Joshua Aviles has spent roughly nine months at sea, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, on a deployment so long it set a U.S. military record for uninterrupted time on the water. On Saturday morning, still thousands of miles from home, he got a phone call: his father had been detained by U.S. immigration authorities in Florida.
“I’ve been deployed for over nine months, out at sea in the Middle East aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, fighting for a country that has given me everything,” the sailor wrote in a Facebook post that quickly spread. “I just got a call that my dad was taken by ICE.” The detention account was reported by The Hill and confirmed by multiple national outlets, including NBC News, CBS News, CNN, and The Associated Press.
The sailor’s father is Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, a handyman in Key West, Florida, originally from Nicaragua and a U.S. resident for roughly two decades. According to family members who spoke to the AP and NBC News, he was arrested by Border Patrol on Saturday, shortly after 11 a.m., after leaving home to take his car to a mechanic. Relatives said the arrest happened during a traffic stop, near a Publix supermarket.
His family describes a man with deep roots and no criminal record.
His wife, Argelia Aviles, told the AP that he holds a permit to work in the United States. His son said in his post that his father also has a driver’s license and a Social Security card and was waiting for a green card application to be approved. “He’s doing everything the right way,” Aviles’s stepdaughter, Katty Delgado, told NBC News, saying she knew of no arrest history or criminal allegations against him.
For the family, the detention carried a particular sting. Delgado told CNN that her brother had joined the military in part because he believed his service might improve his father’s chances of gaining citizenship, and that his father might finally stop living in fear of being arrested. Instead, while the son was deployed in a war zone, the outcome he had hoped to prevent arrived at home.
Aviles laid out that anguish plainly. “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,” he wrote. He described his father as a humble, hardworking man, and pushed back on the idea that he had done anything wrong: “My dad’s only ‘crime’ was coming to this country to give my siblings and me a better life.” By his own account, the sailor has worked shifts of more than 12 hours for over 250 days without a break.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the arrest and offered a sharply different framing.
The agency said Aviles had entered the country illegally “at an unknown date and location,” and that he would remain in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody pending removal proceedings. DHS did not dispute the family’s statement that he has no criminal record.
In statements to news organizations, the department defended the action as routine enforcement. “We are simply enforcing the laws passed by Congress. This Administration does not pick and choose which laws to enforce,” a DHS spokesperson said, adding that “work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States.” The agency also said that “having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws.”, according to The Hill.
The case landed against the backdrop of the USS Abraham Lincoln’s troubled deployment. The carrier, which has about 5,000 crew members, has drawn national attention over reports of supply shortages, including clean water and food, and concerns about the mental health of sailors kept at sea far beyond their expected return date. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has downplayed the accounts, at one point calling the reported conditions “completely misrepresented.”
The ship left the Middle East last week and is making its way back to the United States, a voyage that could take several weeks. That means Joshua Aviles is heading home from war to a family in crisis; his father in detention, his own return still weeks away.
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Source: The Hill.
This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
