If ICE surge comes to Arlington, county leaders hope to be 'prepared' | ARLnow.com

Arlington officials say they’re taking action behind the scenes to be ready for any possible surge in immigration enforcement locally.

“We have to be prepared,” Arlington County Board member Julius “JD” Spain, Sr., said at the Board’s Feb. 21 meeting. “We don’t want what happened in other parts of our nation to happen here, but if it does happen, we need to be prepared.”

Several speakers during the public-comment period pressed for increased pushback against the Trump administration’s immigration efforts. The options for county leaders are limited, local leaders again acknowledged.

“We don’t have the legal ability to thwart ICE,” Board chair Matt de Ferranti said.

De Ferranti and his colleagues said discussions are happening, but declined to get into specifics.

“We are thinking through how best to keep our residents safe,” Board member Maureen Coffey said. “Everyone should feel safe.”

Coffey said the Trump administration appears to be expanding its efforts to target localities like Arlington.

“The box of terrible things that we thought could happen keeps getting bigger and bigger,” she said.

In January, several Board members encouraged residents to call 911 if they saw federal immigration enforcement efforts. That recommendation drew flak from right-leaning media outlets like Fox News and the Washington Examiner.

ICE detained 19 people in Arlington in 2025, de Ferranti said at the January meeting.

*Board chair, public speaker get into verbal tussle: *At the public-comment period, County Board members also were pressed by progressive activists on a number of issues.

At one point, de Ferranti got into a verbal sparring match with speaker Barbara Wien, who was discussing whether county tax dollars were used to support businesses “complicit in Israeli war crimes.”

(Wien notably was the activist whose phone was seized by Virginia State Police last fall after activism in front of White House official Stephen Miller’s now-former Arlington home. The seizure sparked a legal battle between Arlington’s top prosecutor, the now-former Virginia attorney general and federal authorities over the scope of the search.)

The Board chair said Wien’s comments were too close to those made earlier in the public-comment period, violating the body’s one-speaker-per-topic rule for the Saturday morning period.

“Stay focused on the human rights piece [of your comments],” de Ferranti admonished.

Wien did not take kindly to the input.

“I’m very insulted,” she said to de Ferranti, whom she has known for years. “I’m not happy with you at all this morning.”