The Legal Aid Justice Center found agreements between immigration enforcement and police departments are more common than many might expect in Virginia. The Commonwealth, LAJC Immigrant Justice Program Legal Director Rohmah Javed said, is now among the largest expansion of ICE-linked law enforcement authority nationally. Those agreements, 287(g), allows state and local law enforcement to also enforce immigration. Through more than 50 Freedom of Information Act requests, Javed said, they uncovered at least 32 active 287(g) agreements across Virginia, including in Greene County and Virginia State Police.

Purcellville Vice Mayor Carl “Ben” Nett on Jan. 28 filed a $41.4 million federal lawsuit against fellow councilmembers Erin Rayner, Caleb Stought and Kevin Wright, town staff members Assistant ManagerDiana Hays, Human Resources Director LaDonna Snellbaker, Interim Police Chief Sara Lombraña and Police Lt. Mike Holman, and Commonwealth’s Attorney Bob Anderson alleging 14 counts against him. His 53-page court filing requests that the town’s termination of him as a town police officer be overturned and he be afforded the ability to contest his termination and implement the grievance panel’s decision. … Nett said [all] of these circumstances are part of a conspiracy against him and has called for an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

I’ve spent the past two and a half years requesting and reviewing more than 10,000 misconduct files from New York State’s roughly 500 police agencies. The work has been as tedious as it probably sounds. But it has also contributed to a new era of transparency around policing. These files, many of which had never been reviewed, reveal the systems through which police departments have addressed negligence and misconduct committed by their own. … The ability to get most of these records is relatively new. Starting in 1976, New York State, by law, kept most police personnel records secret. But when the law was repealed in 2020, many departments began making their records available. Others resisted the change, demanding large payments to do the work of pulling the files, providing lengthy timelines or ignoring requests altogether.

A New York City federal appeals court on Wednesday signaled it was likely to remand a FOIA case seeking documents from the FBI’s 2000s investigation into pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein back to a lower court to consider how the bureau’s public disclosure obligations are now shaped by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and pending appeals from Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Tabloid website Radar Online sued the FBI in Manhattan federal court in 2017 — one year before the Miami Herald ran a bombshell exposé on the disgraced billionaire Epstein’s sex crimes — seeking production of documents from the federal investigation into Epstein’s underage sex trafficking operation, but the lower court sided with the Department of Justice in 2024, ruling on a second summary judgment that the FBI was right to decline the FOIA request for privacy concerns and issues related to the Maxwell case. During oral arguments on Wednesday, Radar asked the appeals court to vacate the lower court’s “categorical, blanket” exemption from the disclosure obligations under the Freedom of Information Act and to remand the case back to the District Court judge to reconsider the FBI’s FOIA obligations and how that may align with the documents that are expected to be released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.