“It Blows My Mind That There’s No Opposition”: When ICE Allies Run Unchallenged

Maida Dooley is careful not to speak Spanish too loudly in public these days. She moved to the U.S. from Venezuela as a child, gained U.S. citizenship three years ago, and now keeps her passport card on her at all times, fearful that her skin tone alone could lead police or immigration enforcement to question her. When she mentally rehearses such a confrontation, she imagines officers accusing her of fabricating the card.

Dooley volunteers with a local rapid-response network of activists in southeast Virginia that monitors ICE activity and distributes know-your-rights information to people who may be vulnerable to deportation. The network is on high alert, she said, showing Bolts some recent messages from its Signal group chat: An attorney was unsure about entering a courthouse with her client, nervous that ICE might be patrolling there. Another organizer in the group warned of a possible ICE sighting at a government office where people apply for citizenship. 

For a long time after she got to the U.S., Dooley says, she assumed that the president alone controlled public policy. Now that she keenly understands the power local officials wield over the communities she works to protect, it troubles her that so many in Virginia seem eager to assist President Trump’s mass deportation project. 

Many Virginia sheriffs have recently rushed into new partnerships with federal immigration authorities. In Dooley’s region of Hampton Roads, the sheriff of Chesapeake, the state’s second most populous city, just signed a new detention contract with ICE this week, and he is referring to himself in campaign mailers as “Detain ‘Em Dave” as he runs to retain his seat. This sheriff, Dave Rosado, is locked in a June 17 GOP primary against Wallace Chadwick, a local police lieutenant who vows to be even more aggressive on immigration enforcement. 

Compounding Dooley’s frustration: This GOP primary will most likely determine the next sheriff. No Democrat filed to run by an April deadline, despite this being a competitive city of 250,000 people that narrowly voted for Kamala Harris last fall, and the window for the party to designate a candidate, or for an independent to join the race, is fast closing.

“It blows my mind that there’s no opposition,” Dooley said. “It drives me crazy … that there is a door with an opportunity and no one is taking advantage of it.”

Sheriff’s offices are critical to ICE operations, greatly expanding the reach of federal immigration enforcement. Nationwide, survey data show, these offices are overwhelmingly held by white men who support Trump, and their cooperation with ICE has sometimes defined their local elections: Dating back to Trump’s first administration, voters in blue-leaning areas, including places in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and North Carolina, have ousted sheriffs who were known to be helping ICE and instead elected candidates who vowed to strengthen immigrant rights. 

There are dozens of sheriff’s races in 2025, including 28 in Virginia, with hundreds more nationwide next year. But before immigrant rights activists can organize around these races, they need actual candidates to be running for office—and that’s been a challenge. 

In Virginia Beach, Chesapeake’s neighbor and the state’s most populous city, which also voted for Harris in November, the Republican sheriff is running unopposed. Roughly 75 percent of sheriff races in New York, one of the states electing the most sheriffs this year, have drawn a single candidate; in populous, blue-leaning Erie County, home to the city of Buffalo, a GOP incumbent who has called for the federal government to step up deportations is so far running unopposed.

Luis Aguilar, Virginia director for the immigrant rights group CASA, is concerned by this dynamic. “It’s important for people right now to elect the right leaders, but we need to have people running for positions to actually make change,” Aguilar said. “If we want a society that is dehumanizing people, then we’ll continue doing the same.”

Blaizen Buckshot Bloom, a vice chair of Chesapeake’s Democratic Party, told Bolts that the party wanted to find candidates for all local elections, including for sheriff, adding that they’re aware of at least two people the party courted to run in that race.  

But Bloom thinks that would-be Democratic candidates were disinclined to challenge a sheriff’s office power structure that tends to be dominated by conservatives, saying, “The people that [party leadership] asked to run were scared; given how conservative law enforcement can be, they didn’t want to blow up their careers.” Unlike other states, Virginia does not require that sheriff candidates have a background in law enforcement.

