brown people

California Sen. Alex Padilla is among the highest-ranking Latinos in U.S. politics today, but it took a pair of handcuffs to make him famous.

How’s that for a comment on America 2025?

Padilla, you may remember, was tackled and cuffed by federal officers after attempting to ask a question of Homeland Security Czarina Kristi Noem at an L.A. news conference in June, when the National Guard first made its appearance on our streets. Noem later claimed Padilla “lunged” at her — which he did not — using the classic Trumpian technique of erasing reality with blame, especially when it comes to brown people.

Padilla told me that “from day one of this administration, I have tried to speak truth to power,” and if getting tackled forced people to “have no choice but to now start paying attention … that could be helpful, because the general public knows it’s wrong.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi recycled the incident on Tuesday when Padilla attempted to question her during a congressional hearing, voicing concern about the weaponization of the Department of Justice. Bondi refused to answer multiple questions, instead invoking the Noem defense.

“I find it interesting that you want order … in this proceeding now,” Bondi said. “You sure didn’t have order when you stormed Secretary Noem at a press conference in California, did you?”

Again, no storming, no lunging, not even a feint. Really, if anything can be said of Padilla, it’s that he’s a guy who likes order. An MIT-trained engineer, he’s known for being calm to the point of boring — in the best of ways. Who wouldn’t want a bit of boring in their politics today, if it’s seasoned with compassion and common sense?

Calm, of course, does not mean a lack of conviction. As the government shutdown limps to the end of its first full week, Padilla took a few minutes to fill me in on why Democrats shouldn’t back down, and why he won’t — whether the issue is healthcare, immigration or the collision of the two, which is at the heart of this shutdown.

Republicans would like voters to believe that undocumented immigrants are throwing parties in our emergency rooms, racking up free services while shoving U.S. citizens out to the sidewalk. In reality, there’s not a lot of good data on how many ER visits involve undocumented folks because doctors are more focused on saving lives than checking immigration status. But one Texas study found that about 2% of all hospital visits in a three-month period involved people without documentation. That’s in a state with a high number of undocumented folks, so take it for what it’s worth — hardly a scourge.

Padilla and Democrats would like to stay focused on an actual crisis — healthcare premiums for low- and middle-income folks are about to skyrocket in coming weeks if Congress doesn’t keep the Obama-era subsidies that make the premiums affordable. Padilla wants voters to understand how dire this is.

“This is not a what-might-happen-next-year concern … this is a now concern,” Padilla told me.

“Open enrollment is opening,” he said. “People are setting their premiums and have to make choices of where to sign up for healthcare and at the cost right now, and so it does need to be immediately addressed.”

In case you think this is partisan show, far-right MAGA cheerleader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) agrees with Padilla. That’s when you know things are getting weird.

“Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!” Greene wrote on social media, breaking with her party on the issue.

That’s about the only thing that Padilla and Greene may ever agree on. Padilla is the son of immigrants who met in L.A. and later obtained legal status. He was born in Southern California, making birthright citizenship core to his identity at a moment when Trump is asking the Supreme Court to end it. His isn’t just an immigrant story, it’s a California story, and it’s never far from his mind.

He was recently asked if he regretted fighting with the Biden administration over proposed immigration reform that lacked pathways for immigrants, especially Dreamers and others who have been in the United States for years if not decades, to become citizens. Would it have been better to sell them out, leave them in limbo, but fix the border before Trump could exploit it?

“Of course not,” Padilla told me. Rather than shrink under attack, Padilla said he’s holding his ground.

California is one of a handful of states that does in fact offer healthcare to undocumented people, though budget shortfalls forced Gov. Gavin Newsom to scale back that plan.

No federal dollars are used for that undocumented healthcare — it’s solely state money. And Padilla supports it.

“There are some states that choose to use state funding to provide that care, and I agree with that, because it’s much smarter, from a public health standpoint, to help prevent people from getting sick or treat people early on, not administer healthcare, certainly not primary care, through emergency rooms,” he said.

Padilla said it’s rich that the very workers deemed essential during the coronavirus pandemic, the workers who kept food on tables, deliveries going, and cared for our young and our elderly, are now “the primary target of Trump’s massive deportation agenda. So whether it’s in the vein of the healthcare question, whether it’s in the vein of the indiscriminate raids by ICE and other federal agencies, that’s the cruel irony.”

The Trump administration raised Padilla’s profile inadvertently, but the newfound fame has had a somewhat unexpected consequence: Frequent speculation that he may run for governor when Newsom terms out in 2026.

Padilla said he hasn’t “made a decision on that and not making any announcements right now.”

Instead, he’s focusing on helping to pass California’s Proposition 50, which would rig election maps to potentially create five more Democratic seats in the midterm elections, with the hopes of taking control of at least one house of Congress, an effort he says is “critical to reining in this out-of-control administration.”

What makes someone suspicious enough to be grabbed by masked federal authorities?

Is it a Mexican family eating dinner at a table near a taco truck?

Afghan women in hijabs working at a Middle Eastern market?

South Asian girls in colorful lehengas, speaking Hindi at an Indian wedding?

According to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing a concurrence in the Supreme Court’s emergency ruling allowing roving immigration raids in Los Angeles, any of these could be fair game, using law and “common sense.”

Brown people, speaking brown languages, hanging out with other brown people, and doing brown people things like working low-wage jobs now meets the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” required for immigration stops.

