Army sergeant’s wife deported to Honduras under Trump crackdown

The wife of an active-duty U.S. soldier has reportedly been deported to Honduras, her native country, in the latest instance of a family member of an American service member being swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Multiple outlets reported that Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo, the wife of Army Sgt. Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez and mother of their 6-year-old daughter, was deported Monday. She had left Honduras in 2016 due to violent crime in the country, according to her husband.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Villafranca-Trejo had “received due process” ahead of her deportation.

She is at least the seventh spouse or parent of an active-duty military member to be removed from the country, with more than 50 cases of immediate family of American troops, sailors and airmen placed in federal immigration detention, according to The Associated Press .

Military family members were largely seen as safe from deportations until President Trump’s second term, when protections were rolled back.

Turcios Juarez previously told ABC News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers detained Villafranca-Trejo July 11 outside of a Walmart in Fort Bliss, Texas, in front of their daughter.

The Army sergeant has since told The Associated Press he has been struggling to manage his military duties since his wife was detained as he has had to care for their child without her help, skipping training in the mornings to take his daughter to school. He also told the outlet he has had to postpone a planned assignment at another base.

“I don’t know if I will be able to continue with this,” Turcios Juarez told the AP of his service. “I have to make a plan to make sure I can still fulfill my military responsibilities — but also take care of my family.”

Villafranca-Trejo entered the U.S. when she was 18 years old and has no known criminal record but was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge in 2017 after failing to appear at a hearing, DHS told the outlet.

But her husband said she had not received a notice for the hearing and didn’t know she had been ordered deportation until 2022, when they went to apply for her green card after marrying.

Turcios Juarez, also originally from Honduras, became a U.S. citizen in 2024 after enlisting in 2022.

Villafranca-Trejo had been waiting for roughly a year to see if her application for military parole-in-place — which allows the immediate family of U.S. troops to remain in the country to apply for a green card — was approved.

“We were following the rules, we did everything we could on our side to fix this problem,” Turcios Juarez told the AP.

Villafranca-Trejo’s removal comes as a Navy sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln — the aircraft carrier that has received attention in recent weeks due to its extended deployment in the Middle East coupled with reports of poor conditions and low morale among its services members — posted to social media that his father had been detained by U.S. immigration authorities this week.

Sailor Joshua Aviles said his 48-year-old father Luis Manuel Aviles had a driver’s license, Social Security card and a permit to work in the U.S., and was waiting to get his green card approved.

“We have done everything through immigration to get his green card approved, and we are just waiting,” Aviles wrote on Facebook .

“This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly being treated like a criminal,” he continued.

“My dad’s only ‘crime’ was coming to this country to give my siblings and me a better life.”