Wife of Soldier Set To Be Deployed Taken Away By ICE As Part Of Immigration Crackdown: Report

A U.S. Army staff sergeant who is readying for deployment had his wife detained by ICE and she is being held in a detention center, according to a new report.

The New York Times noted that the woman in question is named Annie Ramos, who was set to marry Matthew Blank. She is a Honduran undocumented immigrant who was brought to the United States by her family when she was a young child. Ramos was detained under a deportation order that was entered when Ramos was just 22 months old.

According to the outlet, Ramos has no criminal record, and the couple had begun immigration proceedings.

“I knew she didn’t have status. We were doing everything the right way,” Blank told the newspaper. “Our plan was to drive over, bring her to the office to get her military ID and activate her military spouse benefits. She was going to move in after the Easter weekend. Instead, she got ripped away from me,” he told the NYT.

The Trump administration says that its immigration crackdown has so far resulted in 605,000 migrants in the country unlawfully being deported and an additional 1.9 million self-deporting.

The Trump administration has touted its efforts as targeting the “worst of the worse,” often focusing on migrants with criminal records of gang ties. However, critics of the administration have said that the deportation efforts are far broader and have regularly involved targeting people who are in the process of pursuing legal immigration routes.

In the case of Ramos, authorities were told that she had married a U.S. citizen and that her attorney was filing her green card application that day, the New York Times reported.

“I grew up here like any American,” Ramos told the newspaper in a phone call from a detention center. “This is all I know. My husband and family are here.”