“I didn’t expect it to happen in my family.”

Growing up in the Buford Highway area, Victoria Garcia was used to having her uncle Kiko around, especially during her teenage years. “He was very present for all of his nieces and nephews,” she said. “He calls his mom in Mexico every day. He shows up to all of our birthdays and parties.”

But since Tuesday, she’s barely been able to speak to him, with conversations limited to the 45 to 60 seconds he’s able to use phone from the Atlanta field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where Kiko is being held, she said.

On one of the first calls, “he just said, ‘Sell my van, get rid of my apartment, sell all my things.’”

On Tuesday morning, Kiko left his Norcross home in his work van along with five others in his work crew; they were on their way to a construction job site. They decided to stop at a QuikTrip in Alpharetta, Victoria said, to pick up breakfast and coffee. As they were sitting in the van waiting for one of the crew members to finish using the bathroom, an otherwise uneventful morning took a turn. 

“Suddenly ICE was on both sides of their parked van,” Victoria told 285 South, explaining that one of the men in the work crew – who was in the U.S. on a tourist visa –  hadn’t been taken by the agents, and had relayed what had happened to the family. “There were like four agents on the left, four agents on the right, and then there were people behind the van, and there was also police at the gas station that had pulled up behind them. They were all pointing Tasers into the van.”

Kiko has been at the Atlanta ICE field office ever since, she said. On Friday, he called the family, saying that he and other detainees had been taken on a bus the previous night to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, about two and a half hours from Atlanta. But when they arrived, it seemed there wasn’t enough space for them, Victoria said, “so then they turned right back to Atlanta.”

The arrest of Victoria’s uncle is among a series that have been reported in the metro area in the last several days. Local Spanish-language media outlets have been posting videos of ICE activity in Norcross, Duluth, Alpharetta, Marietta, and Doraville, pointing to a potential increase in immigration enforcement activity.

A summer uptick would be in line with national trends. The latest data released by ICE shows that the agency arrested an average of 1,300 people a day in June, the highest month on record, according to an analysis by Dr. Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University geographer and immigration policy expert. Another of Victoria’s uncles, M, was detained by ICE in late June; he also works in construction and had been driving to a job site, she said, when he was pulled over in Gainesville for having an expired tag. Just a few days before Kiko’s arrest, M was released from Stewart Detention Center on bond, required to wear an ankle monitor.

According to Kocher, the data from the first 11 days of July reveals an even higher rate this month, with over 1,400 arrests a day. The number of ICE arrests of those with no criminal history is also on the rise. 

Multiple local media sources—including Telemundo Atlanta and Mario Guevara News, the outlet run by now deported Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara—posted videos on July 21 of an incident outside the construction site of the new Norcross Police Department (NPD) office on Buford Highway. Four people were reportedly arrested; the videos show them being handcuffed and put into vehicles by men wearing green vests. That same day, Notivision Georgia posted an anonymously submitted video appearing to show at least two men being handcuffed by immigration agents at a Norcross QuikTrip. It was one of several that had been sent in, the news platform said. Spanish-language news sources have also shared videos of people being arrested around Buford Highway and at an apartment complex on Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross. 

Norcross Police Department Captain Robert Braud confirmed to 285 South that there had been ICE activity in the parking lot area of the construction site of the new NPD office: “They did show up there, they did make arrests. We don’t know how many.” 

“We’ve seen ICE in and out,” he said, but added: “We are not in coordination with them . . . We don’t even communicate. They’re doing their own thing. We’re doing our own thing . . . Our job is to obey federal and state laws.” (Following the 2024 passage of House Bill 1105, local law enforcement agencies in Georgia are required to coordinate with federal immigration authorities when they have a suspect in custody suspected of being in the country without legal documentation.) 

285 South also reached out to the Gwinnett and DeKalb County police departments asking for comment on recent ICE enforcement. In an email, DeKalb County police wrote, “DKPD does not enforce immigration law, that responsibility lies with the federal government. We do not have any information on their arrests or operations.” Gwinnett County has not responded to our request for comment on recent activity in the area, nor has ICE. 

State Rep. Marvin Lim, whose district covers parts of Norcross with a significant undocumented population, said the community has been hit by waves of increased activity at different points since January 2025. “There’s a lot of activity right now, but we all know that this wasn’t the start of any of that,” he said. “I had not seen that level of activity, chatter, whatever you want to call it, since the school year ended. I think there was an uptick in January, February, March,” he said, around Old Norcross Tucker Road and South Norcross Tucker road, and Jimmy Carter Boulevard, mostly around the apartment complexes. 

Victoria, who was born in Gwinnett County, says both her uncles, who have lived here for nearly twenty years, had been careful, limiting driving for work-related purposes. In addition to supporting himself, Kiko sends money to family members in Mexico. Kiko hadn’t even come to her brother’s wedding last year—the night before the wedding, ICE had been “banging on people’s doors” in the apartment complex where he lives, she said. 

Victoria visited Mexico this summer, spending time in an indigenous community with Uncle Kiko’s mom and cousins. She came back inspired. “Their community has a history of rising up to defend their land and protect each other,” she said. There’s a large bell in the central plaza of the town where Kiko’s family lives, she explained; whenever someone is hurt or there’s a problem, “they can ring the bell and everyone knows to come out and help.”

Like so many impacted by ICE enforcement, Victoria’s launched a GoFundMe, to help cover legal fees. She wishes there was the type of wide-scale solidarity here that she witnessed in Mexico—even something like a mutual aid network where people could offer rides. “I think there are people willing to do it, but wish there was a bigger call to action. My family was eating only delivery food for a week because they don’t want to leave the house,” she said.

Victoria is the founder of the local photography club Captura ATL, has been working to get the stories out of people around the Buford Highway corridor for several years now. She was an executive producer of a locally made student film, Nuestra Realidad, that highlights the experiences of young people who’ve been impacted by ICE enforcement.  

Still, her uncles’ experiences came as a shock, she said: “I didn’t expect it to happen in my family. Even though you can have so much experience helping other people, you still don’t always see it happening to you.”