Army Spc. Jasmine Hernandez enlisted in the Army in part out of gratitude for the life her parents had worked to build for her. Her father came to the United States illegally from Guanajuato, Mexico, at 17, looking for work and a safe place to raise a family. For Hernandez, one way to return that sacrifice was to protect him from deportation.
“I walked into the recruiter’s office. I felt like I needed to do something for my parents. I didn’t want them to live in fear anymore,” Hernandez said, adding she had a patriotic draw to military service.
“I love my country,” she said.
Still, Hernandez’s military service didn’t prevent her father from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention earlier this year — just one of several cases where military families are being swept into President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown, despite systems in place meant to protect them. It happens amid a backdrop of a military increasingly turning to the immigrant community to fill its ranks.
Shortly after joining the Army in 2024, Hernandez submitted her father, Aniceto Hernandez-Reyna, for Military Parole in Place, an immigration program that can allow undocumented parents and other close relatives of service members to remain in the country.
An Army legal office has described the policy as a matter of military preparedness, saying that uncertainty over a family member’s immigration status can weigh on troops and interfere with their duties. “Such personal concerns have the potential to adversely affect a service member’s ability to focus on mission-essential duties,” an April Army legal notice to the force outlining the program says.
On May 16, more than a year after Hernandez applied her father for the Military Parole in Place program, ICE officers detained Hernandez-Reyna at a gas station just outside of Phoenix in front of Hernandez’s two younger brothers. She was 2,000 miles away at the time, stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
Hernandez-Reyna’s application for Military Parole in Place was still pending when immigration officers detained him. The longstanding program can allow undocumented spouses, parents and children of service members and veterans to remain in the U.S. on a case-by-case basis, typically in one-year increments. It can also make it easier for some recipients to seek work authorization or pursue a green card, though it does not itself promise legal status.
“Programs like Military Parole in Place are not automatic, and having a pending application does not confer legal status,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which ICE falls under, said in a statement.
Trump has said his immigration crackdown aims to target the “worst of the worst” criminal offenders among the nation’s migrants. An ABC News review of state and federal records did not find records of violent crime for Hernandez-Reyna. He has had several traffic violations, including a DUI in 2002.
In this July 27, 2026, file photo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents walk a detainee out of the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, Calif.
Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
Hernandez said her father’s ICE detention is causing her stress at a time she’s serving the country.
“That was a slap in the face. I’m here serving the country, and this happens to my own family,” Hernandez said. ”It’s like a guessing game. Are my parents OK? Are my siblings OK? It’s a lot mentally. Sometimes I have a hard time focusing because I’m just so stressed out.”
Her father remains at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Hernandez has spoken with him once since he was detained. She does not know when she will hear from him again.
Pentagon fueling the ranks with immigrant community
Families of service members targeted by ICE include relatives with no violent criminal record who have been detained or deported. This comes as the Pentagon is recruiting from the immigrant community, including legal permanent residents, or green-card holders, at a rapidly growing pace — with their number climbing sharply in recent years, a reflection of broader demographic trends in the U.S.
An investigation from the Associated Press in April found that more than 50 spouses and parents of service members have been detained during Trump’s second term, with at least six of them being deported.
A Defense Department spokesperson said that the Pentagon “respects the rule of law and the officers who enforce it” in regards to these ICE actions.
Earlier this year, ICE detained Annie Ramos, 22, the Honduras-born wife of Army Staff Sgt. Matthew Blank, as she tried to register for military benefits at Fort Polk, Louisiana, just days after the couple married.
Sergeant Matthew Blank, 23, and his wife Annie Ramos, 22.
Courtesy family of Matthew Blank
Federal agents detained Ramos over a removal order issued in 2005, when she was 20 months old. She was later released with an ankle monitor after five days and widespread media coverage, but a DHS spokesperson said at the time the government would continue pursuing her deportation.
“All I have ever wanted is to live with dignity in the country I have called home since I was a baby,” Ramos said in a statement in April. “I want to finish my degree, continue my education, and serve my community — just as my husband serves our country with honor.”
