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Gov. Abigail Spanberger has formally ended an agreement with the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement that had allowed Virginia State Police troopers and Virginia Department of Corrections officers to assist ICE.
The agreement — which stems from Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration — had effectively placed state law enforcement under federal control and supervision to conduct civil immigration enforcement.
Ending the agreements was a campaign promise of Spanberger’s last year when she said tasking state and local law enforcement to help with federal law enforcement was a “misuse of those resources.”
She said she’d rather law enforcement focus on its core duties than serve as deputies to ICE.
Executive Order 12 builds on her earlier day-one executive order that gave her the option to end the agreement that Order 12 now rescinds.
The order directs all state law enforcement agencies to review policies, training and practices to ensure they align with standards of protecting human life and to “not engage in fear-based policing, enforcement theater, or actions that create barriers to people seeking assistance in their time of need.”
Spanberger pointed to national conversations around ICE’s tactics in a meeting with the news media on Wednesday. As President Donald Trump’s administration has had the agency hyper-focused on Minneapolis in recent weeks, American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been killed by agents.
“I think it has brought the conversation to the forefront,” Spanberger said of how their deaths helped inspire her new order.
Drawing on her own background in law enforcement, she emphasized that the order is intended to reinforce accountability, public service, and safety.
“I think it’s extraordinarily important to make sure that we are celebrating, and honoring and recognizing the strong vetting, the strong training, and the incredibly high standards that here in the commonwealth of Virginia, we hold our law enforcement agencies to,” Spanberger said. “We want to make sure that we’re making a clear line in the sand about what is expected of our law enforcement officials.”
Republicans, however, offered a sharply different view.
Sen. Glenn Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield said in reaction Wednesday that he believes the order reflects Spanberger “putting politics over public safety.”
As of late last year, the majority of the thousands of people detained by ICE in Virginia had no criminal histories.
With Virignia’s legislature and governorship now under Democratic control — at a time when President Donald Trump has targeted Democratic-led states — immigration advocates and civil rights groups have argued the commonwealth could become the next focal point for ICE enforcement.
Some Republican lawmakers have suggested Trump could retaliate against Virginia over Spanberger’s actions. Del. Karen Hamilton, R-Culpeper, speculated in a recent social media post that the president could withhold federal funding following Spanberger’s previous ICE-related order — a move Youngkin once threatened against localities that declined to cooperate with ICE.
When asked Wednesday whether he believes Trump might retaliate, Sturtevant said, “we’ll see.”
“At the end of the day,” he added, “we know we have criminal illegal aliens here in Virginia. We have federal law enforcement, whose job it is to go and identify, find, and deport these individuals. We had been working constructively with those federal partners to do that.”
Spanberger, meanwhile, said her order does not prohibit cooperation between state agencies and ICE under limited circumstances, such as participation in special task forces or when ICE presents judicial warrants requesting assistance.
“That’s a clear delineation,” she said. “But taking Virginia law enforcement, state agency personnel, and basically giving them over to ICE, is something that ends today.”
Virginia Mercury reporter Shannon Heckt contributed to this story.
