ICE Detains Wife of Retired US Army Staff Sergeant Citing Two-Decade-Old Deportation Order She Was Never Told About

A Honduran woman with no criminal record, married to a decorated 20-year US military veteran, was arrested by ICE during a routine check-in appointment and transported 300 miles from her Texas home to a detention facility in Oklahoma.

Arelys Barahona-Martinez, 40, was taken into custody on 11 June 2026 at an ICE office in Dallas during what her husband believed was a standard supervised appearance. Retired Staff Sergeant Wilmer Trujillo, 45, who served in the US Army and the Texas National Guard for roughly 20 years, told CBS News his heart broke when he was informed she would be detained and deported.

The legal basis for her detention is a removal order issued in absentia on 2 November 2005, a hearing her attorney says she had no knowledge of.

A 2005 Deportation Order Issued Without Her Knowledge

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Barahona-Martinez's arrest in a statement, saying she had entered the United States without authorization in 2005 and was subsequently released. The agency said she 'received full due process and was issued a final order of removal from an immigration judge on November 2, 2005,' according to a DHS spokesperson.

Her immigration attorney, Mark Shmueli, directly contested that characterisation. Shmueli told CBS News that Barahona-Martinez was ordered deported in absentia because she did not attend a hearing she was never made aware of. He confirmed she has no criminal record.

According to CBS News reporting, Barahona-Martinez first crossed the US-Mexico border in 2005, gave birth to a son in the United States, then returned to Honduras with him in 2006. She crossed back into the country illegally in 2018, government documents show, and was placed on supervised release. She has since been living in Princeton, Texas, with her husband.

As of 13 June 2026, ICE records show she is being held at the Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma.

Twenty Years of Service, One Phone Call That Changed Everything

Trujillo enlisted in the military in the late 1990s, straight out of high school. He served approximately four years in the US Army, then 16 years in the Texas National Guard, completing deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan before retiring in 2021.

The couple married in 2020. Their household in Princeton includes his daughters from a previous marriage and Barahona-Martinez's 20-year-old son, a US citizen who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes tumours to grow on nerve tissue.

'I don't want to hate on ICE. I don't want to hate on anybody, but yeah, it boggles me. It rips my heart apart,' Trujillo said in a CBS News interview on 12 June 2026. 'I love this country, and for this country to rip apart my family and take away my wife; she's my rock and she is my backbone to this family.'

He told the BBC separately: 'I just don't understand, we have a family here, and they're breaking us up. They're breaking my family up. She's my backbone.' His message to ICE, he said, was direct: 'I'm not asking for favours. I know a lot of military members are going through this. I am just asking ICE to let my wife go.'

Part of a Wider Pattern Unsettling Military Families

Barahona-Martinez is at least the third military spouse detained by ICE during a scheduled appointment in recent months. In April 2026, ICE detained Deisy Rivera Ortega, the wife of Sgt. 1st Class Jose Serrano, a three-time Afghanistan veteran, during an immigration appointment in El Paso. She was held for roughly a month before being released following direct intervention by Senator Tammy Duckworth, who contacted the DHS Secretary personally.

Earlier, in April 2026, Annie Ramos, the Honduran-born wife of Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Blank was detained by ICE agents at Fort Polk, Louisiana, when the couple arrived on base to register her as a military spouse. Like Barahona-Martinez, Ramos had a removal order issued in absentia in 2005, when she was 22 months old. She was later released but remains under removal proceedings.

The Trump administration has formally scrapped previous policies that gave immigration enforcement leniency to military family members. The DHS has stated that 'military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating US immigration laws', a position that advocates warn is already affecting recruitment and service member morale.

For Wilmer Trujillo, who spent two decades serving a country now moving to deport the woman he calls his backbone, the question is no longer abstract: it is personal, immediate, and without a resolution in sight.