Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested the wife of an active-duty U.S. Army soldier as she was attending an appointment at an immigration office last week.
Sgt. First Class Jose Serrano, who has served in the military for 27 years, including three tours in Afghanistan, told CBS News that his wife, Deisy Rivera Ortega, was arrested by ICE on April 14 in El Paso, Texas.
Rivera Ortega, 36, who is from El Salvador, has been in the U.S. since 2016, and has been married to Serrano, 51, since 2022.
The outlet, citing government documents, said she was summoned to the immigration office to interview for Parole in Place, a program meant to provide deportation protections to military spouses or parents who are in the U.S. without legal status.
Serrano said he had submitted an application to the program on her behalf last year and that the case is pending.
“I don’t really understand why [she was arrested], because she followed the rules of immigration by the T since day one,” Serrano told CBS News, highlighting that his wife had a valid work permit at the time she was arrested.
In 2019, she was granted a legal protection that prevents her deportation back to her native country, the outlet reported. However, Serrano said that his wife was told she could be deported to a third country where she has no ties, such as Mexico.
“They really don’t care, sir,” he told CBS News. “They said, ‘We cannot send her to El Salvador, but we gonna send her to Mexico.”
Serrano, who was born in Puerto Rico, told the outlet he would likely not be able to see his wife without putting his military career at risk, as service members face restrictions on traveling to Mexico.
“I love the Army. [The] Army helped me out for almost 28 years. It’s not the Army, sir. It’s ICE,” he said. “ICE is out of control right now, sir, taking away rights, as soldiers, that we have.”
“We don’t know nobody in Mexico,” he continued. “Plus, as a military, we’re not allowed to go to Mexico.”
Serrano said his mental health challenges, which include PTSD, depression, and a traumatic brain injury, have worsened since his wife’s detention.
“Since this happened, I’m sleeping only two hours a day, two hours a night,” he said.
Reached for comment, the Department of Homeland Security called Rivera Ortega a “criminal illegal alien,” citing a federal offense of illegal entry. The DHS said she was ordered deported on Dec. 12, 2019.
“Work authorization does not confer any legal status to be in the country,” the agency added. “Rivera-Ortega remains in ICE custody pending removal.”
Matthew Kozik, a criminal defense and immigration lawyer based in El Paso, filed a habeas petition for Rivera Ortega in federal court. “I served the Army as a judge advocate for 10 years,” he said. “And as a judge advocate and a combat veteran, bronze star service member, what is going on is absurd.”
“At that interview, she was taken away without cause or explanation and remains confined as of today,” Kozik told the Daily Beast in a statement. “She was following the process prescribed by law – as a former Army Judge Advocate, this is below the acceptable standards for our supposed rule of law."
Kozik told the Daily Beast that Rivera Ortega has no criminal history and is permitted to live and work in the U.S., adding that “she is not illegally present.”
The lawyer also said that she has spent the last two years working at Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army base headquartered in El Paso. “Every day, she was inspected and permitted to access one of the nation’s largest military installations,” he said, adding that she also lived on the base from 2024 to 2025.
Rivera Ortega was being held at the ICE processing center in El Paso as of Monday evening, according to the agency’s online detainee locator.
The Daily Beast reached out to ICE for comment.
ICE has historically refrained from deporting relatives of military service members, but under the immigration crackdown of Trump 2.0, things have changed.
