Border Patrol Arrests Father of Sailor Serving Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln

Border Patrol agents arrested Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, in Key West, Florida, on Saturday, August 22, while his son was still at sea aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. His wife, Argelia Aviles, told the Associated Press he had simply left the house to take his car to the mechanic.

Aviles is from Nicaragua and has lived in the U.S. for 19 years, according to his family. His stepdaughter, Katty Delgado, told NBC News he has no known arrest history and works as a handyman to support the family. "He's doing everything the right way," she said.

His son, Navy sailor Joshua Aviles, learned of the arrest by phone while serving his ninth month aboard the Lincoln, which has been deployed to the Middle East and involved in the war with Iran. "I just got a call that my dad was taken by ICE," he wrote in a Facebook post, according to CBS News. "This is heartbreaking for me. I don't know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly being treated like a criminal."

What DHS says

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to CBS News, NBC News and the Associated Press that Border Patrol arrested Aviles during a traffic stop in Key West and that he entered the country illegally at an unspecified date and location. DHS said he remains in ICE custody facing deportation proceedings.

DHS did not dispute the family's account that Aviles has no criminal record. "Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation's laws," the department said in a statement Sunday. "We are simply enforcing the laws passed by Congress. This Administration does not pick and choose which laws to enforce."

When NBCUniversal's Telemundo asked DHS to confirm whether Aviles has a Social Security number, work permit, or pending immigration case, as the family says, DHS responded that "work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States." That answer neither confirms nor denies the specific documents the family described.

A pattern, not an isolated case

Under the second Trump administration, prior limits on ICE and Border Patrol arrests involving military families were rescinded as part of the administration's mass deportation push, according to CBS News and NBC News. Arrests of military spouses and parents, historically rare, have become more frequent.

The Associated Press, in reporting carried by Gulf News and 2news.com, found at least six family members of active-duty troops have been deported and one self-deported in the broader crackdown, in what AP describes as the first accounting of such detentions, since the government does not track them. One case involved the wife of a U.S. soldier who spent more than a month in detention before being pulled off a deportation flight to Brazil following AP's reporting.

The military offers "military parole-in-place," a program letting spouses, children and parents of active-duty service members apply for legal status from within the U.S. Not everyone qualifies. People who overstayed a visa or already applied for status at the border, for instance, are excluded, according to AP's reporting. It is not publicly known from these reports whether Aviles pursued this option or why he would not have qualified.

The backdrop: a carrier under scrutiny

Joshua Aviles' deployment has drawn its own controversy. The Lincoln left San Diego on November 25, and by this weekend had spent more than 260 days at sea, a Navy record for time without a port call, according to NBC News and Fox News. Reports from military families described food shortages, plumbing failures and mental health strain among the roughly 5,000-person crew.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called those accounts "completely misrepresented." CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper, who visited the ship over the weekend, said in a statement posted to X that the Lincoln "currently has among the lowest number of cases related to mental health" of the Navy's 11 active carriers. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Cooper said many of the food and hot-water complaints were "old news" already resolved by ship leadership, while acknowledging that extended deployment "is uniquely challenging and tough" and affects sailors differently. The Navy announced Friday that the Lincoln is expected to be relieved soon and left the Middle East last week, beginning a return trip to the U.S. that could take several weeks.

Separately, the political fallout from the Lincoln's deployment spilled into a Georgia Senate race. Sen. Jon Ossoff invoked the carrier's record deployment in an Atlanta speech criticizing President Trump's handling of the Iran war, drawing sharp personal attacks from White House communications director Steven Cheung and spokesperson Davis Ingle, and a one-line jab from Trump himself, according to Breitbart.

The available reporting does not indicate whether DHS has disclosed why Aviles was pulled over or whether agents knew his son was an active-duty sailor before the stop. It also remains unclear whether Aviles has any pending path to legal status through his son's service, or whether Joshua Aviles' hope, described by his sister to Ground News, that enlisting might help secure his father's citizenship, was ever a viable route under current law.