The wife of an active-duty US soldier was deported on Monday to her native Honduras, according to her family and the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo is at least the seventh spouse or parent of an active-duty US soldier to be deported under the immigration crackdown during Donald Trump’s second presidency. The has found more than 50 cases in which immediate family members of US troops were placed in federal immigration detention after the Trump administration rolled back protections for military families.
In some instances, DHS has released military spouses after media attention and advocacy by congressional leaders. Villafranca-Trejo’s husband, army Sgt Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez, said he has been struggling to manage his military duties since she was detained on 11 July outside a Walmart near Fort Bliss, Texas, where he is stationed. Since then, he’s had to care for their six-year-old daughter without his wife’s help.
Instead of training in the mornings, he takes his daughter to first grade – and he said he has already had to postpone a planned assignment at another base. Villafranca-Trejo, who has no known criminal record and entered the US in 2016 at age 18, was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge in 2017 after failing to appear at a hearing, according to DHS. Villafranca-Trejo’s husband said she had not received a notice for the hearing she missed and did not realize she had been ordered deported until they went to apply for her green card after marrying in 2022.
Originally from Honduras, Turcios Juarez became a US citizen in 2024 after enlisting two years earlier. Villafranca-Trejo’s motion to reopen her case was denied last May and an appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals remained pending, according to her attorney. She had also been waiting for about a year for a decision on her application for military parole-in-place, a program that allows the immediate family of US troops to remain in the country to apply for a green card.
JP Caballero, a spokesperson for congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a Democrat representing El Paso, said Escobar had opened a congressional inquiry into Villafranca-Trejo’s case and visited her at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas earlier this month. He still hasn’t figured out how to tell his daughter what has happened. But he says he still wants to keep serving his country.
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