Longtime Newport News Sheriff Gabe Morgan is being challenged for his post by a former sheriff’s deputy.

Morgan, 69, a former Army major who was first elected in 2005 and re-elected four times, faces Francis Jacobson, a 38-year-old who moved to the United States from Nigeria in 2018 and became a U.S. citizen in 2021.

The Newport News Sheriff’s Office hired Jacobson as a recruit in October 2023, and he spent several months in training before becoming a licensed sheriff’s deputy in May 2024. He parted ways with the office earlier this year.

Jacobson says he resigned in March after he filed to run against Morgan. He’s now working in security at Hampton University.

The Newport News Sheriff’s Office has 245 employees and a budget of about $28 million. It runs the Newport News City Jail, provides security for the city’s courthouses and serves legal documents, among other duties.

Morgan, first elected as a Republican in 2005, became a Democrat early in his tenure and holds the Democratic nomination again this year. Jacobson is running as an independent.

The two candidates have identical positions on a major issue of today — the extent of cooperation they would provide to federal authorities on immigration matters.

Both say they will tell the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement if an undocumented immigrant is in jail custody. At the same time, both say they would decline to hold those inmates under ICE detainers asking inmates be held up to 48 hours past their release time on local charges.

Morgan notes that an ICE detainer is not the legal equivalent of a warrant issued by a judge.

“I’m not going to violate your constitutional rights,” Morgan said, noting that ICE has so far always come to get such inmates before they are released on local charges.

Jacobson shares the same view. “If they do not come on time and pick the individual, and it’s time for the individual to leave, bro, I’m letting him go,” Jacobson said.

But the men disagree starkly on whether a new Newport New City Jail is needed.

Morgan backs a city capital project to build a new facility. The sheriff contends that the current jail, designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s, is no longer adequate.

“When I took over, it was the belly of the (Amistad),” Morgan said of the 26th Street facility. There were 750 inmates at a facility designed for less than half of that. He kept another 200 or so inmates at the regional jail in Portsmouth, which has since closed.

Morgan said he “fought and took over” the city’s old juvenile detention center that now serves as the jail annex. The Sheriff’s Office now houses between 450 and 600 inmates between the two buildings, but the jail still feels old and cramped.

“We don’t have the programming space,” Morgan said. “We do not have the medical treatment space.” Nor is there a good space for an increasing number of older inmates who have difficulty climbing bunks.

“We’ve been fabricating parts to keep the locks operational,” he said, given that the lock manufacturer went out of business years ago. But recently, he said, the city finally approved his longstanding request for $2 million for new locks.

Morgan serve on the city’s public safety committee that’s expected to recommend that a new “courthouse complex” and new jail be added to the city’s long term capital budget. Together those are expected to cost more than $200 million.

But Jacobson disagrees on the need for such a large investment.

“We don’t need a new jail,” he said. “To me, it’s an excuse for failure. So what I’m going to do is remodelize the sheriff’s office because that building is so beautiful … When a new jail is approved, our taxes are going to go up, which we all know.”

The city should not be planning to “incarcerate more of our citizens,” he said. “We are not thinking on how we can reduce the jail population,” he said.

Morgan shook his head as Jacobson made that case during a recent debate sponsored by the NAACP. “If you spent any time in the jail other than eight months, then you would know the limitations of the facility that we have,” he said.

Jacobson says he owns a Nigerian-based company, NairaMe Africa, which he said has more than 200 employees and provides point of sale payment machines and a ride-sharing and package delivery service.

He also said he’s a pastor of a Christian church in Nigeria called Grace Domicile, which he said has 1,300 members, and is a published author.

Attempts to verify the business and church last week were not successful, with the websites no longer in existence. The book title Jacobson mentioned at the NAACP debate could not be found online.

Asked if he has time to be sheriff with all his other commitments, Jacobson says “it’s all about system and structure.”

“They are stand-alone, which means they can function in my absence,” Jacobson says of his businesses, asserting that he can handle that work in about five hours a week.

