Thank you, Mr. President! The Republican-led Commonwealth of Virginia has become a “hotbed” for illegal alien arrests, says The New York Times, before providing its reasons for this surge.
As a long-time resident of Northern Virginia, I can tell you one reason for it — it is because Virginia is a hotbed of illegal aliens!
And legal ones too, I’m sure. At least in the areas I’m most familiar with near Washington, D.C.
This, despite the Times’ claiming that “people born in foreign countries make up a smaller percentage of the population” here than some other states, like Maryland.
I noticed the dramatic shift several years ago when going shopping at big box stores in towns well outside the D.C. suburban sprawl where almost everyone you encountered was clearly of foreign origin.
After a similar shopping trip to a Walmart Supercenter just yesterday near Dulles Airport I noticed the same thing. Almost everyone there, from employees to shoppers, were foreigners or recent arrivals based on ethnicity and language.
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of recent immigrants concentrated in just a couple of suburban counties.
How many came here illegally, or quasi-legally, under Biden’s term, is hard to say, but the results are obvious — a potential high concentration of illegal aliens.
And to me, this is one reason for the Trump administration’s focus on the state.
The Times reports that:
Arrests in the state by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are up more than 350 percent since 2024, one of the steepest increases in the country. This outpaces the growth in ICE arrests in Democratic-run states like California and New York and Republican-controlled states like Florida and Texas. Nearly 3,000 people were arrested by ICE in Virginia in the first five months of 2025, on par with numbers in a much larger state like New York.
And that’s a great thing.
While ignoring the obvious massive growth in foreign born people in the state as a factor, the Times instead focuses on another reason the state may be such a focus for illegal alien enforcement — “the unqualified backing of Virginia’s leaders, as well as sheriff departments across the state.”
The decrepit Gray Lady adds:
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican nearing the end of his term, has been full-throated in his support for President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Sounding a constant refrain about the perils of “dangerous criminal illegal immigrants,” Mr. Youngkin has championed the work of a federal-state task force aimed at combating “transnational organized crime.” He has directed his state’s law enforcement agencies to partner with federal immigration authorities and threatened to withhold funding from local governments that do not fully cooperate with ICE.
Youngkin’s task force is composed of more than 200 officers from the FBI, ICE, Virginia State Police, and the Department of Corrections. The Times continues:
The majority of ICE arrests have taken place in the Northern Virginia suburbs or in the Richmond metropolitan area. Roughly twice as many arrests have taken place in Fairfax County — the wealthy, densely populated and strongly Democratic county outside Washington — than in any other county in Virginia.
This is in part because these places have large and active immigrant communities. But several lawyers suggested the nearness to Washington may more than anything explain why Virginia — and Northern Virginia in particular — has become such a hub of ICE activity.
I would add that another reason is the political makeup of the targeted counties — ones closest to D.C., like mine, Fairfax — which are Democrat-run.
Meanwhile, one source, Newsbreak.com, reported that the governor isn’t backing off in helping ICE:
… Youngkin on Wednesday doubled down on the controversial use of courthouse arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, brushing off criticism that some of the individuals detained were simply in court to pay fines for traffic infractions and had no criminal record.
“Let’s just be clear, the vast majority of the people that have been arrested at courthouses around the country are committing violent crimes,” Youngkin said at a press conference at the Virginia State Police headquarters in Richmond. “If someone breaks the law and is here illegally, they should be arrested.”
I couldn’t agree more. Keep it up!
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of The Republican Standard.
1 Comment
This is great to hear but with approximately 275,000 illegal aliens in VA we have to pick up the pace.
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