carelessly in immigration debates, so precision matters here.
For centuries, Rome’s auxiliary forces worked. Non-citizen provincials enlisted for roughly 25 years, and under Emperor Claudius (who reigned from AD 41 to 54) the reward was regularized: on honorable discharge, the veteran received a diploma of two hinged bronze tablets granting him Roman citizenship. His children were included, and he gained the right to a lawful Roman marriage. His non-citizen wife, however, did not become a citizen through his service, and after about AD 140 the grant no longer automatically covered children born while he served. Rome rewarded the soldier, after the service. It did not make his household Roman because he enlisted. That individual, earned bargain filled the ranks and folded generations of provincials into the Roman people.
Two things broke it. The first was Caracalla’s edict of AD 212, which extended citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants of the empire. Once citizenship was handed out wholesale, much of the incentive to earn it through service was gone.
The second was the shift from individual recruits to whole peoples. In 376, Rome admitted Gothic tribes across the Danube en masse. Two years later they revolted and destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople, killing Emperor Valens. The settlement that followed placed the Goths inside the empire as foederati, allied bands serving under their own kings with their own loyalties. Alaric, a Gothic leader who had held Roman command, sacked Rome in 410. In 476, Odoacer, commander of the barbarian troops in Italy, deposed the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus.
The lesson is not that foreigners cannot serve. Today’s non-citizen recruits enlist as individuals and swear the same oath as every other American in uniform. The lesson is about the direction of policy. Rome stayed strong while service was an individual path into the nation, with the reward following the service. It weakened when status was handed out regardless of service and when military obligations attached to groups whose loyalties ran somewhere other than Rome. A policy that turns one enlistment into a protective umbrella over an entire household moves us, however slightly, from the first model toward the second.
Answering the critics
“Enforcement hurts readiness and morale.” The concern is real, and the mayor raised it in good faith. But readiness is better served by clear rules that a recruit understands on day one than by an expectation of exemption that collapses at a check-in appointment. The cruelest outcome is a promise the law never made.
“Congress and President Trump reaffirmed parole in place in 2020.” They did, as a case-by-case discretionary authority. The statute directs DHS to weigh each request. It does not create a right, a guarantee or a bar on ordinary enforcement.
“These families are following the legal process.” Many are. But a pending discretionary application does not confer lawful status or erase a prior removal or illegal re-entry. The Rocha case, as DHS describes it, shows why the details of each file matter.
What we should do instead
- Fast-track naturalization for the person who serves. Sections 328 and 329 of the Immigration and Nationality Act already provide an accelerated path for honorable service. Clear the backlog and make that path fast and predictable, so the reward attaches to the one who took the oath.
- Require written recruiter disclosure. Every branch should tell prospective enlistees, in plain language, that parole in place is a discretionary DHS program, not a military benefit, not an enlistment incentive and not a guarantee for any relative.
- Screen and counsel at enlistment. Recruits should get accurate information about their relatives’ status and the limits of any relief before they sign, not after a family member is detained.
- Let Congress write the rules. Eligibility, limits and process belong in statute, not in memos that expand and contract with each administration.
- Keep enforcement, and weigh service as one factor. Military ties should count in the balance. They should not function as an automatic shield against the consequences of unlawful presence.
The bottom line
Military City USA can honor every man and woman who serves and still insist that the law applies to everyone. The American practice, like the Roman practice at its best, has been to reward the individual who completes honorable service with a clear path to citizenship. It has not been to treat a relative’s enlistment as a substitute for lawful status. Mayor Jones asked for a standing preference for families already seeking status. The better answer is simpler: give the person who serves the citizenship he or she has earned, keep parole in place genuinely discretionary, and do not make San Antonio the place where one oath shields an entire household from the rules that govern everyone else.
Sources
- San Antonio Report: Jones calls on DHS, DOD to halt immigration action against military families (Oct. 22, 2026)
- San Antonio Report: The U.S. military has long advertised pathways to citizenship for service members and families. Is that changing? (Sept. 8, 2026)
- City of San Antonio: Mayor Asks DOD, DHS Reconsider Immigration Action for Military Spouses (Oct. 21, 2026)
- Border Report: Congressman says midshipman’s mom deported back to Mexico
- Office of Rep. Joaquin Castro, press release (Aug. 28, 2026)
- ICE Policy 10039.3 (2025)
- 10 U.S.C. 504, Persons not qualified
- NDAA FY2020, Sec. 1758 (text via Center for Immigration Studies)
- 2019 House amendment (Takano)
- Roman Inscriptions of Britain: The Diplomata (RIB 2401)
- Roman military diploma (overview)
Featured photo: William Rudolph / Unsplash.