He Joined the Military. They Reported His Wife to ICE.

G iovanna Perez loaded her four kids into the car on September 21 and drove from their home in Weslaco, Texas, to Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

She had a 9:30 a.m. appointment to pick up the ID cards that would allow them to access military medical insurance, facilities, and commissary stores.

Her husband, Pedro Gutierrez, had recently enlisted in the Army and left a month earlier for basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia.

Perez approached the military guards at the gates with some trepidation.

Her parents illegally brought her across the U.S. border from Mexico when she was 6 years old.

Now 35, she and Gutierrez have been together since they were 17 and have carefully kept her immigration status a secret.

Gutierrez is a U.S. citizen, but marriage does not give legal status to someone who is in the country unlawfully.

When the Obama administration started the DACA program to protect immigrants like Perez who had arrived as children, she did not apply, for fear that the government might someday use the information against her family.

Perez told us that her husband believed that joining the Army would allow him to serve his country, give his family access to health care—including the costly medications his son takes—and potentially protect his wife from deportation.

He had already submitted her application for a benefit called Parole in Place, which offers a path to legal residency for the close relatives of service members.

Officials at Fort Benning had assured him that she would have no trouble getting IDs for herself and the children, and that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a Social Security number, Perez told us.

At the gates of the Navy base, guards told Perez they had no record of her appointment.

She remained calm as they directed her to a nearby office to get a visitor’s pass.

That’s when two military officials took the family into a room for questioning.