The pace of immigration arrests has shot up across the country under the second Trump term, but few places have seen a spike quite as sharp as in Virginia.
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.
It is not entirely clear why Virginia, a politically middle-of-the-road state, has become such a magnet for immigration enforcement.
The state’s immigrant population has increased dramatically in recent decades, and Virginia is now home to more than a million immigrants, most of them citizens or legal residents. But compared to some other states where arrests haven’t risen as much, like neighboring Maryland, people born in foreign countries make up a smaller percentage of the population.
One difference may be that ICE has the unqualified backing of Virginia’s leaders, as well as sheriff departments across the state.
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.
“We just passed over 2,500 arrests through our Virginia Homeland Security Task Force, 2,500 violent criminals who are here illegally,” Mr. Youngkin said at a news conference on Wednesday at the Virginia State Police Headquarters. “This is why today, Virginia is safer.”
While some of the thousands of undocumented immigrants arrested in Virginia this year are accused of serious crimes, immigrant advocates say they know plenty who had no such records.
“We see people getting detained at 7-Eleven or coming back from stores where they go to buy clothes or food,” said Marilyn Figueroa, a lead organizer for CASA, an immigrant rights group.
She described an asylum seeker who was married with three children and had his own landscaping company, and then was deported after some 20 years in the United States.
Ms. Figueroa said she was also seeing more people arrested after being stopped by the police for traffic infractions like speeding or missing a taillight.
Sheriffs in 19 Virginia counties have entered into formal partnerships with ICE, and nearly all of these agreements promise the highest level of cooperation, with local law enforcement able to make arrests on the suspicion of immigration violations. While most of these counties are rural, investigative news outlets have reported that some populous Virginia counties also shared data from license plate readers with federal immigration authorities. (A state law that took effect this month now prohibits that.)
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.
“Virginia often just because of its proximity resonates more with the White House than other states,” said Ava Benach, an immigration lawyer in Washington. The fact that enforcement has been heaviest in Fairfax County is unsurprising, she said, both because the county is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants and in light of Mr. Trump’s explicit pledge to focus enforcement efforts in Democratic jurisdictions.
It is, in other words, a convenient target for both practical and political reasons.
“I don’t think anybody in the White House is afraid of the Fairfax County supervisors,” Ms. Benach said.
In March, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, joined ICE agents for a highly publicized raid in Arlington, Va. “Northern Virginia is safer after a successful operation getting criminal aliens and gang members off our streets,” she said in a post on X.
Later that month, Mr. Youngkin stood alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi for a news conference announcing the arrest of a man in Northern Virginia who prosecutors said was a gang leader. The federal charges against the man were later dropped so he could be handed over to ICE for deportation.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return requests for comment.
In addition to being highly visible, Fairfax County is also the site of Virginia’s main immigration court, which has become a target for ICE enforcement actions. In June, ICE agents arrested people who had come for immigration hearings at the courthouse in Fairfax, as well as at a courthouse in Loudoun County, also in Northern Virginia.
These are part of a pattern of courthouse arrests across the Virginia and nationally, not only at immigration courts but in and around county courthouses as well.
“ICE has been really aggressively going after low-hanging fruit,” said Miriam Airington-Fisher, who runs an immigration law firm in Richmond. “If you go into a traffic docket in a community with a high Latino population or high immigrant population, you know you’re going to be able to scoop a bunch of people up.”
More than a dozen immigrants were recently arrested in and around the courthouse in Chesterfield County in the Richmond suburbs. According to Jessica Schneider, a member of Chesterfield County’s Board of Supervisors, those detained included a man who had been in the country for decades and had come to court to pay fines for traffic violations.
Many expect arrests like these to ramp up even more as ICE agents try to meet the high expectations set by the White House. And with the passage of Mr. Trump’s sprawling policy bill, which includes tens of billions of dollars in funding for immigration enforcement, the acceleration of ICE arrests in Virginia may quickly be matched all around the country, according to Luis Aguilar, the director of the Virginia office of CASA.
“Virginia is a testing ground,” Mr. Aguilar said. “They’re testing the messaging, the tactics and how they operate.” With ICE getting a huge influx of funding, he said, “they will be able to open up other field offices, contract other ICE agents, and they’re going to be able to replicate what they are doing in Virginia.”
Verónica Zaragovia contributed reporting.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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