Tag: virginia

Trump Administration SUES Virginia for Giving Illegal Aliens In-State Tuition While American Taxpayers Foot the Bill

The Trump administration has launched a sweeping federal lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Virginia, accusing state leaders of openly defying federal immigration law by granting illegal aliens discounted in-state college tuition while forcing American citizens from other states to pay dramatically higher rates.

In a civil complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Department of Justice argues that Virginia’s tuition scheme blatantly violates federal law and must be permanently shut down.

The lawsuit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to block the enforcement of Virginia statutes that classify illegal aliens as state “residents” for tuition and financial aid purposes.

At the center of the case is a law passed in 2021 and effective since 2022, which allows illegal alien students who meet specific residency and high school graduation criteria in Virginia to pay in-state tuition regardless of their immigration status. They can also qualify for state financial aid.

Meanwhile, American citizens from neighboring states—or even military families temporarily stationed elsewhere—are forced to pay out-of-state tuition rates that can be tens of thousands of dollars higher.

The DOJ complaint states plainly that Virginia’s policy gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens over U.S. citizens, calling the practice “squarely prohibited and preempted by federal law.”

“In direct conflict with federal law, Virginia law permits an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States to qualify for reduced in-state rates and state-administered financial assistance based on residence within the state but does not make United States citizens eligible for such benefits without regard to whether the United States citizens are Virginia residents,” the lawsuit reads.

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Virginia to Enforce Verification Law for Social Media on January 1, 2026, Despite Free Speech Concerns

Virginia is preparing to enforce a new online regulation that will curtail how minors access social media, setting up a direct clash between state lawmakers and advocates for digital free expression.

Beginning January 1, 2026, a law known as Senate Bill 854 will compel social media companies to confirm the ages of all users through “commercially reasonable methods” and to restrict anyone under sixteen to one hour of use per platform per day.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Parents will have the option to override those limits through what the statute calls “verifiable parental consent.”

The measure is written into the state’s Consumer Data Protection Act, and it bars companies from using any information gathered for age checks for any other purpose.

Lawmakers from both parties rallied behind the bill, portraying it as a way to reduce what they described as addictive and harmful online habits among young people.

Delegate Wendell Walker argued that social media “is almost like a drug addiction,” while Delegate Sam Rasoul said that “people are concerned about the addiction of screen time” and accused companies of building algorithms that “keep us more and more addicted.”

Enforcement authority falls to the Office of the Attorney General, which may seek injunctions or impose civil fines reaching $7,500 per violation for noncompliance.

But this policy, framed as a health measure, has triggered strong constitutional objections from the technology industry and free speech advocates.

The trade association NetChoice filed a federal lawsuit (NetChoice v. Miyares) in November 2025, arguing that Virginia’s statute unlawfully restricts access to lawful speech online.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The complaint draws parallels to earlier moral panics over books, comic strips, rock music, and video games, warning that SB 854 “does not enforce parental authority; it imposes governmental authority, subject only to a parental veto.”

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Group Asks DOJ to Look Into Soros-Backed Virginia Prosecutor Accused of Leniency for Illegal Immigrant Suspects

The Gateway Pundit reported on questionable decisions by the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office led by Attorney Steve Descano.

Now, a pro-police organization is asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to look into accusations that the Soros-backed Descano is being unfairly lenient when it comes to illegal immigrant suspects.

Marvin Morales-Ortez, 23, an illegal from El Salvador, who already had a lengthy criminal record, was released from custody after the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office dropped a case against him for charges of allegedly brandishing a gun and assaulting and injuring someone.

Fox News’ Bill Melugin reported he was then released back onto the streets after an ICE detainer was ignored.

The next day, it is alleged he is responsible for the murder of a man found dead in a home in Reston, Va., according to the Fairfax County Police Department.

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) told Fox News Digital that it would ask the Trump Justice Department to utilize the law enforcement “pattern-or-practice” provision, under 34 USC 12601, which the Biden administration used to investigate police departments, to examine Descano’s actions.

Fox News reports:

LELDF’s request “seeks to use established federal civil-rights tools to test whether a prosecutor’s office is operating a discriminatory system that endangers the public and erodes equal justice under law,” the group’s president, Jason C. Johnson told Fox News Digital. LELDF officials will formally ask Deputy Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon to investigate Descano’s office under the same “pattern-or-practice” concerns as Biden’s DOJ had in Louisville.

The group alleged the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office “violat[ed] the civil rights of US citizens by favoring illegal aliens and non-citizens in charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing decisions.”

They cited Descano’s “official policy” to consider “immigration consequences” when prosecuting cases.

Descano was elected in 2019 with significant financial support from the Justice and Public Safety PAC, a political action committee primarily funded by George Soros.