Morgan said he’s not sure what Jacobson has or hasn’t done in terms of businesses, adding that he couldn’t find Jacobson’s book when he tried to Google it.

“I’m not even here to dispute whether he’s what he says he is,” Morgan said. “I can tell you what he’s not — he’s not qualified to be the sheriff of Newport News.”

Morgan has served since 2021 as chairman of the board of Riverside Health System, which runs Riverside Regional Medical Center. He’s also on the board of the National Sheriff’s Association, chairing the organization’s “jails and detention subcommittee.”

“Everything I have going on is directly related to this job and the running of the correctional facilities,” Morgan said.

During his time working as a jail deputy, Jacobson said, he “never” saw Morgan coming and going. “He was never around,” Jacobson said. “He would never come through the jail. Not for once.”

He also said he never spoke with Morgan — “not once.”

“I have never sat down with Morgan,” Jacobson said. “The inmates don’t know who Gabe Morgan is. The community doesn’t even know who Gabe Morgan is … This election is bringing him out.”

Morgan said he is often out in the community and regularly visits the City Jail and the courthouses where his deputies work. “I could be on the second floor and he’s on the first floor and he never sees me,” Morgan said.

But the sheriff noted that his jail deputies have sergeants, lieutenants and captains and a major over them.

“My job is not to be working on the floor with him,” Morgan said. “If I am working the floor with him, who’s doing my job? Who’s fighting for funding? Who’s fighting for personnel? … He doesn’t even understand what’s required of the sheriff.”

Morgan notes that he fought for a new pay plan in January, with the city kicking in more per deputy in addition to what the state provides. “Deputies are getting more money. How did that happen? Negotiation, working with the city.”

Morgan also said that when he wasn’t satisfied with the outside company that provided the medical services for the jail, he brought those 45 workers in house, saving $1 million annually in the process.

Jacobson also said he’s running for office because of the “inhumane treatment at the sheriff’s office, the suicides in the City Jail, the lack of mental health care in the City Jail, the lack of advanced technology.”

He says he wants to “change the lenses” through which deputies “treat our incarcerated citizens.”

He promised “modern age cameras” that “alert you when an incarcerated citizen is prone to committing suicide.” He said there should be more mental health specialists than the two currently working at the jail.

Moreover, Jacobson promised to teach inmates new job skills during incarceration and touted a new app to keep track of inmates when they leave the jail.

He asserted that when several inmates managed to get out of their cells to a more common area earlier this year, that wasn’t the first time that happened. All throughout my time in that City Jail, it was never secured,” Jacobson said. “Inmates can pop the locks.”

Several men are facing felony charges in the incident.

He termed the Sheriff’s Office “complacent,” and promised to spend a lot of time listening to people. “If you know African culture, we listen,” Jacobson said.

Morgan says the jail is very secure — but that he also treats inmates humanely. “For nearly two decades, I have led the Office of the Sheriff with integrity,” he said.

Morgan has worked with the city’s Public Works Department, Waterworks, some local businesses and nonprofits to get jobs for inmates once they are released. He also says the jail runs substance abuse programs and uses virtual reality to train inmates on mechanics.

“Again, my opponent is uninformed,” Morgan said. “We’ve been doing preventative work from 2007. We are the model for re-entry.”

Morgan said there are “three mental health people, not two,” up from none when he started in 2006. “We currently spend $650,000 (a year) on mental health, and all of that comes out of what we can scrape together.”

In 2024, he said, there were 45 suicide attempts — one successful — at the City Jail. So far this year, there have been 31 attempts, two successful. He also said cameras can’t take the place of physical checks.

But deaths by suicide, he said, are a huge issue in jails all over the country.

“Part of what we inculcate in all of what we do is fair and humane treatment,” Morgan said. But he said there’s lots of complexity to running the jail that’s not as simple as Jacobson seems to think.

“Folks, let me tell you something,” he said at the NAACP debate. “The facility is a dangerous place. And if you are not careful, it will get out of hand quickly.”

Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com

https://www.dailypress.com/2025/10/18/newport-news-sheriffs-race/