Jim Spencer, Virginia Mercury

Two Republicans may break a deadly promise

The longest government shutdown in American history ended less than two weeks ago, but the battle over Affordable Care Act credits and Americans’ health-care access still rages in Congress. Approximately 100,000 Virginians could lose their health insurance if the credits lapse, lawmakers and advocates say.

Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation has staunchly supported extending the credits, which help people buy health insurance via the ACA marketplace and are set to expire at the end of December. Now, it’s time for Virginia’s Republican U.S. Reps. Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans to make good on promises they made before the shutdown and during it.

Specifically, Wittman, who represents Virginia’s 1st Congressional District, and Kiggans, who represents Virginia’s 2nd District, should prove they did not lie when they pledged to protect their constituents’ access to Medicaid and affordable health care.

Virginia’s other GOP representatives also should support access to Medicaid and affordable health care by extending the insurance subsidies. Sadly, they all lacked the courage to sign pledges promising to do so.

Ahead of the shutdown, Wittman and Kiggans signed letters to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate saying they would not vote for a budget with cuts in Medicaid, which pays medical bills for the poor and disabled.

Wittman and Kiggans also questioned the wisdom of their Republican party’s plan to let federal subsidies that made health insurance affordable for millions of low-income, working-class, and middle-class families expire at the end of the year.

But then, they both voted for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that cut Medicaid and let insurance subsidies expire. In doing so, Wittman and Kiggans set the stage for millions of Americans — including tens of thousands in their districts — to lose access to health care and face financial ruin from medical debt.

So, like their GOP peers, Wittman and Kiggans betrayed their constituents who likely will suffer untreated illnesses or crushing doctor bills in the current budget. Their “no” votes could have defeated the current budget bill.

Senate Democrats felt so strongly about this that they refused to pass the budget without affordable health-care measures. And so, the shutdown began.

Wittman, particularly, spent the shutdown talking about how he voted for a “clean budget” that would have kept the government running temporarily, but which Democrats blocked over health-care issues. Wittman implied that the temporary budget left time for negotiating those issues.

Kiggans was among a bipartisan group of House members who offered a bill in September to extend health insurance subsidies for a year to allow more time to negotiate a more permanent extension or put in replacement health insurance subsidies.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson never brought that bill to the floor for a vote. Instead, he adjourned the House when the shutdown started, so no new legislation could be offered.

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was among seven Democrats and one independent who broke ranks with their party’s leadership to reach a compromise deal to reopen the government. The Senate compromise included a guarantee of a vote on extending health insurance subsidies by mid-December in the upper chamber. Johnson still has not agreed to allow that vote in his chamber.

At this point, it is up to Republican representatives like Wittman and Kiggans, who promised to support access to affordable health care and Medicaid, to live up to that promise. They must do whatever they can to enable and support a vote that extends health insurance subsidies before those subsidies expire.

If Wittman and Kiggans still lack the courage to do that, they will have betrayed their constituents for a second time.

Virginia native Jim Spencer is a former Minnesota Star Tribune Washington correspondent, metro columnist for the Denver Post and the Newport News Daily Press, feature writer for the Chicago Tribune, editorial page editor for the Charlottesville Daily Progress, and reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. He lives in Williamsburg where he started his 50-year journalism career doing a little bit of everything with the Virginia Gazette.

This single ICE detainment shows the depth of Trump's disgrace

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainment of J.R. Tucker High School student Armand Momand constitutes a constitutional outrage.

Because of his father’s service to the U.S. government in Afghanistan, Momand has legal U.S. immigration status. Yet ICE agents took him into custody Aug. 8 after convictions in an Henrico County court for driving more than 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.

Now, the government that Momand’s father risked his life to serve in fighting terrorism wants to deport his 19-year-old son, despite the young man’s lawful presence in the United States.

The deportation debacle ordered by President Donald Trump has turned into a nightmare of lies and unconstitutional behavior.

Trump’s demonization of immigrants in the name of nationalism doesn’t get much worse than betraying those who placed themselves in harm’s way to support this country.

On its website, ICE lists criminal convictions which would cause the service to detain an immigrant because they pose “a public safety or national security threat.”

The list includes burglaries and robberies. It includes kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, and weapons offenses. It includes drug trafficking, and human trafficking.

What the list does not include are Momand’s convictions for reckless driving for going more than 20 miles an hour over the speed or misdemeanor disorderly conduct, a charge which prosecutors reduced from an original felony charge for eluding or disregarding police.