It’s too late for any Democrat to enter the Chesapeake race via the usual procedure of filing to run in advance of a primary. But local Democrats could technically still hold a special caucus vote to nominate a candidate until June 17. The party is already holding such a vote on June 12 to designate a candidate for city treasurer after no one filed by the April deadline. Bloom said there are currently no such plans for the sheriff’s race, as the party has identified no one to nominate. 

A candidate could also file to run as an independent until June 17, but local observers say it doesn’t appear that anyone is preparing to do so.

The office of the Chesapeake sheriff does not patrol and rarely makes arrests in the field, but it does run jails and staff courts—two critical access points for federal immigration enforcement. “We know that the mass deportation plan … can only be successful with the support of sheriffs, and their manpower and resources and local jailing capacity are all essential to that,” Julien Burns, a spokesperson for Sheriffs for Trusting Communities, a national organization that wants sheriffs to restrict ties with ICE, told Bolts. 

Rosado, Chesapeake’s current sheriff, did not respond to an interview request for this story, but his number two, Undersheriff Christopher Pascal, told Bolts that their goal for ICE collaboration is to be “good stewards and partners in keeping illegals off the streets and putting them behind bars.” Pascal said the office’s present policy is to question everyone who enters the Chesapeake jail about their country of birth and citizenship, contacting ICE over anyone who wasn’t born in the U.S.

In March, the sheriff’s office also changed its internal policies to start requiring that the jail honor so-called ICE detainers, which are requests for local deputies to keep incarcerating people for up to 48 hours beyond their scheduled release, in order to give immigration agents more time to come and arrest them. As of May 28, the Chesapeake jail was holding 13 people on ICE detainers, Pascal said.

These detainers are not backed by a judge’s warrant, and some sheriffs refuse to honor them, saying they amount to illegal arrests. Pascal said his office used to be worried about this, too: “When we first heard the 48-hour thing, we were like, how can you hold somebody 48 hours after the courts say to let them go?” he told Bolts. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, helped persuade Rosado and other sheriffs in the state to honor detainers earlier this year, Pascal added.

On June 4, the office said it was “proud to announce” it had signed a new contract with ICE that will allow the agency to rent space in the Chesapeake jail to detain immigrants who have been arrested by federal agents. The office also already receives federal money through a program called SCAAP, in exchange for sharing some sensitive data about people it holds in the jail.

White House officials are currently demanding maximum immigration arrests, ordering last week that ICE agents meet a quota of 3,000 daily—tripling an earlier rate the administration set in February. John Vazquez, an immigration attorney in Hampton Roads, told Bolts that southeast Virginia has felt the expanding ICE assault, saying he’s seen much more active enforcement in the area since Trump returned to office. 

“As far as Chesapeake goes, before the new administration took over, if I had a client that had a possible jail sentence, it was usually unlikely they’d be turned over to ICE,” Vazquez said. “Now, in Chesapeake and every single jail here, if you go to jail for one day, there’s a good chance ICE is going to pick you up on the way out. If it’s a criminal case, I tell people there’s really nothing they can do about it and nothing I can do about it.”

Still, Chadwick, Rosado’s challenger, has blamed the incumbent for not going far enough to assist immigration enforcement. He attacked Rosado earlier this spring for not honoring some ICE detainers and accused the sheriff’s office of having a “sanctuary” policy. Chadwick’s campaign has sent out mailers singling out a specific individual, with his name and picture, whose name appears on the state’s sex offender registry: “One of many illegals released by Sheriff Dave Rosado,” the mailer reads. 

It’s not clear how Chadwick specifically intends to partner more closely with ICE than Rosado does today. Chadwick initially agreed to an interview for this story but then did not return follow-up messages. He has claimed that his attacks are what motivated Rosado to adopt his new policies this spring to honor detainer requests, though Rosado’s team denies this connection. 

Immigrant rights advocates are dismayed by this race to the right, and they wonder if the sheriff might have at least felt some pressure from the opposite direction had there been a more liberal challenger in the race, whatever the ultimate result. Said Dooley, “There is a voice for fear, for conservatism, but there’s no voice for us.”

