Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger accused President Donald Trump of sending immigration officials to “arrest mothers and detain children” and called illegal aliens “aspiring Americans” in the Democratic Party’s official response to the State of the Union address.
While her speech was meant to represent her entire party’s dissenting voice against Trump, Spanberger treated it as a chance to talk about herself, appearing to campaign as a presidential hopeful.
Speaking to fellow party members in Williamsburg, Virginia, the governor said, “We did not hear the truth from our president” and blasted Congressional Republicans for being “unwilling to assert their constitutional authority to stop him.”
Arguing that Trump and Republicans have made “life more expensive” and are “even making it more difficult to see a doctor,” she claimed that “here in Virginia, I am working with our state legislature to lower costs and make the Commonwealth more affordable.”
Later, changing the topic to law and immigration enforcement, Spanberger again patted herself on the back.
“I work side by side with local and state police to keep our community safe and to uphold and enforce the law,” she said. “Law enforcement officers across the country know that it is a unique responsibility to do the serious work of investigating crimes, comforting victims, and making arrests. It’s about building trust, and that requires an abiding sense of duty and commitment to community.”
Playing up the emotional card when it comes to detainments and deportations made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Spanberger spewed radical and plainly untrue views on Trump’s immigration enforcement policies:
And yet, our president has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans, and they have done it without a warrant. They have ripped nursing mothers away from their babies. They have sent children — a little boy in a blue bunny hat — children to far-off detention centers. And they have killed American citizens in our streets, and they have done it all with their faces masked from accountability. Every minute spent sowing fear is a minute not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings. Our president told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children. Think about that. Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed, not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.
“I think Spanberger just referred to illegal immigrants as people who ‘aspire to be’ American citizens,” wrote political analyst Guy Benson on X.
“She pretends ICE has only arrested innocent mothers and children. ~70% of ICE arrests in the last year have targeted people with criminal histories.”
Spanberger, who campaigned as a moderate while trying to hide her extreme far-left views, rescinded former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order deputizing state law enforcement to assist the administration with federal immigration enforcement.
Earlier in February, the new governor issued another EO stating that Virginia “does not engage in fear-based policing” or “enforcement theater,” and should focus on upholding state law rather than the “administrative enforcement of civil status.”
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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