Maisa Lopes Eliaser was already on a deportation flight bound for Brazil when ICE officers pulled her off the plane midair and sent her back to the United States. The 32-year-old Brazilian national, married to U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Alexis Jaramillo, had spent more than a month in federal immigration detention before her sudden release. She's now back home in Louisiana, though she says she's still struggling to sleep and remains afraid she could be sent back to the detention facility.
Eliaser's ordeal began at what was supposed to be a routine immigration appointment in July, when she was detained despite having already married a U.S. citizen and pursuing lawful permanent residency, according to NBC 5 Chicago, which credited reporting from Jack Brook and Safiyah Riddle. She entered the United States in 2019 and overstayed the tourist visa she used to get in, a detail that mattered a great deal once her case reached immigration court — an immigration judge had issued her a final order of removal in April. Officers eventually placed her on a deportation flight to Brazil, where other detainees were led off the plane before ICE received a phone call about her case midflight and pulled her off before it landed.
The removal from that plane wasn't random. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly's office had contacted the ICE field office involved in her detention, according to a spokesperson cited by NBC 5 Chicago, and Jaramillo said simply that someone made the phone call and his wife came back. Kelly, who has also spoken out for two other detained military family members, did not mince words about the broader policy. “The policy of detaining military family members is wrong and makes no sense at all,” he said, adding in writing that “going after military families instead of real criminals doesn't solve anything.”
A Marriage, a Child, and a Decade of Service Upended
Jaramillo and Eliaser have been married since 2024. He's an aviation operations specialist who has served in the Army for more than a decade, and he took leave from his duties training soldiers at Fort Polk, Louisiana, to deal with his wife's detention. While she was held, he cared for her 5-year-old son and showed photos of her near the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, where she was being held as of early August. Eliaser said she was treated like an animal inside the facility, and ICE officers reportedly told her she was famous because videos about her case had circulated online.
Her legal path forward is narrower than it might seem. Because she overstayed a visa rather than entering without inspection, she was never eligible for Military Parole in Place, the discretionary benefit that lets Homeland Security grant temporary stay and work permits to immediate relatives of active-duty or veteran service members, according to USCIS guidelines. That statutory restriction pushed her instead toward a marriage-based adjustment-of-status application, a process that left her exposed to an old missed-biometrics issue from a prior asylum filing, according to Newsweek, which reported that she and her husband had gone to the Montgomery, Alabama USCIS office expecting to finalize her green card. She now plans to reopen her case and advance that green card application, and she has another immigration appointment scheduled for Monday.
Part of a Wider Pattern Across Military Bases
Eliaser's case is far from isolated. An Associated Press investigation found that ICE has detained more than 50 spouses and parents of active-duty military personnel, forcing some service members to take administrative leave or delay deployments to arrange child care, as reported by PBS. The outlet also detailed the case of Marine Cpl. Jose Manuel Vilchis-Valle's mother, Ursula Borja Valle, who was detained at an immigration appointment last August and deported to Mexico within a week despite decades in the U.S. without a criminal record.
Hoodline has covered similar cases closer to home. In April, Army Sgt. 1st Class José Serrano's wife, Deisy Fidelina Rivera-Ortega, was arrested at a Fort Bliss check-in despite holding valid work authorization through 2030; Sen. Tammy Duckworth contacted Homeland Security to call for her release, and she was later released from custody. In March, Hoodline also reported on Stephanie Kenny-Velasquez, wife of a Houston-based Army reservist Black Hawk pilot, who was detained during what was billed as a routine ICE check-in. Advocacy group Repatriate Our Patriots, which helped with Eliaser's case and broadly supports military families facing deportation, is headed by Danitza James, who said the family's reunion “shows what is possible when people set politics aside and support service members.”
Congress Investigates, DHS Defends the Policy
More than 60 Congressional Democrats, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Duckworth, launched a formal investigation this month into whether Homeland Security and the Pentagon coordinated efforts to deport military family members, warning in a joint letter that the practice undermines military readiness and troop morale, according to CT Mirror. That same reporting noted the Pentagon had acknowledged in a December letter to lawmakers that it had conducted no formal analysis of how deporting noncitizen military relatives affects readiness or morale.
Homeland Security has defended its actions, stating that military service alone does not exempt foreign nationals from federal immigration law or grant them lawful status, a position issued in response to the congressional inquiries. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Eliaser's case specifically. The Trump administration has pushed for mass deportations broadly while rolling back protections that previously shielded military families, a shift that stands in contrast to the Military Parole in Place framework first developed under the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq War and formally codified by DHS in 2013 to protect service readiness.
Not every case has ended the way Eliaser's did. Annie Ramos, 22, was also detained by immigration authorities before being released following public outcry, one of several recent examples advocates point to as evidence of the toll these detentions take on military households. For now, Eliaser is back in Louisiana with her husband and son, but the fear of being sent back to detention hasn't left her, and her legal fight is far from over.
