At Camp Pendleton’s gates, a family breakfast run turned into a nightmare. Marine Steve Rios says his parents, Esteban Rios and Luisa Rodriguez, were stopped by ICE agents on September 28, as they arrived to take Steve’s pregnant sister, Ashley, and her Marine husband out to eat, a routine they had kept for months. Instead of pancakes, there were handcuffs, a downtown detention center, and ankle monitors that would become the prelude to something worse: a deportation.
Released with electronic tags, Esteban and Luisa did what they were told. They reported back to an ICE facility on Thursday, October 2. Steve says his dad even dressed for hope, a bright red shirt and a white cap that both read “Proud dad of a U.S. Marine,” a uniform of faith that did not save him from being led away a second time.
By Friday, October 10, Esteban was gone, deported to Mexico. Luisa’s whereabouts were unclear, a sickening update that left the family scrambling for answers and frantically calling detention centers. Steve told local reporters that when he last spoke to his father by phone, officials said the couple would be moved to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County, a sprawling ICE facility that looms large in immigration cases across the region.
The family insists neither parent has a criminal record. Both, they say, have valid work permits and pending green card applications sponsored by their Marine son, a path that many mixed-status military families navigate quietly until a traffic stop, a checkpoint, or a base gate changes everything. That is why Steve says he enlisted with his parents’ sacrifice in mind, only to watch the system sweep them up in front of the very installation where his family serves.
ICE offered its standard line when pressed. “As part of its routine operations, ICE arrests aliens who commit crimes and other individuals who have violated our nation’s immigration laws,” a spokesperson said in a statement to NBC’s San Diego affiliate. The agency did not address why the couple was initially fitted with ankle monitors, then re-detained days later, or why a father wearing a Marine Pride shirt was fast-tracked out of the country while his pregnant daughter waited at home.
What happened to the Rios family is landing at a volatile intersection of immigration enforcement and military life. Recent coverage shows similar cases stirring outrage when relatives of service members are detained during routine days that turn suddenly surreal, fueling questions about discretion, priorities, and the human cost of headline-driven crackdowns. Against that backdrop, the image of a dad in a “Proud dad of a U.S. Marine” cap being walked into custody reads like a gut punch, a snapshot of policy colliding with family reality.
For now, Steve is left to piece together a plan from scraps of information and a broken calendar. September 28, the stop at the gate. October 2, the check-in that became a trap. October 10, the deportation that ripped his family in two. He says his parents did what they were told, they wore the monitors, they came back when summoned, they trusted the process. The process, he says, did not trust them back.
