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private prisons
'She Got Ripped Away From Me': ICE Raids Military Base, Cages Wife of Newlywed Soldier Preparing to Deploy
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," said one immigration expert.
Apr 06, 2026
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.
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Private Prison Firm GEO Group Reports Record $254 Million Profit After New ICE Contracts
"Trump’s donors are making money from this violent separation of our immigrant families," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib. "This is corruption."
Feb 13, 2026
Private prison company GEO Group on Thursday reported a company record of $254 million in profit last year—a roughly 700% increase over 2024—driven by asset sales and contracts with the Trump administration to build several new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities across the US.
GEO Group secured approximately $520 million in new or expanded contracts in 2025, based on annualized revenue, according to company founder and executive chairman George Zoley.
"This represents the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company's history," Zoley said during an earnings call on Thursday. "We have entered into new contracts to house ICE detainees at four facilities totaling approximately 6,000 beds."
Those facilities are: Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan; Folkston Processing Center at the D. Ray James Correctional Institution in Georgia; and a so-called "deportation depot" at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, Florida.
"The census across our active ICE facilities has continued to steadily increase from the third quarter at approximately 22,000 to presently approximately 24,000, which is the highest level of ICE populations we have ever had," Zoley said. "This past year, we also significantly expanded the delivery of our secure transportation services on behalf of both ICE and the US Marshals Service, valued at approximately $60 million in incremental annualized revenue."
"We continue to be optimistic about the importance and growth potential of the ICE contract," he added. "The new two-year contract includes pricing for 361,000 participants in year one and 465,000 participants in year two. With the capital investment we made in 2025, we believe we have the capability in scaling monitoring devices and case management services to achieve those significantly increased participation levels and far beyond if desired by ICE."
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed last July by President Donald Trump contained a massive increase in funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE's parent agency, including about $45 billion for expanding immigrant detention capacity.
Days after Trump's 2024 reelection—which private prison companies funded to the tune of over $1 million—Zoley hailed the "unprecedented opportunity" of the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign.
“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company’s [and] country’s history, and the opportunity that it will bring,” he beamed.
Unlike state prisons or county and local jails, which are accountable to oversight agencies, privately operated ICE detention centers are not subject to state regulation or inspection. These facilities are plagued by a history of abuse, often sexual in nature, and sometimes alleged deadly medical neglect—problems that carried over from previous administrations.
Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the agency's deadliest in two decades. Most of these deaths reportedly occurred in privately operated detention centers, and 10 immigrants died in GEO Group facilities, according to data collected by attorney and independent journalist Andrew Free.
GEO Group's earnings call came just days after three detainees at one of the company's facilities in Washington state filed a lawsuit accusing two guards there of sexually assaulting and beating them, and then trying to cover it up. The company has been previously sued for alleged inadequate medical care, wrongful deaths, and forced labor.
This, in a system in which immigrant detention is meant to be nonpunitive and in which only a tiny fraction of those detained have been charged or convicted of any violent crime, according to a leaked DHS document exposed earlier this week.
Another private prison company, CoreCivic, on Thursday reported $116.5 million in 2025 profits, a nearly 70% increase from the previous year. The operator of ICE facilities including the notorious Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas—which detainees describe as a measles-infested "living hell" where they’ve been served moldy food full of worms and forced to drink putrid water—said it expects 2026 to be even more profitable.
Some private prison investors expressed frustration that ICE isn't jailing enough people to generate even more revenue.
"One of the big questions, I think... has been the pace of detention by ICE, that it's been below what people... thought [it] was going to be," Joseph Gomes of NOBLE Capital Markets, Inc. said on Thursday's CoreCivic earnings call. "I think... people thought we'd be at that 100,000 level. We're at... a little over 70,000."
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5-Year-Old Abducted by ICE in Minneapolis Now Sick in ‘Abysmal’ Texas Detention Facility
"Liam is getting sick because the food they receive is not of good quality. He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever, and he no longer wants to eat," his mother said.
Jan 29, 2026
Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy abducted by immigration agents in Minneapolis last week, is now in poor health after being sent to languish in a Texas facility with “absolutely abysmal" conditions, according to his family.
HuffPost reports that "Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, are being held at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. This is despite Arias entering the country legally and having no criminal record, according to [the family's lawyer]. Late Tuesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked federal immigration officials from deporting Ramos and Arias, for now."
Reporters got in contact with Zena Stenvik, the superintendent at the Columbia Heights public school district, where Ramos attends preschool, who said she spoke with Ramos' mother.
Just visited with Liam and his father at Dilley detention center. I demanded his release and told him how much his family, his school, and our country loves him and is praying for him.
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— Joaquin Castro (@joaquincastrotx.bsky.social) January 28, 2026 at 3:45 PM
“Unfortunately, Liam’s health is not doing great right now,” said Stenvik. “He’s been ill. I’ve been told he has a fever. So I’m very, very concerned about his well-being in that facility.”
Earlier this week, Ramos’ mother told Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) that “Liam is getting sick because the food they receive is not of good quality. He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever, and he no longer wants to eat.”
A lawyer for the family, Eric Lee, told MPR that the conditions at the Texas facility are “absolutely abysmal."
“They mix baby formula with water that is putrid. The food has bugs in it. The guards are often verbally abusive,” he said.
Marc Prokosch, another of the family's lawyers, emphasized that although US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials describe them as a "family unit" that crossed the border illegally, they entered the US lawfully and had no order of deportation against them or criminal record.
He said the tactics ICE has used in Minneapolis seem designed to evade the law and separate detainees from legal representation.
“Since [Operation] Metro Surge came, they’ve been moving them all out to Texas… within 24 hours," he said. "That’s one of the core elements of being able to help somebody in the legal sphere, is to be able to communicate with them… It’s really hard to talk to them.”
Democratic US Reps. Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett of Texas went to visit Ramos and his father in the detention facility in Dilley on Wednesday. In a video posted to his social media, Castro said the facility is holding 1,100 other people.
"We spoke to many parents throughout our visit," Castro said. "There were a lot of parents there who talked about their kids experiencing deep depression, anxiety, people losing weight, both because of the bad food but also because of their mental state."
Castro said he "very bluntly told" the ICE officials there and officials for Core Civic, the private prison company that runs Dilley, "the country is against what's going on, that Liam needs to be released, that the country demands his release, and that no child that's five years old should be in detention like that."
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