The Virginia Homeland Security Taskforce has been busy this year, arresting more than 2,500 people in the United States illegally. That’s according to Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who boasted the arrest data during a July 2 news conference at the Virginia State Police headquarters in Richmond. But while the governor’s office has described the 2,512 people arrested as “violent criminals who are illegally in the United States,” neither Youngkin’s office nor state or federal agencies involved in the operation have provided any documentation about those arrested to be able to verify who they are, what they were charged with or whether they’ve been deported. “I don’t want to get the numbers wrong, but there is a significant portion that are violent criminals,” Youngkin said July 2. Nationally, an analysis from the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy research group, found that 65% of the more than 200,000 individuals ICE had detained between October 2024 and June 2025 had no prior criminal convictions. The same analysis found that 93% of people detained were never convicted of any violent offenses.

City officials have spent nearly half a million dollars in the past year on consulting services to help Sheila White run the beleaguered Department of Finance, records obtained by The Times-Dispatch show. Invoices and contracts, obtained through a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, show that officials have paid consultant Anne Seward of Anne Seward Consulting LLC $493,000 since July 9, 2024, for “staff and advisory support services to the director of finance.” That’s nearly twice White’s annual salary, and $158,229 more than City Hall’s highest-paid employee — former Chief Administrative Officer Lincoln Saunders — made last year.

One of Martinsville’s volunteer boards may come to an end if council members take action on a proposal scheduled to be on the agenda at its next regular meeting July 22. A notice sent to members of the Citizen Advisory Board by Deputy Clerk Peyton Nibblett, a copy of which was provided to the Bulletin, states, “per council direction,” on the agenda will be a “proposed sunsetting” of the board. Councilman Julian Mei said members of the Citizen Advisory Board had contacted him. “I have not been part of an ongoing discussion and dialogue regarding the effective or ineffective aspects of our various boards and commissions,” Mei said. “While I understand that our Charter allows the clerk, or in this case, the deputy clerk, to convey messages on behalf of council, to infer that this is coming from ‘council direction’ is misleading. I am, after all, a part of this council, and … I do not recall giving any directives that a potential sunsetting of this board be considered.”

Albemarle County authorities have identified the extortion operation behind the June cyberattack attack that took down the internet in county offices and may have exposed both government employee and county resident data. INC Ransom was behind the attack, according to county spokeswoman Abbey Stumpf. Stumpf said she could not provide any more information due to an ongoing criminal investigation. The county has been tightlipped since the attack. On Thursday, exactly one month after the attack, the county announced that what it had been describing only as a “cybersecurity incident” since June 12 was in fact a ransomware attack. Stumpf said in her statement Thursday that “the ransom was not paid to the cybercriminals” and the personal data of county residents and employees had likely been accessed.

Amy Drewry has resigned from Surry County’s Board of Supervisors following a five-month absence that she says was in response to the board’s “divisiveness.” Drewry, who was elected in 2023 to represent the county’s Dendron District, hasn’t attended the board’s monthly meetings since January. She told the Times in February that her absences were a deliberate response to her being “marginalized” by county staff and fellow supervisors. 

Entities involved in plans to build proposed data center campuses in western Chesterfield have dropped tens of millions of dollars in recent days to secure the project sites. More than 1,200 acres between the two sites, one near Moseley and the one near Westchester Commons, have changed hands for a combined total of about $60 million in multiple transactions that closed in late June, according to Chesterfield courthouse records. The buyers were Skyward Holdings and Aeris Investments, which are LLCs affiliated with code-named projects to build data center facilities on the sites. Neither Aeris nor Skyward could immediately be linked to any specific data center development firms, and there hasn’t been a public announcement yet regarding who would operate the data centers at the sites. It’s not clear whether the LLCs are tied to the same company or different firms.

Clerk’s Corner: Historical documents shed light on the county’s education system in the 1830s. Before the development of a modern public school system, children from impoverished families in Virginia were educated through a system supported by progressive state laws. Tuition for “indigent” children, meaning those from low-income households, was funded by the state’s Literary Fund, which aimed to support the education of poor white children in the early 19th century. In Rockingham, John Brown served as treasurer for most of the surviving school commission records. His detailed financial reports, found in the School Records, 1835-1840 collection in the Historical Archives, documented tuition payments, teacher names, and reimbursements for rural schools throughout the county.

Charon Baldwin is sharing her passion for genealogy research through FamilySearch, a free website administered by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Baldwin is one of the volunteers helping the public research their families at the new FamilySearch Center at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, located at 850 S. Ox Road in Woodstock. The Center is open from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday evenings or by appointment by calling 540-686-1640. Through a vast collection of digitized records, family trees and other resources, individuals seeking to identify stories from the past have access to more than 5,000 family history centers worldwide through the online FamilySearch.

A judge ruled in favor of the Chattanooga Times Free Press in its lawsuit against the city of Chattanooga, council members and staff, establishing that open meetings laws were violated during non-public meetings on redrawing local voting districts. The Chattanooga City Council must follow Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act and submit to one year of oversight in addition to writing a semi-annual report regarding its compliance, according to the July 3 order granting the newspaper’s motion for summary judgment. No votes were taken at any committee meetings, but it is undisputed the group met on three occasions without any public notice or minutes taken, the order said. Several members of city administration also worked on the project. “Decisions were made about redistricting that occurred in the individual meetings that were not public between a council member and city staff,” Chancellor Pamela Fleenor wrote in her 50-page ruling. “Not only that, but because it was done in secret, not even the entire council was aware of what the proposed map would be prior to the March 1, 2022 meeting. Rather, each council member only knew how their district appeared.”