A U.S. Army staff sergeant who arrived at a military base in Louisiana with his new wife last week was surprised to find her taken into custody by ICE agents shortly after they arrived.
Staff Sgt. Matthew Blank, 23, drove from Houston, Texas, to Fort Polk with his wife Annie Ramos, 22, and their parents to attend a registration appointment at 2 p.m. on Thursday, April 2.
Ramos is an undocumented immigrant who came to the U.S. with her parents as a child and had expected to get a green card through her marriage.
This would allow her to apply for citizenship three years after receiving the card, which is standard under U.S. immigration law.
The group checked in at the base’s visitors’ center as instructed, providing their documents, including Blank’s military ID, their marriage license, and Ramos’s Honduran passport.
Instead of being taken to the benefits office, as they had planned, ICE agents arrived and took Ramos into custody, putting her in handcuffs before transporting her to a detention center in nearby Basile for deportation.
The family was shocked and cried in disbelief.
“ Our plan was to drive over, bring her to the office to get her military ID and activate her military spouse benefits,” Blank told The New York Times.
“She was going to move in after the Easter weekend. Instead, she got ripped away from me.”
“I knew she didn’t have status,” he added, saying the couple had hired an immigration lawyer and were trying to follow the rules.
“We were doing everything the right way.”
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that Ramos “has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” referring to a court order from 2005 that required the then-22-month-old child to be sent back to Honduras.
“This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law,” it added.
Ramos is a Sunday school teacher and a college student who was close to finishing a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, according to the Times.
The couple met last year on a dating app, got engaged on New Year’s Day, and married in Houston last month.
They had 60 guests at their reception, which included a Mariachi band and served fried chicken and mashed potatoes.
“I grew up here like any American,” Ramos told the newspaper via phone from the detention center.
“This is all I know. My husband and family are here.”
Blank, who has previously been deployed to the Middle East and Europe, has promised to do everything he can to get his wife back and said he has the support of his chain of command.
“We are going to fight with everything I have,” he said.
“She is going to move in with me. We will start a family… I am going to be with her and serve my country.”
A GoFundMe campaign started by the family to help pay for Ramos’s legal fees had raised over $8,000 of its $12,000 goal at the time of writing.
Margaret Stock, author of the book *Immigration Law and the Military*, told the Times the couple’s situation was “very common.”
“Prior to the Trump administration creating a mass deportation policy, somebody like her would not have been detained,” she said.
“It’s fundamentally harmful to national security to be doing this to members of the military, particularly while there is a war going on.
This is a major crisis for this soldier. His mind can’t be on the job.”
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