Things were looking tense in Los Angeles on Thursday even before federal agents took down U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla.
We had the Marines, slightly trained in domestic crowd control, heading out to do crowd control. We had ICE raids, sweeping up a man from a church. Or maybe it was ICE — the armed and masked agents refused to say where they were from.
But then the situation went further south, which to be honest, I thought would take at least until Monday.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was in town to cosplay at being an ICE agent herself. You know she loves to dress up. Padilla, who was in the same building to meet with a general, went to a news conference she was hosting and tried to ask her a question.
Bad idea.
Federal agents manhandled him out of the room, shoved him down onto his knees and handcuffed him. The FBI has confirmed to my colleagues that he was not arrested, but that’s little comfort.
While officers may not have known Padilla was a U.S. senator when they started going after him, they certainly did by the time the cuffs were snapping.
Padilla was heard saying, “Hands off, hands off. I’m Sen. Alex Padilla,” as the officers pushed him back.
The hands remained on.
Shortly after the video of this frightening episode hit social media, Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X, “If they can handcuff a U.S. Senator for asking a question, imagine what they will do to you.”
Indeed.
After the news conference, Noem offered a sorry-not-sorry.
“I wish that he would have reached out and identified himself and let us know who he was and that he wanted to talk,” she told reporters. “His approach, you know, was something that I don’t think was appropriate at all, but the conversation was great, and we’re going to continue to communicate.”
It was great! Send in the Marines!
When asked why she had ordered the removal of Padilla, Noem deferred to law enforcement.
“I’ll let the law enforcement speak to how this situation was handled, but I will say that it’s people need to identify themselves before they start lunging at these moments during press conference,” she said.
“Lunging.”
It is starting to feel like being brown in America is a crime. Brown man allegedly lunging is the new Black man driving — scary enough that any response is justified.
Sen. Adam Schiff, our other California senator, came to his colleague’s defense, demanding an investigation.
“Anyone who looks at it — anyone — anyone who looks at this, it will turn your stomach,” he said. “To look at this video and see what happened reeks — reeks — of totalitarianism. This is not what democracies do.”
Political pundit Mike Madrid pointed out how personal this issue of immigration is to Padilla.
Padilla is the son of Mexican immigrants, Santos and Lupe Padilla. He went into politics in 1995 because of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, the California measure that knocked all undocumented people off of many public services, including schools. He’s been a champion of immigrant communities ever since.
“Hard to describe how angered and passionate Senator Alex Padilla is — I’ve known him for 25 years and never seen anything like this,” Madrid wrote online. “He’s a living example of how Latinos feel right now.”
And not just Latinos — all Americans who care about democracy.
We are about to have approximately 3,000 hours of debate on whether Padilla deserved what he got because he was not invited to the press conference.
The right wing is going to parse the video looking for that lunge and saying Padilla was aggressive. The left will say he has a right to ask questions, even a duty because he is an elected representative whose constituents are being detained and disappeared, even ones that are U.S. citizens.
I’ll say I genuinely do not care if you are pro-Trump or pro-Padilla.
If you care about our Constitution, about due process, about civil rights, watching a U.S. senator forced onto his knees for asking questions should be a terrifying wake up call.
It turns out that it’s true: after they come for the vulnerable, they do indeed come for the rest.