Federal immigration agents detained Annie Ramos at Fort Polk, Louisiana, last Thursday after her husband brought her there so she could begin the process of receiving military benefits and take steps toward a green card. By Monday, Ramos was still in a federal immigration detention center.
Her husband, Staff Sgt. Matthew Blank, said he had gone to Fort Polk with the woman he married in March expecting to start the paperwork that would let them live together near the base. Instead, he said, the visit ended with agents taking her away. “I never imagined that trying to do the right thing would lead to her being taken away from me,” Blank said. “What was supposed to be the happiest week of our lives has turned into one of the hardest.”
Ramos, who was born in Honduras and is 23 years old, entered the United States in 2005 when she was younger than 2 years old. Her family failed to appear for an immigration hearing that year, and a judge issued a final order of removal. She later applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2020. Her detention was first reported by.
The case has revived concerns among military families and immigration lawyers about how aggressively the government can act when a service member’s spouse or other immediate relative is undocumented. The Department of Homeland Security eliminated a 2022 policy last April that had treated military service of an immediate family member as a significant mitigating factor in immigration enforcement decisions. DHS said Ramos has no legal status to be in the country and said this administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.
Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer and retired Army lieutenant colonel, said the arrest makes no sense to families trying to follow the process. “It doesn’t make any sense — they’re going to get arrested for following the law? That’s stupid,” she said. Stock also said, “It’s bad for morale, it disrupts the soldiers’ readiness.”
That criticism arrived months after more than 60 members of Congress wrote to DHS and the Defense Department in September warning about arrests of military personnel and veterans’ family members. Legal experts said the government had previously been more lenient toward military families, while advocates said detentions like Ramos’s can undercut recruitment and weigh on readiness, especially as service members try to build stable homes around their assignments. DHS, however, has said military service alone does not exempt people from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.
For Blank, the issue is no longer paperwork or policy. The couple had planned to live together near Fort Polk just days after their wedding. Instead, their first week as husband and wife ended with Ramos in custody and a military family waiting for the next hearing, the next decision, or the next chance to bring her home.
