Editor's note: This story recounts violence, and the podcast version contains distressing audio. Please read and listen with discretion.
This story includes information from interviews conducted in English and Spanish with the help of a third-party interpreter. The translations have been reviewed and confirmed by Spanish-speaking WHRO Journalism staff.
Jordy hasn’t been home in three months.
His wife Jessica misses him. Their son misses him. The three-year-old’s asthma is getting worse with more frequent attacks — something Jessica can’t help but connect to the stress of his father’s absence.
She spoke with WHRO on the condition that we don't use the family’s last names.
“It’s difficult, the truth, to explain it when he's so young and doesn't understand,” Jessica said through an interpreter.
Jessica assures him Jordy will be home soon. But that’s unlikely.
The boy’s father is undocumented. Jessica said Jordy doesn’t have a criminal record, but he’s now in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Farmville. And she has no idea when — or if — he’ll be released.
The arrest
Elena Moreno owns four Latin stores in Norfolk. The morning of Feb. 6, 2026, she went to run the counter at Lempira Tienda Latina on North Military Highway.
The shop is part-convenience store, part-restaurant. Its shelves are stocked with crunchy, sweet, spicy and salty snacks from Latin America, as well as produce and pantry staples.
The early lunch crowd trickled in, ordering sandwiches and platters of rice, meat and beans. Suddenly, a man threw open the door and bolted inside. He wasn’t a stranger.
Jordy lived nearby and stopped in nearly every day, often getting plantain chips, Moreno said. Just a few hours earlier, he bought a snack and drink. Now, he was back — this time sprinting from a pack of ICE agents wearing masks.
Four of the agents made it inside.
“They come in running and I can’t help but think, ‘Do they want to kill me? Do they want to assault me?’” Moreno said through an interpreter.
The agents ran past her. Moreno grabbed the key to the front door, locking five more agents outside.
Jordy darted through the kitchen out the back door. Customers fled behind stacks of boxes and storage shelves. Employees scrambled to get out of the way.
By the time Moreno got to the back, the men were kneeling on Jordy, pressing him face first into the dirt. She recorded the encounter on her phone.
On the video, her voice breaks as she begs them to stop before they kill him.
Moreno said Jordy’s face started to bleed and he cried out in pain. The ICE agents told him to “relax.”
Then, they were gone. So was Jordy.
“It lasted eight minutes,” Moreno said through an interpreter.
But she said the memories linger — of Jordy’s screams, the feeling of being utterly helpless and the panic.
The scale
Immigration enforcement isn’t new. But advocates say how this enforcement is carried out has changed drastically under President Donald Trump’s second term.
Raegan Collier with Virginia Organizing, a statewide advocacy nonprofit, said immigrant families have always felt unease and confusion around the immigration process, but not like they do now. ICE agents’ tactics of racial profiling and targeting places immigrants frequent add stress to daily routines.
“The fear hasn't been that they'll hang around outside of a school or hang around outside of businesses because the Supreme Court legally allowed it to stop anyone that looks vaguely Hispanic or Latino enough,” said Collier, who’s based in York County.
Collier said even two years ago, she can’t remember ever hearing about people arrested by ICE on the streets.
ICE arrests used to be mostly at the border, said Graeme Blair, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-director of The Deportation Data Project.
“What the Trump administration has done is to really expand a particular kind of arrest in the interior,” he said. “These are raids at Home Depots, in neighborhoods and at people's businesses.”
WHRO analyzed ICE arrest data obtained by The Deportation Data Project. The analysis showed that Hampton Roads saw 16 times more ICE arrests in 2025 than in 2024.
Though President Trump has repeatedly said ICE is targeting “dangerous criminals,” only 26% of people arrested in Hampton Roads last year had prior convictions. Around 40% had no criminal record and roughly 33% had “pending criminal charges,” according to the data obtained by The Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Communities in Hampton Roads have pushed back against ICE’s presence in the region. In April, a group of residents gathered in Suffolk to protest a potential ICE facility billed as administrative offices that they worry would actually be a detention center.
The fear
Kimberly Discua Enamorado is the director of the Refugee and Immigrant Solidarity Coalition in Virginia Beach. The 16-year-old said her peers at Bayside High School share an overwhelming sense of dread.
“We're always looking over our shoulders,” she said. “We always carry our IDs on us now because we don't feel safe.”
By now, she’s seen countless videos of ICE arrests on social media. She read about the 11-year-old girl in Texas who committed suicide after her classmates threatened to call ICE on her parents. She saw Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old wearing a blue bunny hat, get detained in Minneapolis, Minn. She heard about a man in Norfolk who was hit and killed by a vehicle while fleeing from ICE.
When she saw the footage of her own uncle’s and cousin’s arrests in Hampton Roads, she cried.
“I wasn't able to help them,” she said. “I felt useless and incapable in that moment, because I was like, ‘This is my family. These are the people who I love, and there's nothing that I can do for (them).’”
Patricia Bracknell leads the Chamber for Hispanic Progress in Hampton Roads. She said she hears stories every day of how families are struggling. People are scared to go to the doctor or drop their kids off at the bus stop. Kids are afraid to go to school. She said she wonders how long it will take for people to process the trauma ICE is causing.
“As a community, we can’t stop them from criminalizing our lives,” she said.
In the weeks that followed Jordy’s arrest, Moreno said she relived those eight minutes every time she closed her eyes. Fewer people are coming into Hispanic stores where they might be targets. Business is slow. And Moreno said she worries she’ll be targeted by ICE even though she’s a U.S. citizen.
“I’ve never lived like this,” she said through an interpreter.
She described feeling always on edge — even at home.
The toll
After Jordy’s arrest, Jessica said the emotional stress set in first. The financial strain shortly followed.
Her household went from two incomes to one. She has to pay for childcare now, since Jordy isn’t there to watch their son when she goes to work.
“Milk, Pampers, a babysitter who gets paid every weekend,” she said through an interpreter, reeling off everything she has to pay for. “Cell phones, the lights, the rent.”
Insurance won’t cover some of their son’s asthma medication, and she can’t afford it out-of-pocket, Jessica said. She pays for Jordy’s phone and food while he’s in jail, which totals more than $100 every month.
Legal fees also are adding up. Jessica said she’s already spent $15,000 on Jordy’s defense. Community members, including Moreno and her husband, have chipped in, but there are no signs Jordy’s case will be heard anytime soon.
Jessica is left to borrow money from family to stay afloat.
She talks to Jordy every few days. She said the hardest part is that he cries when he sees their son on video calls.
Jessica said healing will only start when her family is all together again. Until then, she said she can only pray for strength.
