Wilmer Trujillo, a retired staff sergeant with a two-decade service record in the U.S. Army and Texas National Guard, finds himself in a personal crisis. Despite deployments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Korea, his biggest challenge now unfolds at home in Princeton, Texas.
Trujillo’s wife, Arelys Barahona-Martinez, faces deportation. “It breaks me because the country I worked my entire life for is ripping my family apart,” Trujillo shared with CBS News.
Barahona-Martinez, a native of Honduras, was arrested during a routine Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) check-in in Dallas. Although she has no criminal record, her two unauthorized entries into the U.S. resulted in a deportation order in 2005. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed this as the reason for her detainment.
Barahona-Martinez’s arrest marks her as one of many close relatives of U.S. service members or veterans targeted under the intensified deportation efforts of the Trump administration. Speaking from an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas, she expressed her anguish, “It is truly hell, to be judged as a criminal,” Barahona-Martinez lamented, seeking only to complete the legal process with her family.
Potential relief may come through a program known as parole-in-place, which assists military families facing deportation. Trujillo’s wife might pursue permanent residency based on their marriage, but reliance on an immigration judge to reconsider her case is necessary.
Barahona-Martinez and Trujillo met after she returned to the U.S. in 2018, following her exit in 2006 to protect her son, Idben. At that time, gang threats and his need for treatment of a genetic disorder, neurofibromatosis, prompted her return.
The family has now grown close, with Trujillo’s daughters and Barahona-Martinez’s son living together. Idben stated, “She came to this country just to save my life,” describing the emptiness of their home without his mother.