Army veteran pleads with ICE to release wife facing deportation to Honduras

Wilmer Trujillo spent twenty years in uniform. He enlisted in the late 1990s right out of high school, served four years in the Army, then another sixteen in the Texas National Guard. He was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He retired in 2021, a staff sergeant, an American citizen. On Wednesday in June, his wife was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during what was supposed to be a routine check-in appointment at an ICE office in Dallas.

His wife's name is Arelys Barahona-Martinez. She is forty years old. When Trujillo learned she would be detained and deported to Honduras, he said his heart broke. In an interview days later, he struggled to articulate the weight of it: "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." He and Barahona-Martinez married in 2020. They live together in Princeton, Texas, in a household that includes his daughters from a previous relationship and her twenty-year-old son, who is a U.S. citizen. The son has neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes tumors to develop in his body, including in his nose. Over the years, Trujillo said, they had become a tight-knit family.

The Department of Homeland Security's explanation was straightforward and cold. Barahona-Martinez entered the country illegally, the agency said. More than that: she had been issued a deportation order more than twenty years earlier, in November 2005. "The Trump administration is not going to ignore the rule of law," DHS stated. "She will remain in ICE custody pending removal from the U.S." As of the Friday after her arrest, she was being held at the Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma.

Her immigration attorney, Mark Shmueli, offered a more textured account. Barahona-Martinez has no criminal record. She first crossed the southern border illegally in 2005 to reach the United States, where she gave birth to her son before returning to Honduras with him in 2006. The deportation order issued that year was handed down in absentia—she did not attend the hearing because she was not aware it was happening. Thirteen years later, in 2018, she crossed the border again, illegally. Trujillo and Shmueli said she did so out of desperation. Her son needed serious medical care that was not available to him in Honduras. There was another threat too: gang members in Honduras were attempting to recruit him. "This is the whole reason she's here," Trujillo said. "To save her son."

What makes this case notable is not its isolation but its company. The detention of military spouses by ICE has historically been rare, but under the second Trump administration, such arrests have accelerated as part of a broader mass deportation campaign. The administration has revoked previous restrictions on ICE enforcement actions. Some military spouses detained in recent months have been released after their cases received media attention and intervention from members of Congress. One such case involved the wife of an active-duty Army soldier, detained in April and subsequently released, though her deportation proceedings remain open.

Shmueli argued that Barahona-Martinez should receive the same outcome. She has no criminal history. She is married to a retired staff sergeant. Her American son has a serious medical condition. And legally, she has a pathway forward: as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, she could potentially obtain a green card if her deportation case were reopened in immigration court and her removal order nullified. Shmueli said a request to reopen her case is pending. He also plans to file an application for Parole-in-Place, a specialized program designed to protect certain military spouses and parents from deportation.

Trujillo's message to ICE was direct and without embellishment. "I'm not asking for favors," he said. "I know a lot of military members are going through this. I am just asking [ICE] to let my wife go. Don't break this family apart." He said the agency was treating his wife as though she were a hardened criminal, when what he wanted was simply for her to be released from detention so she could continue her immigration case from outside a cell. "I love this country," he said, "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."