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Former Top Virginia Democrat Official CHARGED with Distributing Child Pornography — Court Documents Reveal Disturbing Evidence

A former top Democrat Party official in Virginia has been charged federally with the distribution of child pornography, according to newly unsealed court documents filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Randon Alexander Sprinkle, a former finance chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party and former treasurer for the Metro Richmond Area Young Democrats, is accused in a criminal complaint of possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), including videos involving infants and very young children.

The criminal complaint, obtained by National Review, was filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and sworn out by an FBI special agent assigned to the Richmond Field Office’s Child Exploitation Task Force.

According to the filing, FBI Richmond executed a federal search warrant on October 16, 2025, at Sprinkle’s residence in Richmond, Virginia. Federal agents seized multiple electronic devices, including an iPhone and laptop computers.

The affiant states that, following forensic extraction and review, investigators identified multiple archived files constituting child pornography, including videos and images involving minors.

The complaint further alleges that at least one video recovered depicts sexual abuse of an infant, a detail explicitly cited in the court record to establish probable cause.

The case stems from an FBI undercover operation conducted in May 2025, in which a task force officer operating online allegedly engaged with a user later identified as Sprinkle on a dating application and subsequently on Telegram.

Court documents allege that the account linked to Sprinkle shared explicit child sexual abuse material and expressed interest in the exploitation of minors.

The complaint states that investigators later linked Sprinkle’s online identities to his personal devices, phone number, email address, and IP address, tying the communications directly to him.

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Soros-Backed Fairfax DA Repeatedly Dropped Charges Against an Illegal Immigrant — Now Someone’s Dead

The Democrats’ soft-on-crime, pro-illegal immigration policies are deadly. There have been far too many stories about career criminals with multiple arrests being given slaps on the wrist before they’re turned loose on our communities to rob, rape, and murder innocents.

But this story out of Reston, Virginia, takes the cake. Illegal immigrant Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez, from El Salvador, has been charged with several crimes in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Including a first-degree murder charge in 2021.

But the Soros-backed Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano entered a nolle prosequi and declined to prosecute not only that first-degree murder charge, but several more of Morales-Ortiz’s criminal offenses dating back to 2020.

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Two-Tier Justice on Full Display: Virginia Grand Jury Refuses to Re-Indict Letitia James

On December 4, 2025, a federal grand jury in Virginia declined to indict Letitia James a second time in her mortgage-fraud case.

This marks the second time prosecutors have failed to move charges against her forward in recent weeks.

James celebrated on Twitter/X with staggering hypocrisy, declaring “As I’ve said from the start, these charges are baseless. It’s time for the weaponization of our justice system to stop.”

The case dates back to an October 9, 2025 indictment, which charged James with bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution.

Prosecutors alleged that when she purchased a home in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2020, she misrepresented the property’s status, claiming it would be a “second home” rather than a rental, thereby qualifying for more favorable mortgage terms she was not entitled to.

However, on November 24, 2025, a Clinton-appointed federal judge, Cameron McGowan Currie, dismissed the indictment.

She claimed that the interim U.S. attorney who brought the charges, Lindsey Halligan, was found to have been unlawfully appointed and thus lacked authority to prosecute.

Undeterred, the Justice Department re-presented the case to a new grand jury just 10 days later. But the second grand jury declined to indict.

Sources familiar with the proceedings told reporters that while this constitutes a setback for prosecutors, the door is not shut, that another grand jury or a different prosecutorial strategy remains possible.

This sequence underscores the difficulty in prosecuting Democrat officials for wrongdoing.

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Twin Brothers Charged with Plotting to Delete Government Databases and Steal Private Info

Two Virginia twin brothers were arrested for their alleged roles in destroying government databases hosted by a federal government contractor, the Justice Department said on Wednesday.

Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, both 34 years old, were indicted in November for allegedly plotting to destroy databases used to store government information.

Muneeb was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and to destroy records, two counts of computer fraud, theft of government records, and two counts of aggravated identity theft, while Sohaib was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, destroying records, and computer fraud.

Bloomberg News reported in May how the two former federal contractors had compromised data across many government agencies, which includes the Internet Revenue Service (IRS) and the General Services Administration (GSA).

The Akhter brothers also pled guilty in 2016 to federal charges of conspiracy regarding data breaches at the State Department and a cosmetics company. The two worked at Opexus, a federal contractor that helped process government records.

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Assistant Principal From Virginia and His Brother Arrested for Plotting to Shoot Police and ICE Agents

What is going on in Virginia? Is there something in the water there?

An assistant school principal from Virginia Beach and his brother were arrested for plotting to shoot police and ICE agents. Apparently, someone overheard the brothers talking about it in a restaurant and snitched on them.

How many more people out there are talking about doing things like this, who haven’t been caught?

13 News Now in Virginia reports:

Virginia Beach assistant principal, brother accused of plotting violence against ICE, police say

A Virginia Beach high school assistant principal is one of two men accused of threatening violence against law enforcement, including local police officers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Virginia Beach police said John W. Bennett, 54, and Mark B. Bennett, 59, were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit malicious wounding.

