Veteran Faces Struggle as Wife Detained by ICE

Retired staff sergeant Wilmer Trujillo served in the U.S. Army and the Texas National Guard for around 20 years, including deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Korea. Now, he confronts an unanticipated personal battle as he pleads with the government to prevent his wife’s deportation.

“It breaks me because the country I worked my entire life for is ripping my family apart and taking away my wife,” Trujillo shared with CBS News at his home in Princeton, Texas. “I’ve never thought I’d be in a situation where I’m begging my own country to let my wife go so we can do our thing the right way,” he continued.

Trujillo’s wife, Arelys Barahona-Martinez, originally from Honduras, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last week during a routine check-in in Dallas. Despite her lack of a criminal record, her unexpected arrest on June 10 stunned the family. According to immigration officials, Barahona-Martinez unlawfully entered the U.S. twice, in 2005 and 2018. A deportation order from 2005 was cited in her recent arrest by the Department of Homeland Security, responsible for ICE oversight.

Trujillo and Barahona-Martinez met in 2019, a year after she returned to the U.S. Barahona-Martinez explained her return in 2018 was due to the threat of gangs recruiting her U.S.-born son in Honduras and his ongoing medical needs for neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder.

On Monday, a video call from inside an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, allowed Barahona-Martinez to speak with her husband. “It is truly hell, to be judged as a criminal,” she expressed in Spanish, breaking into tears as she pled to be with her family.

Barahona-Martinez may have a potential path to U.S. residency due to her marriage to a U.S. citizen. However, she must convince an immigration judge to reopen her deportation case and the government to overlook her illegal entries via a parole-in-place program intended to protect military families. Yet, whether ICE will allow her to pursue this outside detention is uncertain. Under President Trump’s administration, ICE intensified efforts to arrest those with deportation orders, with less regard for their criminal background, making detainee release more complex.

Over the years, Trujillo and his daughters, along with Barahona-Martinez’s son Idben, have bonded. Recalling his medical condition, 20-year-old Idben who lives with Trujillo admitted, “The house feels empty without my mother. She came to this country just to save my life.”