To detain an immigrant, federal law requires ICE to have “probable cause” to believe the immigrant has committed a federal crime or is illegally residing in this country.

Momand has done neither, his lawyer, Miriam Airington-Fisher, told me in an interview.

Public records that I looked at show that a Virginia district court judge gave Momand no jail time for his state convictions on August 8. Yet ICE detained him to consider for deportation.

According to Airington-Fisher, Momand is a legal resident of this country who is pursuing permanent legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship.

Momand was born in Afghanistan. Momand’s father received a Special Immigration Visa to bring his wife and children to America because he helped the U.S. military during its fight against Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan. The visas granted to Momand’s father and his family come with extensive vetting and reflect the deadly Taliban retribution faced by Afghanis who worked with Americans.

Virginia court records show no other criminal history for Momand. Airington-Fisher told me that is because the teenager has none. Ironically, Momand’s continued detention by ICE forced him to reschedule a green card interview set for Aug. 14, Airington-Fisher said.

ICE has offered no legal explanation for Momand’s imprisonment to his lawyers or family, Airington-Fisher added.

“We received a notice to appear at a hearing to initiate deportation,” she explained.

That Aug. 25 hearing was postponed because of a “crowded” court docket, Airington-Fisher told me a day later. Now, to argue for bond, Momand, a legal U.S. resident, must wait until a rescheduled hearing on Sept. 8. He must spend a month in a federal detention center and miss the first two weeks of school. This is what passes for a speedy trial in Trump’s nationalist crackdown on a legal teen immigrant.

Momand, his family, and lawyers remain “completely in the dark” about the legal justification for the young man’s imprisonment, Airington-Fisher said.

“ICE can’t dissolve his visa status,” Airington-Fisher told me. “We do not believe his detention is legal.”

The ICE detainee database shows Momand is being held at the Abyon Farmville Detention Center.

On Aug. 19, I asked ICE if Momand had been charged with any crimes, and if so, what crimes. The media office acknowledged my request, but has yet to get back to me with an answer.

“You can’t just arrest someone and then figure out whether they did anything wrong,” immigration lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a partner with the firm Murray Osorio, said in an interview on Aug. 19. “What was the probable cause to think this person committed a federal crime or was illegally in the country?”

Sandoval-Moshenberg represents Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the man ICE seized and was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration to a brutal El Salvadoran prison in defiance of a federal court order.

As Momand’s Aug. 25 hearing was being postponed in Virginia, ICE was again detaining Abrego Garcia for deportation three days after a judge ordered his release from custody as he awaits trial on federal criminal charges by the Trump administration.

Sandoval-Moshenberg stressed that situations like Momand’s are very different from the Abrego Garcia case, which involves allegations of criminal felonies.

Momand’s case deals with basic constitutional rights such as being told of the charges against him and the right to a bond hearing so he could go to school between legal hearings and the constitutional requirement that the government must justify its legal right to deport him.

Most of all, Momand’s case involves the Trump administration’s detention of immigrants living legally in the United States without probable cause.

Finally, Momand’s case deals with Trump’s disrespect for the Special Immigration Visas meant to protect people who faced death constantly to help America fight ruthless terrorists. This is why the law provides Special Immigrant Visa holders an opportunity to get a green card and an eventual path to American citizenship.

Asked about Momand’s detention by journalists, Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin treated the young man as a dangerous criminal who deserved to be in custody while he is investigated for charges that had already been litigated and resolved.

Youngkin got it backwards. And he took the position that misdemeanor convictions in a traffic incident qualify as proof of a national security risk.

Under Trump’s indiscriminate immigrant removal policies, immigrants can no longer rely on being in the U.S. legally to protect themselves from being harassed and possibly deported, Adam Bates, senior supervisory lawyer for the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me.

“People now do everything they are supposed to, but they get grabbed off the street for doing nothing wrong,” Bates told me.

I have met two Afghans who worked with the American government and who currently live in the U.S. One barely eluded capture by the Taliban as he set up forward communications systems for U.S. Marines. The other risked attack each day for translating in public for an American military contractor.

They, and others like them, worked knowing the fate of people like Sohail Pardis, an Afghani interpreter beheaded by the Taliban for aiding the American government.

The system for granting immigrants who helped America fight terrorism special visas is exhaustive and time-consuming.

For the Trump administration to now turn its back on foreigners who risked their lives on America’s behalf to pursue a nationalist deportation policy that demonizes all immigrants is cruel and self-destructive. The policy betrays constitutional and moral principles, not to mention national security.

