In a Marine Corps being pulled in a million different directions -- from increased focus on the Pacific that has led to a massive restructuring to a surge in domestic operations tied to immigration -- Sgt. Maj. Carlos Ruiz has the difficult job of trying to advocate for the daily needs of Marines.
The top enlisted leader of the service, who has been shouldering that role since the summer of 2023 and is now midway through his tenure, Ruiz has been vocal about a multibillion-dollar barracks effort meant to fix disintegrating housing, as well as mental health and bonus struggles for troops. All are issues that are fighting for oxygen in an environment where the Marine Corps has many responsibilities.
The service was part of an already-forgotten campaign against Yemen's Houthis that spanned multiple administrations and pulled units from the Pacific, deployed expeditionary elements that faced extended tours in an increasingly unstable Middle East, and rotated constantly through the Arctic, South America and everywhere in between.
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New domestic missions largely tied to White House immigration policy are pulling from the service's operational budgets as it rushes to field drones and 5G networks and missiles while seemingly taking on new roles, such as anti-submarine warfare, every day. A restructuring allowed the service to shift an estimated $15.8 billion just a few years ago, yet its leaders are often forced to go hat-in-hand to Congress to get funding for bonuses, duty station moves and barracks.
"We talk about it in Congress, we talk about it with the American people: The Marine is the prize, and then everything else is for that Marine," Ruiz said in an extended interview with Military.com. "But it doesn't compete well with the F-35, with [the amphibious combat vehicle], with very important platforms, because Marines will figure it out, right?"
A better barracks room, decent sleep, proper food, new kit issued not only in the fleet, but at boot camp, and good leadership are just a few variables in an equation that can keep a Marine from "feeling alone and desperate," he said. But he acknowledged that many of those needs lose out in fights against big-budget programs.
"There's budget fights every day on what is being kept on the shelf, what is going to get enough to keep it alive, and what is like, no kidding, we must buy this for the future fight," he said.
The recently passed "One Big Beautiful Bill" is set to ease some pressure caused by years of stopgap measures from Congress, with more than $230 million specifically allocated for the Marine Corps' barracks initiative and billions more divided among the services for housing allowances, bonuses, tuition assistance and child care. But some top-of-mind issues for Marines, such as intangibles like mental health, aren't directly addressed in the legislation.
"I think he gets a lot of questions from the troops around the force -- mental health is something they're thinking about," said Tom Schueman, an active-duty Marine Corps officer speaking to Military.com in his personal capacity as founder of Patrol Base Abbate, a Montana-based retreat and community organization. Schueman praised Ruiz for working with veterans groups to help address troops’ concerns.
Through these developments, budget battles and forcewide changes, Ruiz has attempted to establish guiding principles grounded in the simple things for Marines, with an eye toward what they might mean for the future of the Corps.
"Imagine what they can do if they actually had food and the sleep and the training and the gear -- who could we possibly become? And who would want to mess with that in the future?" he said. "It is strategic, it is overdue, and I think people see that, but [there are] tough decisions for sure."
Fixing Problems with Limited Support
Last year, the Corps reported the highest retention rates seen in more than a decade and, even as other services struggled to make recruiting numbers during the pandemic-era slump, the service has consistently hit its targets.
But years of congressional stopgap funding have splintered some of the Corps' ability to offer incentives that nearly half of Marines reenlisting for the first time take advantage of: bonuses.
The service has had to resort to what Marine circles now refer to as an "IOU" system for payouts meant to keep skilled troops, including in critical roles such as cyber.
Those efforts also made it hard for the Corps to move Marines to new duty stations, at one point forcing it to create "shell orders" so families could start setting up child care or housing, but it lacked the money to actually pay for the move, which was put on hold until funding was available. Last December, that meant nearly 3,000 Marines and their families could not move because the Corps couldn't pay for it.
Ruiz said that Marines generally "understood that we were put in a tough spot" but has hope that the recently passed budget will put the service in a better position starting next year for bonuses, and leaders previously told Military.com that the move issues were improving.
"It's not fun [when] we can't deliver to the family because they're counting on that money," he said of the bonuses. And with the funding, "we're just waiting on how to work it all out. I don't want to say 'hang in there, the government's coming to help you,' but it's not fun to walk back something we've gotten used to and frankly that Marines work so hard to deserve."
When a Marine decides to reenlist, they often seek a bonus to help sweeten the deal, and because the Corps has to make sure its troops are paid on time amid ever-increasing salaries, it has been pulling from personnel accounts that have been decreasingly funded by Congress for years -- a particularly salty blow as the service has now passed an unprecedented two back-to-back financial audits.
The result is that a reenlisting Marine will sign a deal with a bonus attached, but if the Corps can't pay that incentive by the contract's start, the Marine can leave. The bonus struggles have already resulted in thousands of Marines deciding not to stay, Military.com reported last December.
That kind of uncertain congressional support has also shaped what is supposed to be a massive overhaul of Marine barracks.
Ruiz has become the principal advocate for that nascent housing improvement effort aimed at getting thousands of junior Marines out of what he once called "crappy" barracks. Known as Barracks 2030, the yearslong project carries a hefty price tag of roughly $11 billion. But those funds are up against other demands on the service.
