Ghazala Hashmi

I'd never intended to run for office, and I felt like I had to speak up and represent communities that I care about deeply.

As an immigrant and as a Muslim, I was particularly appalled when Donald Trump came into office in his first administration.

riding a wave of bigotry and Islamophobia and seeking to divide this nation.

I taught American literature and so three decades of helping my students to understand the complexity that is our American history and those texts that in particular define our American identity has been my life's work.

I decided to run in 2019 so I could respond to the

the crisis that I was seeing emerging in this country from the Trump administration.

And so for many of those same reasons, I decided to run for lieutenant governor, you know, sadly, and somewhat unexpectedly, I think, I don't think a lot of us plan to be here again, that we're in the midst of a second Trump administration that is even more disastrous than the first one.

And it became immediately clear that we need to have strong state-level leadership to respond to the crisis, to protect our citizens.

I decided to run for Lieutenant Governor so that I can build on my six years of experience in the Virginia Senate

the leadership role that I've played in education and health care, on housing issues, as well as environmental and energy concerns, that I can build on that experience and also continue to respond to what the Trump administration is doing to Virginians, the harm that we're seeing.

You know, we have to join forces.

There needs to be a coalition of strong Democratic leadership across many states.

in order to respond to the harm that's being inflicted on our country.

Yes, this has been a difficult week, but a very urgent and important week.

You know, I'm in the last week of my campaign, but knowing that this is such a critical and urgent moment for us, not just as Virginians, but as Americans,

We in the House as well as the Senate, the Democratic leadership of both chambers knew that we must come back and respond to basically the unconstitutional actions that we see occurring.

Just today, we saw the impacts in Ohio as well.

So when we have Donald Trump demanding that states redistrict and gerrymander in order to support his failed policies, our own constituents have been rallying and marching and asking us to do something.

And in Virginia, we knew we had an opportunity to actually do something.

And so, yes, in this very critical week, we came back into session and our House colleagues passed the resolution as well as we in the Senate.