Abigail Spanberger

My mother was a nurse and my father was a career law enforcement officer.

I began my career by following in my father's footsteps as a federal agent working money laundering and narcotics cases.

I worked side by side with local and state police to keep our community safe and to uphold and enforce the law.

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.

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.

After working in law enforcement, I continued my career of service as a CIA officer, working undercover to protect the United States and our allies from global threats, terrorism, nuclear weapons, and the aggression of adversarial nations around the globe.

But as the president spoke of his perceived successes tonight, he continues to cede economic power and technological strength to Russia, bow down to China, bow down to a Russian dictator, and make plans for war with Iran.

Here's the truth.

Over the last year, through Doge, mass firings, and the appointment of deeply unserious people to our nation's most serious positions,