The Fairfax County School Board is suing the Trump administration for withholding federal funds in retaliation for its refusal to scrap policies supporting transgender students.
At its meeting last night (Thursday), its first of the new academic year, the school board authorized a lawsuit against the U.S. Education Department alleging that its denial of funds to Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) violates federal laws and the Constitution, Superintendent Michelle Reid announced today.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Chantilly field office, typically used for administrative proceedings, is being turned into a “makeshift” detention facility, dozens of immigrant rights advocacy groups say.
With arrests surging during the ongoing federal takeover of D.C., ICE has begun detaining individuals for “several days at a time” in a holding room intended to keep people just for a few hours during processing, according to organizations in the Free Them All VA Coalition.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors went on record yesterday (Tuesday) supporting George Mason University President Gregory Washington as “a critical partner” of the county government and local residents.
The action, taken at the request of Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay, came amid scrutiny of Washington and the university he heads by the Trump administration.
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (WMAA) will receive nearly $7 million in federal funding to support taxiway reconstructions at Dulles International Airport.
The $6.8 million in funding represents the second-largest amount among 18 aviation-related projects approved statewide by the Federal Aviation Administration. Funding comes from a $25 billion appropriation in the 2021 Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act.
George Mason University’s efforts to diversify its workforce violate a civil rights law intended to end segregation, according to the Trump administration.
Following a roughly six-week-long investigation of GMU’s hiring practices, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has found that the Northern Virginia-based university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race in public education.
The Trump administration appears to be following through on its threat to withhold federal funds from public schools in Northern Virginia after they refused to roll back policies that support transgender and gender non-conforming students.
The U.S. Education Department announced yesterday (Tuesday) that it has placed Fairfax County Public Schools and the school systems in Arlington, Alexandria, Prince William and Loudoun on “high-risk status,” a move that it claims lets it attach specific conditions for releasing funding.
Fairfax County Public Schools is joining its counterparts across Northern Virginia in rejecting the Trump administration’s demands that it rescind policies supporting transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
In a message to FCPS staff and families, Superintendent Michelle Reid says she has sent a response to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) defending the school system’s policies as consistent with existing state and federal law, requesting that the federal government pause any further action until the issue is “clarified” by the courts.
One month after Congress passed a federal budget bill with a provision directing NASA to transfer a space shuttle to Texas, the space agency remains tight-lipped on any impending relocation plans.
The bill, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, requires acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to identify a space vehicle to transfer to a NASA field center. The requirements stipulate that the ship must have flown into space, carried astronauts, and is selected with the concurrence of a nonprofit entity designated by the administrator.
Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano took a swing at the federal government yesterday (Wednesday), claiming that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is making it harder for prosecutors to effectively do their jobs.
“The first thing that I hear in our community over and over again is, not only does the federal government focus on fearmongering around crime, but they’re taking it a step further now by actually creating a culture of fear around law enforcement,” Descano said.
The Trump administration has released a new list of localities and states it considers “sanctuary jurisdictions,” and Fairfax County is no longer on it.
The Justice Department identified some three dozen states, cities and counties as so-called sanctuary jurisdictions on Tuesday (Aug. 5), two months after the federal government quietly removed a much longer list that included many localities that support the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.
