Greene County deputies and a federal immigration officer stand in a parking lot behind the sheriff’s office June 23.
The Greene County Sheriff’s Office, working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, conducted a large-scale immigration enforcement operation near the intersection of routes 29 and 33 in Ruckersville on June 23. An ICE spokesperson said the operation detained 49 people.
“I just saw them pull someone over right now where I’m sitting,” said Andrew Young, an environmental lawyer who drove to the scene to document and offer legal aid after seeing reports online. “They’re everywhere up here, literally. I can’t convey how dense the ICE presence is right here.”
A sudden surge in traffic violations
Young provided C-VILLE with multiple photographs showing federal officials, some wearing facemasks, and people wearing sheriff’s office gear conducting traffic stops. Geotagging on the photos and depicted landmarks shows stops at various locations along Route 29 and the intersection of Spotswood Trail and Stanardsville Bypass.
When asked what criteria his deputies used in making these traffic stops, Greene County Sheriff Steven Smith says it was the “same as we do with all vehicles. People that give us a reason to stop them, we stop them.” He says he doesn’t know what specific reasons were associated with the June 23 stops, since he wasn’t with his deputies at the time. But he listed general reasons why his deputies might pull someone over: “Speeding, crossing center line, swerving, running red light, just stuff like that, traffic infractions.”
The Greene County Sheriff’s Office made 3,044 traffic stops in 2025, according to Virginia State Police data. On average, that’s 8.33 stops per day across the county’s 155.9 square miles.
Young reported that ICE agents were riding in the back of Greene County Sheriff’s vehicles as deputies pulled people over for traffic stops. Video of another June 23 traffic stop in that area provided to C-VILLE shows ICE personnel riding in a white Chevy Tahoe with flashing blue-and-red lights.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed SB352, which amends the Code of Virginia to largely prohibit law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings, on May 20. The United States Department of Justice is currently suing the state of Virginia over the new law, slated to take effect July 1.
Full cooperation
When he visited the sheriff’s office, Young says he saw ICE vehicles filling the parking lot in the back, “processing people and transporting them out” in white vans. Photos provided by Young of masked federal officers and a white transport van have embedded coordinates placing them at the sheriff’s office.
Young alleges Smith came out of the office and told him to leave or be arrested. “I said, ‘You have a very unusual arrangement going on here, with ICE riding along with you doing immigration control,’” says Young. “And [Smith] said, ‘Oh, they’re just here to support us, much like in D.C.’”
The Greene County Sheriff’s Office has a 287(g) agreement with ICE under the agency’s “task force model,” in which local law enforcement officers “enforce limited immigration authority with ICE oversight during their routine police duties.”
According to ICE’s memorandum of understanding with sheriffs’ departments using the task force model, any officers or deputies who participate in immigration enforcement must pass mandatory training and exams. Otherwise, Virginia law says officers can only make immigration arrests if the suspect has both previously committed a felony and is present in the U.S. after previously being deported.
Smith believes every deputy cooperating with ICE in its operations received full certification, but says he could not be certain. Not every member of the Greene County Sheriff’s Office has completed the training, according to Smith.
The Greene County Sheriff’s Office denied C-VILLE’s FOIA requests seeking correspondence between the office and ICE in the month leading up to the raid, citing exceptions protecting officers’ privacy.
Greene County’s June 23 operation occurred eight days before July 1, when new state laws effectively barring local law enforcement from participating in such agreements, or otherwise assisting federal immigration authorities in most circumstances, take effect. Spanberger signed HB1441 into law April 22.
“Does that affect the sheriff’s office?” asks Smith, when told about the bill. “You better check that.” The text of HB1441 includes “any sheriff’s office” in its list of law enforcement agencies to whom the bill applies.
Young reportedly told Smith, “This is Virginia, where what you’re doing is illegal, and the governor said that you’re not allowed to do this.” Smith allegedly responded, “I don’t care what the governor says.”
In a video Young provided, captured after that incident, an offscreen official identifies himself as Smith and confirms that he made that remark.
When specifically asked about the remark, Smith does not deny it. “We’re going to enforce the law no matter when it falls,” he says. “Sheriffs are elected officials. We don’t answer to the governor. We answer to the citizens of the counties we live in.”
Smith ran unopposed for Greene County sheriff in 2023, receiving 4,869 votes against 197 write-ins, according to Virginia Department of Elections data. There were 14,625 active registered voters in Greene County that year.
Detention
unknown
After leaving the sheriff’s office, Young says he was tailed by a black SUV until he pulled over to let it pass. Heading south from the sheriff’s office on Spotswood Trail, Young allegedly saw another checkpoint operated by sheriff’s deputies and ICE.
“I honked my horn again, and I took a photo of them,” Young says, after which he says a deputy pulled him over. He says deputies made him wait by the side of the road for at least 40 minutes. “Three ICE agents came out of the car with their handguns drawn,” Young says; two remained near his car, while the third returned to their vehicle.
In a video Young provided, he describes armed ICE officers to a sheriff’s deputy. A man who identifies himself as Smith arrives while Young is sitting in his vehicle. Smith says he had no prior knowledge that Young had been stopped until a call alerted him.
In the video, Young tells Smith he’s called the state police. Young says a local 911 dispatcher told him “no promises” when he asked them to summon state police to the scene and told them ICE agents were holding him at gunpoint.
Young says state police never showed up. A Virginia State Police spokesperson said the agency had not received any calls related to the Greene County traffic stops.
The sheriff’s office charged Young with “improper use of horn,” using a handheld device while driving, and failure to yield to emergency vehicles. While the charges are relatively minor, they carry at least six driver demerit points if Young is convicted, per the Department of Motor Vehicles website. Points stack over time and stay on a driver’s record for a set period depending on the specific offense committed. Accruing 12 demerits within a year results in a mandatory driver improvement clinic, while 18 points results in a temporarily suspended license.
Lines of
abandoned cars
“Every single person I saw pulled over was non-white, besides me,” Young says. “The sheriff said that they were pulling over not just non-white people.”
“There were so many empty vehicles on the side of 29 and 33,” Young said June 23, emotion evident in his voice. “I’m watching a tow truck pull away one right now. That’s pretty haunting. There’s just dozens of cars that have been left.”
Multiple towing companies in the area reported towing approximately 10 vehicles after receiving calls from the sheriff’s office. No company reported receiving advance notice of the enforcement operation. One company told C-VILLE the sheriff’s office said the vehicles needed to be towed following arrests for “driving without a license.”
Organizers across the state have slammed the mass detainments, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia Policy Director Chris Kaiser calling the Greene County operation “just one example of what continues to unfold here in the Commonwealth: local law enforcement directly coordinating with ICE to terrorize and racially profile our communities—tactics we have seen undermine public safety and rip Virginia families apart.”
“Dragnets like these are precisely why Virginia lawmakers passed legislation that will become law in less than a week,” says Kaiser. “Virginia’s attorney general has the authority to hold Virginia officials accountable when they flout the law, and Virginians have the power to hold their sheriffs and Commonwealth’s attorneys accountable when they voluntarily facilitate the Trump administration’s violent, anti-immigrant agenda. We should be prepared to use it.”
“This is the most un-American stuff I’ve ever witnessed,” Young says, “and I’m not scared of these losers.”
The Greene County Sheriff’s Department website, and Smith’s bio, list “putting citizen’s [sic] first” as a top priority. “We were sworn to uphold the law and to protect our citizens,” Smith says, “and that’s what I will continue to do. Put that in your story.”
