ASHBURN, VA – A spat between the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors and the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office escalated this week, with the sheriff's office releasing a letter to be read into the public record to counter what he called "false information" about his office's interaction with U.S. immigration authorities.
Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman called for the letter to be read at Tuesday's supervisors meeting in connection with Chair Phyllis Randall's initiative on the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
According to a report by Loudoun Now, Randall added an item to Tuesday's meeting agenda to discuss LCSO's interactions with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and planned to ask Chapman to attend a board of supervisors meeting to answer questions.
The invitation followed an announcement in early September by the ICE Out of Loudoun Coalition and New Virginia Majority that LCSO routinely contacts ICE to share personal information about community members found to have civil immigration violations, even when those individuals are witnesses to or victims of crimes.
LCSO has a longstanding 287(g) Warrant Service Officer arrangement with ICE. That means the office cooperates with immigration authorities when someone is already being held at the county jail on criminal charges and is scheduled for release. The arrangement lets the jail hold someone for an additional 48 hours so ICE can take custody.
Chapman has repeatedly said that his deputies do not conduct field enforcement with or on behalf of ICE and that deputies do not know the immigration status of anyone they encounter.
There is disagreement over what "coordination in the field" means. Though deputies say they don't seek or provide immigration information directly, they exchange that information through "routine" searches of other national databases.
Chapman says his deputies "routinely conduct computer database checks on people they encounter following a traffic stop or any other encounter." He called this "standard practice among law enforcement agencies nationwide."
This includes regular inquiries to the FBI's National Crime Information Center and the Virginia Criminal Information Network. The NCIC can contain immigration information. It may also contain requests for information about individuals with civil immigration violations.
Chapman says that immigration information encountered tangentially through this database is not used to detain anyone. However, he says that when ICE enters a name into one of those databases, it includes a request for notification if law enforcement has encountered that person. "LCSO honors these requests for notice as a matter of longstanding practice and professional courtesy."
Honoring those requests means sharing personal and location details with ICE about anyone a deputy looks up in these routinely used databases.
However, Chapman says, no one in Loudoun County has been arrested as a result of this information sharing.
According to Chapman, "A FOIA request to the LCSO for the 16-month period ending July 21, 2026, identified 13 encounters where notice to ICE was provided. None of these resulted in anyone being taken into custody for an immigration violation. During that same period, the LCSO documented 233,613 calls for service and other contacts, including 49,834 traffic stops."
According to immigrant rights advocates, the information sharing means anyone, even someone calling LCSO for help, is liable to be sought out by ICE after an encounter with Loudoun County deputies and leaves individual deputies to decide how much they want to cooperate with national authorities.
Loudoun Now reported earlier this summer that Loudoun deputies, for the first time, handed over a man with no criminal record to ICE agents who were waiting outside the courthouse after his arraignment for a traffic accident. Previously, Loudoun deputies had transferred only people already incarcerated in the county, under the 287(g) agreement.
Chapman referred to the ICE Out of Loudoun Coalition, a collection of social justice, civic engagement and migrant rights organizations, as "a group known for making dramatic, false statements and opposing common sense public safety measures" and called the request for his appearance before the board "a political spectacle." He reiterated his invitation to board members to discuss LCSO policies at his office.
Chapman has also recently declined to appear at a board meeting to discuss Flock cameras, Loudoun Now reports.
In June 2025, Supervisor Juli Briskman (D-Algonkian) publicly called on Chapman to end the 287(g) agreement. She argued that cooperation with ICE damaged immigrant residents' trust in local law enforcement and complained that the Sheriff's Office had not been sufficiently transparent about people transferred to ICE custody.
This summer, the Board voted 7-2 to have county staff study whether Loudoun could legally prohibit ICE personnel from county buildings.
A larger legal battle over how much the state can restrict local police forces' interaction with ICE is underway.
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