NORFOLK, Va. — A U.S. citizen, her fiancé and two other undocumented family members were detained Friday morning by federal agents in Norfolk.

Britney Ramirez-Corona said she was buying food to make breakfast with her 4-year-old sister at a Harris Teeter when she got a call around 7 a.m. from her fiancé’s sister. She told Ramirez-Corona that her husband, Oscar Amaya Bueso, had called her panicked while running away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Oscar Amaya, with his brother Osman Amaya Bueso, Ramirez-Corona’s fiancé and his brother-in-law Arnold Antonio Mendoza Garcia, had left for work early as contractors for a local painting company.

Since 2021, the three arrived in the U.S. separately from a small town in Honduras, Ramirez-Corona said, where the most work they could find was a few times a month. It took Osman Amaya, 23, and his brother weeks to cross the Mexican border on foot, and later their sister, who is a U.S. citizen, picked them up and brought them to Norfolk, according to Ramirez-Corona. They are undocumented.

Mendoza, after registering at the U.S. border, has been attending court dates for years. Ramirez-Corona said he was the federal agents’ target for Friday’s arrest and had an outstanding deportation order. Oscar and Osman Amaya were with him when agents stopped their brown truck near 7000 Tidewater Drive, just past the Interstate 64 bridge.

“I was terrified not knowing if they were OK or if they were hurt,” Ramirez-Corona, 18, said. “That’s why I was there.” She buckled her sister into the back seat of her gray sedan and drove three minutes down the road to the site of the arrest.

When she got there and pulled over, she said she saw nearly a dozen federal agents, and her fiancé with his brother-in-law in the back seat of the agents’ car. Her fiancé’s brother, she said, was being escorted to the car with his shirt ripped.

“I knew when I got there something wasn’t going to go the right way,” Ramirez-Corona said, so she started filming.

A 27-second video taken by Ramirez-Corona shows a federal agent blocking the driver’s door of her gray sedan. She tells the female agent that she is a U.S. citizen, and when the agent asks her to show her proof of identification, she refuses.

The agent then orders her to turn around and secures handcuffs to her wrists. She said her 4-year-old sister got out of the car and waited in the roadway as agents took her phone and used it to call her 15-year-old sister.

“I was screaming for help, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen, you guys can’t do this,’” Ramirez-Corona said.

Ramirez-Corona said she saw her 15-year-old sister running down Tidewater Drive from their home on Little Creek Road, with tears streaming down her face. Agents placed the sisters in a black Ford and dropped them off at the Harris Teeter.

Ramirez-Corona said they drove her in a separate black Ford behind the grocery store, stopped next to trash receptacles and shackled her legs together.

“I felt like I was being kidnapped. I didn’t know why I was being detained,” she said.

She was then driven to an upper floor of the Norfolk Federal Building, where the Department of Homeland Security maintains an ICE field office for processing people before they are transferred to detention centers. There she sat chained on a bench, and later in a cell, for nearly three hours, she said. Agents took her photo and her fingerprints.

Federal agents, she said, were asking people they had detained to fill out forms detailing their lives and families. She said she told them not to answer any questions without a lawyer. Her fiancé, Osman Amaya, had a bloodied leg and elbow, and she worried if he would receive the treatment he needed. She said he wasn’t injured earlier that morning.

By 9 a.m., posts on social media began circulating about a protest in front of the federal building on Granby Street.

Within two hours, about two dozen protesters showed up with signs reading, “release our neighbors, stop terrorizing our streets,” “hands off our neighbors! Abolish ICE” and “land of the free?” among others. At one point they began chanting, “hey hey, ho ho, ICE has got to go.”

On posters promoting the protest, Ramirez-Corona is described as an activist, and when asked about the extent of her activism, she said she has volunteered to return the cars left behind by people who have been detained and helped translate for non-native English speakers.

Ramirez-Corona was released around 11 a.m., she said, after her 15-year-old sister brought her birth certificate from home and showed it to a security officer in the building’s lobby.

Exiting the building, “I burst into tears,” she said. During her arrest, she was terrified of how long she would be separated from her family against her will.

“I never thought this would happen to me in this country,” she said. “Why me?”

Ramirez-Corona’s sedan was first bought by Osman Amaya, and later owned by his brother before she bought it from him. She said the agent told her she was arrested because the car was, under a judge’s order, part of an investigation into an ongoing immigration case.

In November, she said federal agents detained Osman Amaya’s brother in Norfolk, and within a month deported him back to Honduras.

Ramirez-Corona said she met Osman Amaya when she was still in high school, and he lived in a Norfolk apartment beneath her and her mother. Her family comes from Mexico, and while she was born and raised in Norfolk, she grew up speaking Spanish. The two began talking and their friendship grew into love as Osman Amaya helped her through a difficult time in her life.

If not for Osman Amaya’s arrest, the two planned to get married during the weekend, Ramirez-Corona said. Her fiancé was looking to start his own contracting business and they were looking to start having kids.

But Ramirez-Corona has poured their savings into paying for an immigration lawyer.

“All they do is go to work for their families,” Ramirez-Corona said of her fiancé and his brothers. Her future sister-in-law is pregnant, and Mendoza Garcia’s 2-year-old is a U.S. citizen.

Ramirez-Corona said they’ve seen the mass arrests of noncitizens across the country, and every day her fiancé leaves for work and they hug goodbye, she fears it may be their last.

“Maybe he didn’t come here the right way, but he was trying to fix it,” she said. “His arrest will make it even harder.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed that Osman Amaya, his brother Oscar and his brother-in-law Mendoza Garcia were arrested Friday morning “in a targeted operation.”

“They will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings and will receive full due process,” a spokesperson said in an email.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials arrested Mendoza Garcia on July 29, 2021, and he was later “released by the Biden administration,” according to DHS. In July 2024, an immigration judge issued Mendoza Garcia “a final order of removal.”

A DHS spokesperson said that Ramirez-Corona was “briefly detained after impeding the operation,” and “swiftly released upon further inspection.”

“Being in detention is a choice,” a DHS spokesperson added, and they encouraged noncitizens to accept an offer from the U.S. government of $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport.

“We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream,” said a spokesperson. “If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”

By Friday afternoon, Osman Amaya and his brother were taken to the Caroline Detention Facility, south of Fredericksburg. Mendoza Garcia was transported to the Farmville Detention Center before being transferred to Louisiana by Saturday night in preparation for a flight back to Honduras.

Ramirez-Corona said her family was not notified that a judge issued him a deportation order.

Federal immigration agents generally do not have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens, said Virginia immigration attorney Andrew Reigel. But federal law gives them limited authority to arrest U.S. citizens if their conduct violates federal law – which includes impeding or interfering with federal agents while they perform their official duties.

Federal immigration agents are allowed to question a person about their legal status, and during previous presidential administrations a U.S. citizen would be asked a brief series of questions before they were released, Reigel said.

But under the Trump administration, federal agents have begun to detain people they suspect are non-citizens as they carry out the president’s ambitious immigration agenda.

“They are going to push the boundaries,” Reigel said. “As a nation of laws, we shouldn’t have to deal with this but we are.”

After her arrest on Friday and in the wake of a new reality for her family, Ramirez-Corona feels, “nobody is safe here, regardless of the documents you have.”

“You are not safe.”

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(Staff writer Emma Rose Brown contributed to this report.)

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