Immigration and Customs Enforcement took Deisy Fidelina Rivera Ortega into custody on April 14 in El Paso, Texas, while she was attending an interview for Parole in Place, a program meant to let undocumented family members of military personnel stay in the United States legally. Her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Jose Serrano, said she was detained after arriving for the appointment and taken away at a federal government building.
Serrano said the pair had been “doing everything by the book.” He said Rivera Ortega went to work or church, and that he had no warning before she was led out of the building. “At the end of the hallway, my wife was apprehended... they put handcuffs on and they took her away,” he said. “And nobody told me anything, even when I was asking, ‘Hey, what's going on? What's going on with her?’”
The case lands hard now because Rivera Ortega is not an ordinary immigration defendant in the public imagination; she is the wife of a soldier who has spent 27 years in the Army, including three deployments to Afghanistan. Serrano is stationed at Fort Bliss, where Rivera Ortega also works for IHG Army Hotels and has a valid work permit through 2030. Her attorney, Matthew Kozik, said she is currently detained at the El Paso Service Processing Center.
The Department of Homeland Security said Rivera Ortega entered the country illegally and was issued a final order of removal. A DHS spokesperson said she remains in ICE custody pending removal. Kozik said an immigration judge granted Rivera Ortega withholding of removal from El Salvador in 2019, and he said she is entitled to contest third-party designations and any termination. Serrano said the family has no ties to Mexico, even though he said she is at risk of deportation there.
That gap between the government’s removal case and the family’s account is now at the center of a federal court fight. Kozik said the case has gone to court to try to stop removal, and he argued that travel for military families is especially limited. “In the Army, travel to Mexico is extremely restrictive,” he said. “He couldn't even just go see his wife.”
Serrano said the detention has hit him hard enough that he has been seeing a doctor for post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he had been stable until his wife was detained last week. “I can’t sleep even with the medication, I can’t even read,” he said. “It's super painful and stressful to not be able to do anything.” For now, Rivera Ortega remains locked inside a federal process that has put a military marriage, a long service record and an immigration case on a collision course.