"That doesn't mean there weren't any surprises -- the border, LA, Florida -- it just keeps coming, and funding has to be diverted or moved to pay for those deployments," he said, fielding a question about barracks and adding that more funding for them is coming after recent legislation.
The initiative has already seen a forcewide inspection of more than 60,000 barracks rooms, new systems to smooth out repair processes and the employment of hundreds of new civilian housing managers to lighten the load, even amid a Pentagon hiring freeze.
But Ruiz said that, in some cases, commanders have stopped "waiting for higher headquarters to come save the day" on barracks, using existing funds to put Marines to work on drywall and caulking while clearing contractor stores of cooling units -- all while the service banks on future budgets to keep this top priority afloat.
"If higher headquarters is not moving fast enough, then we'll take it on ourselves," Ruiz said, referencing Operation Clean Sweep, a West Coast initiative to fix nagging, but low-level barracks issues.
In April, Military.com reported that Marine Corps officials were already concerned unstable congressional funding could stretch that housing effort into the 2040s -- long after today's junior troops would reap any benefit and even as leaders like Ruiz continue to emphasize that providing Marines a decent home is strategically important if the Corps wants them to stay for the next fight.
"We're never going to be done with evolving how we live and how we train, which is good," Ruiz said. "I wish it would go faster, but the times dictate that we do something different," alluding to decisions during the years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan when operational demands took priority over infrastructure, choices that contributed to a scathing Government Accountability Report in 2023 that found that roughly 17,000 Marines were living in substandard conditions.
"But you know who will hold us accountable? The Marines," he said. "Then recruiting will show, and then retention will show, and then those indicators will pop and then they'll refocus us -- if we ever get out of whack, the Marines will let us know."
Marines in the Middle of Immigration Operations
One of the missions that quickly started adding to the strain on Marine Corps budgets has been the sudden responsibilities for the service tied to President Donald Trump's immigration policy.
Since Trump took office in January, the military -- especially the Marine Corps and the Army -- have taken on a slew of roles tied to preventing migration and supporting efforts at deportation.
For the Corps, that looks like hundreds of Marines sent to the southern border to reinforce barrier walls; hundreds more sent to Los Angeles, California, amid anti-immigration raid protests, which resulted in the immediate but temporary detention of an Army veteran at the hands of those Marines; and most recently, a 200-troop deployment to Florida in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Marine Corps also recently partnered with ICE in a pilot program that sees immigration agents posted at gates across multiple bases around the country, an initiative meant to reduce access to those installations by foreign nationals, but one that the other services said they are not exploring or enacting (the Navy declined to comment).
But beyond policy, the sweeping immigration efforts have also gotten personal for some Marines.
Last month, ICE detained and beat the father of three Marines, one a veteran and two on active duty at Camp Pendleton, California, as he was landscaping outside of an IHOP in Southern California. The father, Narciso Barranco, was released Tuesday after more than three weeks in detention.
His son, Alejandro Barranco, a Marine veteran who served during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, advocated for weeks alongside lawmakers to get his father released.
There are at least two active-duty Marines -- Alejandro's brothers at Camp Pendleton -- who are now part of an organization that is growing increasingly close to the immigration forces that detained their father.
"It's definitely hard," Alejandro told Military.com. He noted his brothers had received support from their leaders, many of whom come from immigrant backgrounds themselves, but said of the conflict: "It's orders from way, way above them, to the point where they can't really control it. They just have to follow orders. They can't risk their careers."
Ruiz himself has become the center of an online hoax tied to immigration. Ruiz, who was born in Sonora, Mexico, is the son of two immigrants. After his interview with Military.com, the satire site Duffel Blog published a post that jokingly suggested Ruiz had been deported. Though clearly not a real news item -- both given its source and the use of AI imagery -- the post took off and rumors circulated widely about Ruiz's status, to the point that the debunking site Snopes wrote about it.
Military.com asked Ruiz the week prior: If a Marine is concerned about their family members, but sees the Corps' operations with immigration enforcement, how should they reconcile that? How does he reconcile that?
Ruiz said that he has visited Marines in LA and at the border, observing them in riot gear and tacking material onto the barrier -- "and then in any conversation that I've had with them, not one of them has ever asked me, 'Sergeant Major, you were born in Mexico, what do you think about all this stuff?'" he said. "I never get that question. The only questions that I get is, or the only request for advice that I get is about each other and how they're able to maintain their focus on what the mission is in spite of that squad being from all over the globe and their families being from all over the globe."
But Ruiz didn't dismiss that there are those in the broader community who may well be concerned.
"So are there veterans out there, are there Marines today, that look at the environment when they take off their uniform and they're watching television and think, 'Man, that's really -- I can't really -- I don't know where I stand?' The beauty about the service is that they can step out of their barracks room or their house with their uniform on, and they don't have to think that way, because they get to focus, right? So as they're doing it, they're focused on their mission."
That kind of divide, between concerns over fairness in the government or the status of family members and performing one's duty, is inherently unstable, said Margaret Stock, a retired lieutenant colonel and Alaska-based immigration attorney who is one of the leading experts on the relationship between the military and immigration.
