The Greene County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday night to accept another six-figure sum from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, further deepening its participation in federal immigration enforcement operations even as questions remain about the secrecy and legality of a recent roundup that swept up 26 Latino men in the rural Virginia county. … The sheriff’s office has refused to release the names of the 26 detainees despite a public records request from The Daily Progress citing the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. Virginia’s FOIA law generally requires state and local government records to be released upon request unless officials invoke a specific exemption. Maj. Josh White with the sheriff’s office defended the denial in a telephone interview as a consequence of working with ICE. “We just assisted them; we didn’t arrest anybody,” White told The Daily Progress.”It was their operation, so they advised me to redact all the names.” While the sheriff’s office’s written response to the request cited the exemption relating to ongoing criminal investigations, experts who spoke with The Daily Progress expressed skepticism. “The locality can’t use that exemption to bar release of something someone else might be investigating,” said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. “You can’t assert that on someone else’s behalf.”

That practice — refusing to allow questions during public meetings, and instead directing councilmembers to direct their inquiries for behind-the-scenes responses somewhere down the road — has also been increasingly common. During the months-long budget debates between the Richmond City Council and Mayor Danny Avula’s administration, the councilmembers were routinely told their budget-related questions couldn’t be answered in real time and would have to wait until later. Many of those questions never came up in public meetings again. Whether every one of them was addressed internally is not clear. To 8th District Councilwoman Reva Trammell, that behavior has a chilling effect similar to that of the eleventh-hour continuances. “The citizens are entitled to hear it,” she said of inquiries and arguments between public officials. “They’re entitled to the information.”

While the Mineral Town Council meeting to discuss the budget on May 18 initially had five of its six council members present, the number eventually dwindled to just two council members and the mayor over the course of an hour. …Town Clerk Teri Burns asked if the town had a quorum since the two left. … In a follow-up interview, Mayor Pam Harlowe said that she did not stop the meeting because there doesn’t have to be a quorum to discuss budget items and that the council wasn’t taking a vote on any of their discussions that evening. Megan Rhyne, the executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, stated that there was not a FOIA violation by the council in this incident, but advised the council should check their town bylaws to make sure they were in compliance with their operational procedures.

A special audit into Fredericksburg School Board travel expenditures that was commissioned in October of 2025 and supposed to be completed at the end of December 2025 is still ongoing, division superintendent Marci Catlett said last week. In addition, the school division’s response to comments from the general fiscal year 2025 audit that identified discrepancies between School Board travel expenditures and division guidelines was edited following push back from a board member, emails and documents reveal. … The Advance requested the results or the draft report from the special travel audit twice. The division’s FOIA officer, Mike George, told the Advance that he performed an expanded search for all records associated with the special engagement, including in email and Microsoft Teams accounts for all School Board members, central office administrators, and the finance department, and did not find any records or documentation related to it.

Federal employees may soon have to sign strict non-disclosure agreements, according to a new governmentwide proposal from the Trump administration. The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday released plans to create a standardized NDA for all federal employees, in an attempt to stop government documents from being leaked to the press or otherwise made public. The NDA applies to federal information including, but not limited to, “internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available and should not be disclosed under applicable law,” OPM said. … Michael Fallings, managing partner at Tully Rinckey, said the proposed governmentwide NDA is broader than typical federal employee agreements, which tend to more specifically state what type of information cannot be disclosed.