'She Got Ripped Away From Me': ICE Raids Military Base, Cages Wife of Newlywed Soldier Preparing to Deploy

A US Army staff sergeant saw his young wife taken away by immigration agents at his military base in Louisiana last week.

Matthew Blank, 23, who is set to begin training for deployment next month, was preparing to move into his home at the Fort Polk Army base with his 22-year-old wife, Annie Ramos, whom he married just weeks ago.

According to a report out Monday from The New York Times, Ramos is an undocumented Honduran immigrant who was brought to the United States as a toddler. She works as a Sunday school teacher and is months away from finishing a biochemistry degree. She has no criminal record.

Undocumented immigrants who marry US citizens become eligible for green cards and can apply for full citizenship three years after receiving them. Prior to their marriage, Blank and Ramos had already hired a lawyer to begin the process.

Ramos had also applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2020, but her application was never processed after the Trump administration halted it for new applicants.

Blank said he and his wife were following the procedures to get her legal status: "We were doing everything the right way.”

In the meantime, they were planning to begin their lives as newlyweds. On April 2, the couple headed to the base's visitor center to get Ramos registered for military spouse benefits.

They showed Ramos' birth certificate, Honduran passport, their marriage license, and Blank’s military ID. When asked whether Ramos had a visa or green card, they explained that she did not, but that they had completed the application and planned to file it within days. That's when the trouble began.

After the attendant made a "flurry of calls," they were told Ramos would be detained.

Soon enough, she was led away in shackles and taken more than an hour away to the privately owned South Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Basile, where she waits with hundreds of other women who have been rounded up as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort.

"She was going to move in after the Easter weekend," Blank said. "Instead, she got ripped away from me.”

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement following initial reports of Ramos' arrest.

“She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” the statement read. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”

The statement also said that Ramos was arrested "after she attempted to enter a military base," seeming to imply she was in the process of illicit activity rather than there as a military spouse.

Ramos had been issued a deportation order in absentia in 2005, when she was 22 months old, after her family failed to show up for an immigration court hearing.

However, experts told the Times that it is very rare for people who have been issued prior deportation orders to be detained and that it's typically easy for them to adjust their paperwork.

"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," concurred Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who wrote about the incident on social media.

While prior deportation orders can affect an undocumented person's ability to receive legal status, he said, "discretion is part of the enforcement of every law."

"She got a deportation order when she was a small child. It's quite possible that, like many people, she didn't even know about it. That's a common situation," he explained. "Immigration law has always involved choices about whether deportation makes sense or not."

Citing a YouGov/Economist poll from February, he noted that just 21% of Americans support deporting undocumented people brought to the US as kids, while just 16% support deporting those married to US citizens.

Contrary to previous administrations, which tended to target immigrants with criminal records and recent arrivals for deportation, around three-quarters of those currently in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, according to data published in February.

While there is no complete data on how long the average ICE detainee has lived in the US, the Deportation Data Project found that during the first nine months of the second Trump administration, the number of arrests away from the border increased by a factor of 4.6, suggesting that it was going after undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for longer periods of time.

According to Blank's parents, who were there as their son's young spouse was taken away, even the ICE agents who enforced the order to arrest Ramos did not appear proud of what they were doing.

“They told us that they didn’t have a choice, they said they had to take Annie,” recalled Blank's mother, who said the agents apologized.

“I begged them not to take her,” she said. “They said the higher-ups made them do it.”

Ramos told the Times that she knows no other home besides the United States.

"I grew up here like any American,” she said over the phone. “My husband and family are here.”

The facility where she is being held, run by GEO Group, a multibillion-dollar private prison company, has been the subject of dozens of complaints from current and former female detainees who have claimed they were denied basic medical treatment, hygiene supplies, and edible food.

Others have said they've faced sexual abuse and harassment and were subject to forced labor. In December, a former guard pleaded guilty in federal court to sexually abusing a Nicaraguan detainee in mid-2025.

Ramos' detention comes as thousands of US service members deploy to fight Trump's war in Iran. ICE has also been deployed to military bases to screen the family members of Marine recruits at their graduation as recently as last week.

Blank, who has previously been deployed to the Middle East and Europe, said he was "going to fight with everything I have" to secure his wife's freedom.

"She is going to move in with me. We will start a family," Blank said. "I am going to be with her and serve my country."

Their lawyer has petitioned the court to reopen her removal order, which could freeze her deportation. Until it is reopened, however, she could be deported at any moment.

They have also continued to push forward with the effort to get Ramos a green card. But the guards at Basile have refused to let them bring the completed forms inside to get Ramos' signature.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus said on social media that Blank "should be focused on training today," but "instead, he was forced into a fight against his own government to free his wife."

A GoFundMe campaign created by Blank's sister to pay for the legal fight has raised more than $20,000 since Saturday.