Danitza James, CEO of Repatriate Our Patriots, which works to reunite the deported family members of active-duty service members and veterans, said that the number of cases of detention and deportation she has seen is “heartbreaking.”
Last year, the military recruited nearly 11,000 green-card holders, up from roughly 6,800 in 2021, a 62% increase, according to Defense Department data reviewed by ABC News, with that upward trend already on pace to continue this year. But non-citizens are prohibited from commissioning as officers, meaning they are blocked from many of the military’s most consequential roles.
Earning citizenship through enlisting into the U.S. military has long been a recruiting incentive, as troops can apply for expedited citizenship after a year of service. The number of troops becoming U.S. citizens through military service has also more than tripled since 2020, DHS data reviewed by ABC News shows, with more than 16,000 service members naturalized in 2024.
The Philippines, Jamaica and Mexico were among the leading countries of origin for those newly naturalized troops.
The potential recruiting pool is significant. There are some 13 million green-card holders in the U.S. as of January 2025, up by 340,000 from a year earlier, federal data shows, with many of them coming from mixed-status families.
Nearly 50,000 foreign nationals currently serve in the U.S. military, while another 125,000 foreign national veterans live in the United States, according to a May 2026 Congressional Research Service report.
The military has offered immigrants an expedited path to citizenship since at least the Civil War, when Congress eased naturalization requirements for foreign-born troops. During each of the world wars, more than 100,000 service members became U.S. citizens through their military service.
“It has long been a way to fill the ranks,” said Katherine Kuzminski, an expert on military recruitment and the director of studies at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Center for a New American Security.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detain a man as part of a Targeted Enforcement Operation in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, Sept. 4, 2026.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Non-citizen recruits and Hispanic troops are not the same population. But both trends point to a military becoming more dependent on communities with close ties to the immigration system. The rise in Hispanic enlistment is one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in the rank and file in a generation. In the Army, by far the Pentagon’s largest service, Hispanic recruits made up nearly 27% of new soldiers last year, up from just under 20% in 2020.
That growth in recruiting from immigrant communities comes as the military is largely climbing out of its yearslong recruiting slump following a President Joe Biden-era push to pour more money, personnel and attention into recruiting, but the underlying challenge remains consistently finding enough young Americans who can qualify to enlist.
The Pentagon estimates only about 23% of Americans ages 17 to 24 are eligible to serve. Applicants must also pass an SAT-style entrance exam, which has long been a major hurdle, including for some recruits who speak English as a second language. Defense officials have discussed for years whether to offer a Spanish-language version of the exam, according to current and former officials familiar with those conversations, though those deliberations have frequently concluded that troops must have a proficiency in English.
The recruiting pool is poised to shrink even further. The number of Americans turning 18 is projected to fall 13% between 2025 and 2041, primarily driven by declining birth rates following the Great Recession in 2008, according to research from the Center for a New American Security, putting even more pressure on the services to reach a diverse pool of the population.
ICE on military bases
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is being done at military bases themselves.
Last year, ICE agents were stationed at three Marine Corps bases to assist with base security, including Camp Pendleton, California; Quantico, Virginia; and Marine Corps Base Hawaii. A quarter of Marines are Hispanic, according to Pentagon demographic data.
In this July 26, 2019, file photo, the main entrance to Camp Pendleton is shown in Oceanside, Calif.
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images, FILE
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Mexican national who was deported after being stopped while trying to enter Camp Pendleton September last year to visit his pregnant daughter, according to court documents.
Esteban Rios Sosa had visited his daughter on the base repeatedly without incident, court documents show. His daughter lived there with her husband, a Marine. But during a visit last fall, Rios Sosa and his wife were stopped at the gate and ultimately deported. His wife was quickly released, but Rios Sosa remains in Mexico.
U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino of the Southern District of California ruled that Rios Sosa’s due process rights were violated since he had been deported without notice or without a hearing.