Chesapeake’s politics are decidedly purple, often leaning red in local races and blue in statewide and presidential contests. The city voted for Harris in 2024 and Joe Biden in 2020, and voted twice for Barack Obama, though it narrowly opted for Trump in 2016. While Republicans dominate local offices, Democrats have lately made notable gains, including by last year narrowing their seat deficits on the city council and school board. 

On top of all that is the fact that local Democratic candidates around the country have enjoyed a significant electoral boost so far this year, and could very well continue that trend in a November election in which Virginia is selecting a new governor. With these winds seemingly blowing in their favor, Democratic leaders proudly announced last month that they’ve fielded candidates to run in every single one of the 100 state House districts on the ballot this fall. Democrats presently control the state House and Senate, and they’re hoping to hold on to the legislature and flip the governor’s office in November.

But this Democratic approach at the statehouse has evidently not trickled down to sheriff elections—even in the most winnable venues for Democrats. Three Virginia cities (Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, and the small city of Radford) voted for Harris in the fall but have Republican sheriffs up for election this year. No Democrat is running in any of them. A fourth city, Lynchburg, narrowly went for Trump last year and has a Republican sheriff up for re-election now; Democrats aren’t challenging that seat, either. 

Statewide, Democrats have ceded lots more ground to Republican sheriffs in areas that have voted against Trump. Overall, a Bolts analysis found, 30 percent of all Virginians, some 2.4 million people, live in cities or counties that voted for Harris last fall but are represented by Republican sheriffs.

“I think candidate supply has been a persistent challenge,” Michael Zoorob, a researcher who has studied sheriff elections nationally, told Bolts. “This is asymmetric: Democrats or liberals or progressives have a harder time recruiting sheriff candidates than do conservatives, which is attributable probably to the kind of person who serves in law enforcement.” 

That no Democrat filed to run in Chesapeake does not surprise Liam Watson, director of Bluegrass PAC, a Virginia group working to fund and elect downballot Democratic candidates in rural areas of the state. Watson, who is also an elected council member in the city of Blacksburg, knows the dynamic well: His own community, Montgomery County, leans blue but has a Republican sheriff.

“The challenge is finding people who are both qualified and interested,” he told Bolts. 

He and many others noted that the most obvious path to being a sheriff is to work as a sheriff’s deputy, and that there are clear disincentives to challenging an incumbent who could then make your life difficult or fire you if you lose. “Nobody wants to run against their boss,” Watson said. 

The overall group of Virginia sheriffs have lately stepped up cooperation with ICE: Just since Trump retook office, 17 of the 123 have joined or applied to ICE’s 287(g) program, which empowers sheriff’s deputies to act like immigration agents, up from zero earlier this year. 

Conservatives in Virginia have escalated immigration enforcement this year well beyond sheriff offices. Youngkin in February ordered the state police to cooperate with ICE directives and to enter into a 287(g) agreement. He has also threatened to withhold state funding from Democratic-run areas that have adopted “sanctuary” protections. 

Virginia’s Democratic legislature earlier this year rejected several GOP-sponsored bills that would have expanded the state’s participation in immigration enforcement. Should Democrats defend the state House while flipping the governorship this fall, they could try to roll back some of Youngkin’s policies and adopt new legislative protections, as other Democratic-run states have done in recent years. 

At least one of Chesapeake’s House seats—House District 89, in which Bloom, the local Democratic vice chair, is running—is likely to be a key battleground this fall. Bloom is focused on immigration enforcement as a key local issue: “I have friends who are undocumented and I’m very concerned for them,” they said.

In Chesapeake’s sheriff race, though, those who desire more checks on local law enforcement can only watch from the sidelines. Dooley regrets what she calls “complacency” on the part of local Democrats. 

“Take a leap. Jump on the opportunity,” she said. “Like, it’s right there. Maybe they don’t care.”