RICHMOND, Va. -- Whenever someone knocks on the door, Beatriz Marquez's 2-year-old son gets excited.

"Daddy coming?" Anthony asks repeatedly in Spanish. "No, Daddy is working," she tells him.

The little boy has been waiting for his father to come home for more than three months. The last time he saw Victor Orellana, he was in handcuffs on his way to jail.

Orellana, 28, who was in the U.S. illegally, was deported to El Salvador in October, a month and a half after he was detained at his home in Henrico County by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

During the most recent fiscal year, 186,641 immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally were deported. Of those, 1,576 lived in Virginia and the nation's capital.

Marquez and her children are living the consequences of her husband's deportation, and she is not alone.

A Times-Dispatch reporter spoke with a handful of women in the Richmond area--some of them in the country legally, others not _ whose husbands have been deported recently. Their lives, and the lives of their children, were turned upside down in a heartbeat.

Suddenly, the women found themselves frantically trying to save their husbands from deportation. Some had to move out of their homes because they couldn't work to pay the rent while caring for their children.

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