John Bennett is employed as an assistant principal at Kempsville High School. A spokesperson for Virginia Beach City Public Schools said he has worked for the division since 2009 and is currently on leave.

He was arrested in Virginia Beach at 10:47 a.m. Wednesday. On the same morning, Nov. 19, Mark Bennett was taken into custody at Norfolk International Airport at 9:42 a.m. with help from airport police.

According to a criminal complaint filed in Virginia Beach General District Court, an off-duty Norfolk police officer overheard the two brothers while dining inside a Pho restaurant on General Booth Boulevard on Nov. 15.

The officer reported hearing the men talk about ICE agents “kidnapping individuals” and said the conversation led him to believe the brothers “needed to do something about it.”

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After Removing Statue Of American Hero, UVA Plans To Replace It With Massive Land Acknowledgement

After removing the statue of a famed Revolutionary War hero in 2021, the University of Virginia (UVA) plans to replace it with a park that will serve as a de facto land acknowledgement to an Indian tribe, The Federalist has learned.

The Federalist obtained the school’s plans for the site that once held the statue of Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, which indicate that the new park will celebrate “the Virginia landscape and Indigenous stewardship practices.”

“The politicization of the university has reached a level of absurdity as it has gleefully destroyed statues of Virginians,” Ann H. McLean, a lifelong Virginia resident who received her doctorate in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia, told The Federalist. “Rather than celebrating the courage and problem-solving of exploration represented by the George Rogers Clark sculpture, cultural Marxist city leaders and academics are choosing to celebrate those who had no written language, no concept of private property, no trial by jury, or many other improvements brought here by western civic life and Biblical practice.”

Charlottesville, Virginia, became ground zero for the left-wing drive to destroy American culture and history when the city decided to remove the statues of Confederate Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from their respective places in the historic downtown.

Clark was not a Confederate general, not that it should matter, but these leftists wanted to remove his statue anyway. Like President Donald Trump said in 2020, noting that the leftist movement wants to tear down our Founding Fathers as well, “They’re tearing down statues, desecrating monuments, and purging dissenters. It’s not the behavior of a peaceful political movement; it’s the behavior of totalitarians and tyrants and people that don’t love our country.”

It is a crime against Americans, and the people behind the removals — school leadership, city leadership, and everyone else — belong in prison for those crimes.

For most Americans, statue removal and the related Unite the Right rally are basically the only thing the city is known for at this point. That the city is also home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or the university he founded is an afterthought.

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Virginia Democrat Ibraheem Samirah Who Infamously DISRUPTED President Trump Sentenced in Explosive COVID Fraud Scheme

In a delicious twist of irony, Ibraheem Sabri Samirah, the Palestinian-American Democrat who infamously disrupted President Trump’s 2019 speech in Jamestown with a “Deport Hate” sign, has been nailed for wire fraud in a blatant PPP loan scam.

Samirah, 34, a dentist by trade, cooked up fake payroll records for his clinic, Nova Healthy Smiles PLLC, claiming four employees and $33,333 in monthly wages back in early 2020.

But as court documents reveal, those “employees” – including himself – weren’t paid a dime until after the loan came through in May 2020.

He even wrote checks to these phantom workers, only for them to funnel the money right back to him.

When it came time for loan forgiveness in August 2021, Samirah lied again, swearing the funds went to legitimate expenses like payroll and utilities.

In reality, the only “permissible” use was a pittance in employer taxes remitted to the IRS, the rest lined his pockets.

Samirah, who built his political career on railing against “systemic oppression” and championing Palestinian causes, apparently saw no issue with exploiting a Trump-era relief program designed to save jobs.

His actions echo the entitlement we’ve come to expect from far-left Democrats who preach equity while grabbing whatever they can.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia laid it out plain in the July 2025 information: Samirah devised a scheme to defraud Sonabank (now Primis Bank) and the Small Business Administration, transmitting false wires across state lines to secure and forgive the loan.

He waived indictment and pleaded guilty in July, avoiding a trial that could have exposed even more dirt.

Come October 30, a judge sentenced him to three years’ probation and ordered $88,000 in restitution, a light slap considering the felony conviction strips him of voting rights and bars him from future office.

In 2019, President Trump was interrupted by Samirah, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, during a speech marking the 400th anniversary of the first meeting of the Virginia legislature in Jamestown in 1619–the first representative legislative assembly in the Western Hemisphere.

Democrat Ibraheem Samirah stood near the front of the stage facing the audience, holding several signs strung together and yelling, “Mr. President, you can’t send us back, Virginia is our home!”  Supporters of the President booed and chanted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

The messages on the signs read, “Go Back to Your Corrupted Home”, “Deport Hate” and “Reunite My Family And All Shattered by Systemic Discrimination”.

Ibraheem interrupted the president to scream about his deported Palestinian father.

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