VIRGINIA – Jermiah “Jerry” Fitz has been appointed as the Chief Deputy Director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, Governor Abigail Spanberger announced.

I want to thank Governor Spanberger for the chance to serve the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia and work alongside Director Walters as we move the agency forward. The field of corrections sees both the best times and the most challenging times for the people we encounter. Long-lasting public safety depends upon our agency doing the right things for the right reasons.

Chief Deputy Director Jermiah “Jerry” Fitz

Fitz has served in a variety of leadership positions throughout the agency, bringing nearly 30 years of experience in corrections and public safety to the role.

In 1997, Fitz began his career at District #14 in Danville as a Surveillance Officer and rose to the rank of Chief Probation Officer in Chesterfield County in 2013. He later served in Henrico County and has led VADOC’s Central Region as Regional Administrator for Community Corrections and the Eastern Region as Regional Administrator for Institutions during his career.

Other notable roles that Fitz has served in include Legislative Liaison, Corrections Operations Administrator, and most recently, Deputy Director of Community Corrections since March 2025. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice from Old Dominion University.

“I offer my sincere congratulations to Chief Deputy Director Fitz on his appointment, and I look forward to the opportunity to continue to work with him to advance our public safety mission,” Director Walters said.

LYNCHBURG, Va. (WSET) — A bill being discussed in Richmond could impact what students across Virginia learn in history and social science classrooms.

House Bill 614 would change statewide learning standards by requiring public schools to include the contributions and experiences of groups described as “historically marginalized” in history and social science instruction.

Those groups include racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people from a range of socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. The proposal has sparked debate among lawmakers and education leaders.

Republican Delegate Tim Griffin said he strongly opposes the bill, arguing it shifts the focus away from what he described as core educational priorities.

“This bill is going to have a negative impact on schools, because instead of worrying about reading, writing, and arithmetic, or in the historical arena, talking about American exceptionalism, it focuses on every single minority that you can ever imagine,” Griffin said.

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Griffin said he believes emphasizing specific groups in the curriculum could come at the expense of teaching broader American history.

“American history is the history of all of us as Americans,” Griffin said. “I hate the dividing us into silos and into different groups. America should be about America, especially this year.”

Supporters of the bill disagree, saying it builds on existing standards rather than replacing them.

Karl Loos, president of the Lynchburg Education Association, said House Bill 614 would help address gaps in what is currently taught in classrooms.

When asked about Griffin’s concerns that the bill is overly focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, Loos said, “I think he is wrong.”

“With the growth of America and the history of America, what this does is it gives us a more complete picture of how all of that came about,” Loos said.

Loos said some historical contributions are currently missing from Virginia’s Standards of Learning.

“The short answer is yes, there is,” Loos said. “There are a variety of contributions made by people that we haven’t really touched on in the SOLs.”

According to Loos, the legislation would not give the state control over local lesson plans, but it would guide how Virginia updates its history and social science standards in future reviews.

The bill was proposed by Delegate Sam Rasoul. ABC 13 reached out to Rasoul for comment, but had not heard back as of publication.

House Bill 614 continues to make its way through the General Assembly.

This article was reprinted with permission from Virginia Mercury. 

Gov. Abigail Spanberger has formally ended an agreement with the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement that had allowed Virginia State Police troopers and Virginia Department of Corrections officers to assist ICE.

The agreement — which stems from Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration —  had effectively placed state law enforcement under federal control and supervision to conduct civil immigration enforcement.

Ending the agreements was a campaign promise of Spanberger’s last year when she said tasking state and local law enforcement to help with federal law enforcement was a “misuse of those resources.”

She said she’d rather law enforcement focus on its core duties than serve as deputies to ICE.

Executive Order 12 builds on her earlier day-one executive order that gave her the option to end the agreement that Order 12 now rescinds.

The order directs all state law enforcement agencies to review policies, training and practices to ensure they align with standards of protecting human life and to “not engage in fear-based policing, enforcement theater, or actions that create barriers to people seeking assistance in their time of need.”

Spanberger pointed to national conversations around ICE’s tactics in a meeting with the news media on Wednesday. As President Donald Trump’s administration has had the agency hyper-focused on Minneapolis in recent weeks, American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been killed by agents.

“I think it has brought the conversation to the forefront,” Spanberger said of how their deaths helped inspire her new order.

Drawing on her own background in law enforcement, she emphasized that the order is intended to reinforce accountability, public service, and safety.

“I think it’s extraordinarily important to make sure that we are celebrating, and honoring and recognizing the strong vetting, the strong training, and the incredibly high standards that here in the commonwealth of Virginia, we hold our law enforcement agencies to,” Spanberger said. “We want to make sure that we’re making a clear line in the sand about what is expected of our law enforcement officials.”

Republicans, however, offered a sharply different view.

Sen. Glenn Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield said in reaction Wednesday that he believes the order reflects Spanberger “putting politics over public safety.”

As of late last year, the majority of the thousands of people detained by ICE in Virginia had no criminal histories.

With Virignia’s legislature and governorship now under Democratic control — at a time when  President Donald Trump has targeted Democratic-led states — immigration advocates and civil rights groups have argued the commonwealth could become the next focal point for ICE enforcement.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested Trump could retaliate against Virginia over Spanberger’s actions. Del. Karen Hamilton, R-Culpeper, speculated in a recent social media post that the president could withhold federal funding following Spanberger’s previous ICE-related order — a move Youngkin once threatened against localities that declined to cooperate with ICE.

When asked Wednesday whether he believes Trump might retaliate, Sturtevant said, “we’ll see.”

“At the end of the day,” he added, “we know we have criminal illegal aliens here in Virginia. We have federal law enforcement, whose job it is to go and identify, find, and deport these individuals. We had been working constructively with those federal partners to do that.”

Spanberger, meanwhile, said her order does not prohibit cooperation between state agencies and ICE under limited circumstances, such as participation in special task forces or when ICE presents  judicial warrants requesting assistance.

“That’s a clear delineation,” she said. “But taking Virginia law enforcement, state agency personnel, and basically giving them over to ICE, is something that ends today.”

Virginia Mercury reporter Shannon Heckt contributed to this story.