US citizens are joining the military to save their families from ICE

US citizens from migrant backgrounds are joining the US military in a bid to protect their families from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They hope a little-known provision which protects serving personnel’s families from deportation will save relatives from Trump’s fascist private militia.

Their desperation is leading them to enlist and to adopt a 20-year-old scheme to protect their families.

US soldier named Alex Jimenez was killed in Iraq in 2007. Jimenez’s body wasn’t recovered for a year. His wife, who had arrived in the US “illegally” was deported in the interim. The George W. Bush government stepped in after public outcry. She was granted residency. The ‘Parole in Place’ initiative was born in that moment.

At the time a senior Homeland Security official said:

The sacrifices made by our soldiers and their families deserve our greatest respect.

The New York Times (NYT) reported:

The program was formalized a few years later. The goal was to provide soldiers peace of mind before they went to war. If a service member drops out or is dishonorably discharged, their family member loses protective status.

They added:

In 2023, about 11,500 relatives of military recruits used the benefit, a 35 percent increase over the previous year, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Colonised people forced into colonising institutions to save their families from deportation by Trump’s private fascist army? Welcome to America in 2026.

Numbers are up

The NYT says people are particularly joining the National Guard — roughly the US equivalent of the British armed forces reserves. The enduring US tradition, however, is to have state-level militias. British militias were a repressive internal security force.  A local militia famously attacked and killed unarmed protestors at Peterloo, Manchester, in 1819. The British state abolished the militia in 1908.

The paper said numbers are up:

The agency did not respond to requests for more recent data. But several states reported a recent surge in program enlistees. In Nevada, 79 enlistees, or about 20 percent of the state’s new National Guard recruits in 2025, used the program.

The NYT reporting suggests that many new joiners are from Hispanic and Latino backgrounds.

Trump has already used National Guard to back up ICE in some states, as part of his ethnonationalist war on immigration. As US reporter Spencer Ackerman wrote on 12 January:

Either ICE is abolished or it will kill many more Renee Goods. Minnesota is just the beginning of ICE’s transformation into a right-wing death squad.

You can read his full piece here. His use of ‘death squad’ might seem hyperbolic. But such units have long been a mainstay of US imperialism around the world. The difference is they have now come home.

National guard vs ICE

There have been major legal challenges against the practice.

And the use of the national guard cuts both ways. Following the 7 January execution-style killing of US citizen Renee Good, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said he’d deploy the Guard to defend communities from ICE.

Walz told the press:

We do not need any further help from the federal government.  “To Donald Trump and [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem: You’ve done enough.

His comments captured the chaos of the moment:

Featured image via the Canary