El Paso, Texas - ICE reportedly abducted and detained the wife of an active-duty US Army soldier when she showed up for an appointment at an immigration center last week.
Deisy Rivera Ortega was arrested by ICE on April 14 while attending an immigration appointment in Texas. She is now being held at the agency's notorious El Paso detention camp as of Sunday evening.
"I don't really understand why, because she followed the rules of immigration by the T since Day One," Sgt. First Class Jose Serrano told CBS News in an interview on Sunday.
Serrano has served in the US Army for more than 27 years, including in Afghanistan.
"I love the Army. Army helped me out for almost 28 years. It's not the Army, sir. It's ICE," the 51-year-old said. "ICE is out of control right now, sir, taking away rights, as soldiers, that we have."
Rivera Ortega married Serrano in 2022 and has been in the US since 2016. She was granted legal protections prohibiting her deportation back to El Salvador in 2019, but in a statement to CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security justified her arrest on the basis that she entered the US illegally.
Serrano said that Rivera Ortega has been informed by immigration agents that she may be deported to a third country, likely Mexico, to which active service duty members are banned from traveling.
"We don't know nobody in Mexico," Serrano said. "Plus, as a military, we're not allowed to go to Mexico… Since this happened, I'm sleeping only two hours a day, two hours a night."