Luis Manuel Aviles, a 48-year-old handyman in Key West, Florida, was arrested by immigration authorities on Saturday after leaving his house to take his car to a mechanic, according to a family account. His son, Joshua Aviles, was in his ninth month of deployment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East and was supposed to return home soon.
The arrest, first reported by WSOC-TV, came as the Trump administration continues to pursue a mass deportation agenda that has swept up at least dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops, per the outlet's reporting. The Department of Homeland Security said Border Patrol agents arrested Aviles on Saturday and that he will remain in ICE custody while the government seeks to deport him. Aviles has lived in the United States for 19 years and, according to his family, has a permit to work in the country and no criminal record.
Aviles' daughter, Katherine Delgado, 28, said their father dedicates himself to work to provide food for his family — a portrait echoed by his wife, Argelia Aviles, who described him the same way to reporters. Delgado had been sending her brother hundreds of dollars in care packages containing food and hygiene products while he served aboard the carrier, though some of those packages failed to arrive, the report notes.
A Son's Grueling Deployment
Joshua Aviles joined the military partly to improve his father's chances of obtaining citizenship, according to the family's account relayed in the same report. He was serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was deployed in the Middle East and set a U.S. military record for uninterrupted time at sea — a deployment that the Guardian reports surpassed 250 days at sea and roughly 200 consecutive days without a port visit before the Navy dispatched the USS George Washington to relieve it earlier this month. The Guardian also reports that family members described food shortages and increasing strain on the ship and its equipment during the extended mission.
Joshua Aviles worked 12-hour shifts for more than 250 days without a break, and he wrote that he was fighting for a country that had given him everything. He said his father's detention was heartbreaking and made it difficult to continue working 12-plus-hour days, according to the account published by WSOC-TV. Luis Manuel Aviles had not seen his son for nine months and reportedly became distraught when six months passed without his son returning; he had been looking forward to his son's deployment finally ending, the report states. The USS Lincoln is expected to soon be brought out of service in the Middle East.
Military Parole-in-Place, and Why It Didn't Help
Military parole-in-place allows spouses, children and parents of active-duty service members and veterans to obtain legal immigration status from within the United States, a discretionary benefit first used under the George W. Bush administration in 2007 and formally codified by DHS in November 2013 under Immigration and Nationality Act § 212(d)(5)(A), according to the National Immigration Forum. Since that codification, roughly 82,000 military family members have applied for the benefit, per the Chidolue Law Firm. But the protection does not apply to everyone: it excludes people who overstayed visas or already applied for legal status at the border, and per WSOC-TV's reporting the Trump administration has rolled back immigration protections for military families more broadly.
WSOC-TV's reporting indicates immigration authorities have detained at least dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops under the current push, with at least six military family members deported and one person self-deporting. One soldier's wife spent more than a month in federal immigration detention, while another was removed from a deportation flight to Brazil before it departed — an episode Hoodline covered in its report on a Fort Polk soldier's wife pulled from that flight.
A Pattern Across Military Bases
Aviles' case follows a string of similar detentions involving military families nationwide. In April, ICE detained Deisy Fidelina Rivera-Ortega, the wife of a 27-year Army veteran stationed at Fort Bliss, during an in-person appointment tied to her pending parole-in-place application — she held an active work permit through 2030 and had previously been granted withholding of removal. A month earlier, ICE detained the Venezuelan wife of an Army reservist Black Hawk pilot during a routine check-in in Houston, prompting her husband to temporarily suspend his flying duties while the family sought congressional help.
In January, Minnesota National Guard recruiters faced scrutiny for marketing parole-in-place to high school students as a way to protect undocumented parents from deportation, which prompted officials to clarify that the benefit requires prior enlistment and cannot be guaranteed by the military branches. Border Patrol agents also routinely carry out joint enforcement operations with local agencies in the Florida Keys, including the Key West Police Department and the Monroe County Sheriff's Office, part of the broader federal and local collaboration on immigration and maritime operations in the region.
Compounding Legal Uncertainty for Nicaraguans
Aviles is originally from Nicaragua, a detail that lands amid sweeping changes to humanitarian protections nationwide. The Department of Homeland Security terminated Temporary Protected Status for Nicaragua effective September 2025, and after a district court stayed that decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay in February allowing the termination to proceed, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That status had provided work permits and deportation protection to Nicaraguan nationals continuously residing in the U.S. since 1998.
Between January 2025 and this month, the federal administration terminated or initiated termination of Temporary Protected Status for 13 of the 17 designated nations, affecting roughly 1 million of the country's 1.3 million TPS recipients, per the Pew Research Center. A June Supreme Court decision cleared the legal path for the administration to proceed with those terminations, the same analysis notes. It remains unresolved whether immigration courts or USCIS will pause removal proceedings to allow pending green card petitions or parole-in-place requests, including any bearing on Aviles' case, to be adjudicated before deportations occur.
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