"What he seems to be saying is that he expects the Marines to compartmentalize and exclusively focus on their given mission, come what may, but that's contrary to human nature," she said. "You can't get troops to compartmentalize like that. It causes a breakdown in morale and cohesion and mental health."
Immigration enforcement, and the potential for detention and deportation, can have massive impacts on families, she said.
"There's just no way you're going to focus on your mission," Stock said. "If you're serving as a Marine or Army soldier and ICE arrests and detains your parents, you're going to be preoccupied with worry about how your parents are doing. Where are they being detained? What can be done to help them? How do you find them? How do you get them an attorney? How do you pay for an attorney? How bad are the detention conditions? How's their health holding up?"
Ruiz said that his own experience, as the child of undocumented immigrants finding his way several decades ago, was different than today.
"I was a young Marine with undocumented parents who crossed and got jobs and got Social Security numbers, and they figured it out, but it took a little bit, and they were able to do it on their own," he said. "I didn't naturalize any of my family. It wasn't part of what it's like today, where if you join, you can help, you can provide resources and you can guide your family through a naturalization process or citizenship process, which I'm glad that exists today."
And he said that he didn't have a prescription for how a Marine might handle their conflicting feelings of being tasked with an immigration mission potentially aiding in the detention and deportation of those from similar families, but that they need to be focused on their missions.
"How do you reconcile?" he said. "That's for each and every one of [them] to do. I just want Marines to know that they are always focused on what they're doing, because they do it for each other. Is it fun to stand and do things that are unconventional for a Marine? They may think it's a different thing that they're doing, but if we look at history, we've been fighting fires, we've been on borders before, we've done this, again -- and at every turn, it has been a lawful order, and that's what we do, and I think that's what Americans respect."
When asked about the case of Narciso Barranco, Ruiz said he was unfamiliar, but that having to worry about one's parents would be taxing for a service member.
"If my parents were taken, I would be worried all the time, much like Marines affected by Texas floods and who lost all their property or entire way of making a living," he said. "I hope that while they're here and life happens to them, because that's a life event, that we're good enough to be there for them, because that's all we can do, right?"
The Long Game, Mental Health and Transition
Last year, the Marine Corps released a revamped publication called "Sustaining the Transformation," 130-odd pages of Marine how-tos that reads more like philosophical opus than military doctrine.
It is a new version of a same-titled publication from 1999; taken together, they represent bookends to 20 years of war through the lens of Marines on the ground and up the chain. It reinforces the idea that part of the Marine Corps' mission is returning quality citizens to society, and Ruiz has leveraged several veteran-centric organizations to help fill gaps in the official transition program to do that.
While the immediate goal is smoothing that transition, Ruiz and veteran group leaders said that building strong support networks and a sense of purpose can have ripple effects that benefit the Corps long term. Young people considering enlistment are often influenced by veterans -- in person or online -- whose negative experiences, especially during transition, can shape their perceptions of military service.
"The sergeant major understands the long game," said Joshua Jabin, a Marine veteran and COO of the Travis Manion Foundation, a nonprofit that supports veterans and their families. "He's not just trying to do what's best for the Marine Corps in the short term. He understands that if you take care of people and they have a successful transition, that's good for the long term for the Marine Corps' success,"
"To be able to recruit people in the future," he added, "those young adults need to see people transitioning and being successful after their Marine Corps career."
Like the necessity of getting good gear early on in a Marine's career, Ruiz described a momentum for troops leaving the service: Many are ready to "run hard" toward their next life, but then the last paycheck arrives, the spot at the police academy doesn't start for another year and suddenly "things accumulate, and you get into this cycle."
"I want gates to be open. I want veterans back into bases. I want young Marines talking to Marines of the past," he said, referencing veteran service organizations common to previous generations and recently established ones. He wants them "to come together and elevate their game and connect the generations."
He said that the Marine Corps' Transition Readiness Seminar, one of the final steps into the civilian world, is often rushed for Marines, especially if they are coming off a lengthy deployment when their focus is on the mission at hand. "It's not good enough," he said of the program, which helps set up employment but doesn't necessarily address building community.
"There's two really important things that you have when you're on active duty that you lose when you transition: One is the camaraderie, and two is that sense of purpose -- that mission," according to Jabin.
"Those are the two most important protective factors against suicide, against negative mental health and well-being outcomes," he said. "The more that you have that strong, supportive community and that next mission, and the earlier you have it in your transition, the more likely you are to move toward thriving and away from crisis."
These efforts are two sides of the same coin, and increasingly relevant. Ruiz began his tenure following consecutive years in which Marines had the highest suicide rates among the service branches, and at a time when veteran suicide rates remain significantly higher than their civilian peers.
Congress may be focused on big budget programs like the F-35, and public attention may be centered on the Corps' role in immigration enforcement, but it's often mental health that the rank-in-file ask about.
Ruiz thinks veterans might be a key to helping address that issue.
By bringing veterans onto bases, "maybe we'll have a better effect on the mental welfare of what it's like to be a Marine, because they've been through it," Ruiz said.