“It is horrific the extent to which we put people in mortal danger to help with our war effort and then toss them aside like used candy wrappers,” said Sandoval-Moshenberg. “It is going to have disastrous long-term foreign policy consequences.”

In Virginia, the ICE handling of Arman Momand should also have consequences.

If it proves anything, it proves that immigrants are not and have never been America’s enemy.

This right-wing lunacy is a violation of everything conservatives hold dear

According to a new report by a state commission on banned books in Virginia schools, Hanover County Public Schools removed the book Medical Discoveries: Medical Breakthroughs and the People Who Developed Them from libraries sometime between July 2020 and March 2025.

Censored, too, was a book entitled Sexual health information for teens: health tips about sexual development, described by its publisher as “basic consumer health information for teens about puberty, sexuality, reproductive health, contraception, and disease prevention.””

Likewise jettisoned were copies of Encyclopedia of the Human Body, The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body, and The Medical Advisor: The Complete Guide to Alternative and Conventional Treatments.

The conservative library review movement in Virginia’s public schools, which has galvanized during the tenure of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, purports to be about protecting parents’ rights to know what their children read. The July report by Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) put the lie to that claim.

Book banners in schools want to dictate what students can learn in their classrooms and from their libraries, regardless of what individual parents and guardians believe. No greater violation of adults’ child-rearing choices exists than the moral arbitration right-wing extremists hope heap on them.

JLARC found that 63 percent of Virginia public schools removed no books from their libraries. That good news was tempered by the fact that one in three had removed at least one book. But the real bad news is that the public-school book ban movement is just getting up to speed, as holier-than-you evangelical Christians try to take over school boards across the country. We’ve seen it in Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states. As many of those types of people gain positions of power in the administration of President Donald Trump, violations of parents’ First Amendment rights by radical theocrats seem likely to accelerate.

Hanover County, which lies about 30 miles north of Richmond, serves as a cautionary tale. Hanover schools are governed by a conservative majority and the school board is appointed, not elected like most school districts in the state. The JLARC report revealed that Hanover accounted for 36 percent of all “book removal actions” in the state. Hanover removed 125 titles from its schools from July 2020 until March 2025, the report found.

This is the last step in a progression that begins with challenging content in library books, then pulling them from shelves and requiring guardian consent to check them out, and finally, removing them from libraries entirely.

Letting political and religious ideologues control children’s reading choices leads to censoring their exposure to prize-winning literature and reflects obvious prejudices against books about racism and LGBTQ+ issues. It sacrifices scientific knowledge to faith and, in some cases, ignorance. Hanover proves that.

The conservative attack on diversity, equity and inclusion — all fundamental American values — will lead to a literal whitewash of U.S. history and doesn’t serve anyone who believes that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Censorship to shape politics and culture like what is happening in Hanover often finds its natural conclusion in symbolic or actual book burnings, like those that famously fired up Hitler’s power in Germany.

Banned books in Hanover don’t just include books about gender or sexual identity. The list also includes literary classics by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, Booker Prize winner Maragaret Atwood, and National Book Award winner Kurt Vonnegut.

For would-be book banners, a single sex scene in hundreds of pages or a suggestion of white racism now serves as justification for exclusion from a school library.

As that continues, taboos grow. Hanover County dumped The Freedom Writers Diary. The book tells the story of a California teacher who taught students about the Holocaust by making them read and write about The Diary of Anne Frank.

To get an idea of how far-gone Hanover is, the county Board of Supervisors removed references to school library censorship from a certificate it gave a Hanover student who won a national Girl Scout award. Kate Lindley received a “Freedom to Read” award from the Girl Scouts for establishing a website and a series of “Banned Book Nooks” in the county where students could read books the school board had removed from libraries.

As she accepted her certificate from the Board of Supervisors, Lindley showed more class than the governing body.

“You have shown the world that you are afraid to call something what it is, be that a banned book or a deselected one,” she told the board’s conservative majority. “Thank you for this recognition.”

What the rest of us must recognize and resist is the assault on our rights by people who, without our consent, would deprive Virginia kids of access to books like Jesus Land: A Memoir. A New York Times bestseller, it tells the true story of a 16-year-old white girl and her Black adopted brother trying to survive a brutal, violent fundamentalist upbringing. It could be that Hanover County banned the book because it does not cast Christian fundamentalism in the light that evangelicals want it seen.

That is the polar opposite of parents’ rights.