Veteran fights to prevent wife's deportation: "I'm begging my own country"

Princeton, Texas — Retired staff sergeant Wilmer Trujillo served roughly 20 years in the U.S. Army and the Texas National Guard, with deployments and assignments in Afghanistan, Iraq and South Korea. But Trujillo says he is now facing the most difficult battle of his life, as he implores the government he began serving in uniform after high school to not deport his wife. "It breaks me because the country I worked my entire life for is ripping my family apart, and taking away my wife," Trujillo told CBS News inside his home in the Dallas suburb of Princeton. "It makes me sick to my stomach." "I've never thought I'd be in a situation where I'm begging my own country to let my wife go so we can do our thing the right way," the veteran added. Trujillo's wife of six years, Honduras native Arelys Barahona-Martinez, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week during a check-in appointment in Dallas. He said she had been checking in with ICE routinely over the past years, without incident, until her unexpected detention on June 10. While she lacks any criminal record, immigration officials said Barahona-Martinez entered the U.S. illegally twice, first in 2005 and then in 2018. In a statement confirming her arrest, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, cited a deportation order issued against Barahona-Martinez over two decades ago, in 2005. She's the latest close relative of a U.S. …