Maisa Lopes Eliaser is home after five weeks in immigration detention. She and her husband, Army Staff Sergeant Alexis Jaramillo, told their story this morning at a virtual press conference with Danitza James of Repatriate Our Patriots and Ashley DeAzevedo and Allyson Bautista of American Families United.
On July 8 the family drove nine hours from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Montgomery, Alabama, for what they had been told was a routine interview to finalize Maisa’s green card. Their paperwork had been filed in Alabama, where Alexis was stationed before. Maisa was taken out of the room partway through. An officer brought Alexis into a conference room, with their five-year-old son standing next to him, and told him his wife was going to jail.
“They use these words: ‘Your spouse is going to jail,’” Alexis said. “I was in uniform. They didn’t care about it.”
Alexis has served eleven years as an aviation operations specialist and is now a senior instructor. He spent the next five weeks parenting a five-year-old alone while remaining on active duty. He said a peer and a superior are the reason he decided to speak publicly rather than handle it quietly.
Maisa spoke briefly in Spanish, with Danitza translating. She said she is happy and feels safe at home, and that she is still afraid to go out, because anyone she does not recognize might be ICE. She thanked people who supported her without knowing her or her case. The couple has an ICE check-in on Monday, August 17, and both of them said they are afraid of what that appointment will bring.
Danitza said the trauma does not end when the detention does. Every immigration appointment from here forward will be a reminder, and that is true of every family going through this. “Alexis is still my brother. Maisa is still my military family sister. I didn’t know you. I have never met you. But you were still my military family sister. This is who we are. This is what we sign up for,” she said.
More than 1.5 million U.S. citizens are married to someone who could face exactly what Maisa faced, Ashley said. Her organization’s inbox fills daily with those families, and she said resolving them one press conference at a time is not a response to a problem that size. An Associated Press investigation counted at least 51 spouses and parents of active-duty service members detained since January 2025, and everyone on the call agreed the real number is higher. She asked the administration to stop detaining non-criminal immigrants married to U.S. citizens while Congress works this out, and asked Congress to move the bills that have been sitting in committee for years.
Repatriate Our Patriots is working other active cases right now, most of them active-duty service members whose spouse or parent is detained. She said the scale of military family detention is unprecedented in her years doing this, and that the military has no standard operating procedure, guide, or memo telling commanders how to support a soldier in this situation. What has helped in the cases she tracks is individual commanders and first sergeants deciding on their own to connect their soldiers to organizations like hers and to congressional offices. That is improvisation by people who happen to care, in place of a system.
Maisa is home, and everyone who had a hand in that decision did the right thing. Her case is not resolved, and many other families are waiting for their version of this outcome. Both organizations asked for her case to be reopened and for the system that put her there to be fixed.