Living while brown has become the new driving while Black.

Of course, this particular high court ruling — and our general angst — has centered on Latino immigrants. That’s fair, and understandable. In California, about half of our immigrants are from Mexico, and thousands more from other Latin and South American countries.

But increasingly, especially for newer immigrants, more folks are coming from Africa and Asian countries such as China and India — some of which, you may recall, Donald Trump called “shithole countries” way back in 2018, while questioning why America doesn’t take more immigrants from white places such as Norway.

It’s a dangerous mistake to think Trump’s immigration purge is just about Latinos. He’s made that clear himself. We have reached the point in our burgeoning white nationalism when our high court has deemed brown synonymous with illegal, regardless of what country that pigment originated in. False distinctions about who is being targeted create divisions at a time when solidarity is our greatest power.

“It’s really about racial subordination, and this is really about promoting white supremacy in this nation,” George Galvis, executive director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, told me. He’s part Native American and part Latino, and 100% against policies like this one that target people by skin color.

Mexico, India, China, Iran. People from these places may not always see what they have in common, but let me help you out.

Racists see two colors: white and not white. Although this particular case was filed on behalf of Latino defendants, there is nothing in it that limits its scope to Latinos.

“It’s not targeting, you know, Eastern Europeans. It’s not targeting people who are Caucasian,” said Amr Shabaik, legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in L.A., a nonprofit civil rights organization advocating for American Muslims. “This is going to be on Black and brown communities, and that’s who’s going to feel the brunt.”

For Black Americans, this argument is as old as dirt. Our criminal justice system, our society, has a long and documented history of viewing Black Americans with suspicion — considering it “common sense” to think they’re up to something nefarious for actions like getting behind the wheel of a car. But, for the most part, our courts have frowned upon such obvious racism — though not always.

That anti-Black discrimination can be seen today in Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into urban centers in what Trump has described as a “war” on crime, a callback to the war on drugs of the 1990s that targeted Black Americans with devastating consequences.

This ruling on immigration enforcement goes hand-in-hand with that military deployment, two prongs in a strategy to wear away our outrage and shock at the dismantling of civil rights.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the 4th Amendment is supposed to protect us all from “arbitrary interference” by law enforcement.

“After today,” she wrote, “that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”

That makes this ruling “unconscionably irreconcilable” with the Constitution, she wrote.

ICE has detained about 67,000 people across the country since last October, according to government data. Of those, almost 18,000 are from Mexico. Detentions of people from Guatemala and Honduras add almost 14,000 Latinos to that number. Places including Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela add thousands more. Certainly, by any measure, Latinos are bearing the brunt of immigration enforcement.

Other parts of the brown world are not immune, however. More than 2,800 people from India have been detained, as have more than 1,400 Chinese people. Thousands of people from across Africa, including more than 800 Egyptians, have been locked up, too.

So we are not just talking about Latino people at car washes or Home Depots. We are talking about Artesia’s Little India; Mid-City’s Little Ethiopia; the Sri Lankan community in West Covina.

We are talking about Sacramento’s Stockton Boulevard, where Vietnamese men congregate in the cafes every afternoon.

We are talking about the farms, schools and towns of the Central Valley and the Central Coast, where Latino and Asian immigrants grow our food.

We are talking about cities such as Fremont in the Bay Area, where 50% of the population is Asian, from places including India, China and the Philippines.

We are talking about California, where immigrants make up 27% of the state’s population, more than double the national average. And yes, many of them lack documents, or live in families of mixed status.

A recent UC Merced study found that there are about 2.2 million undocumented immigrants in California. Of those, about two-thirds have been here more than a decade, and half have been here for more than 20 years.

“This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on social media. “Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family — and every person is now a target.”

Remember a few short months ago when our dear leader swore they were only going after criminals? How quickly did that morph into criminals being anyone who had crossed the border illegally?

And now, it has openly become anyone who is brown — and we are not even shocked. We are happily debating what the rules of these broad sweeps will be, having given up entirely on the fact that broad sweeps are horrific.

Do you think it will stop with immigration, or even crime? What about LGBTQ+ people? Or protesters? Who becomes the next threat?

Immigration sweeps are not a Latino problem, a Latino fear. We have opened the door to target people who “common sense” tells us are un-American.

The only way to close that door is with our collective strength, undivided by the kind of “common sense” discrimination that men like Kavanaugh embrace.

Well, at least they’re not eating the cats and dogs.

To hear President Trump tell it, Washington, D.C., has become a barbarous hellhole — worse even than Springfield, Ohio, it would seem, where he accused Black immigrants, many from Somalia, of barbecuing pets last year during the campaign.

Back then, Trump was just a candidate. Now, he’s the commander in chief of the U.S. military with a clear desire to use troops of war on American streets, whether it’s for a fancy birthday parade, to enforce his immigration agenda in Los Angeles or to stop car thefts in the nation’s capital.

“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” Trump said during a Monday news conference, announcing that he was calling up National Guard troops to help with domestic policing in D.C.

“We’ll get rid of the slums, too. We have slums here. We’ll get rid of them,” he said. “I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”

Where “they” live.

While the use of the military on American streets is alarming, it should be just as scary how blatantly this president is tying race not just to crime, but to violence so uncontrollable it requires military troops to stop it. Tying race to criminality is nothing new, of course. It’s a big part of American history and our justice system has unfortunately been steeped in it, from the Jim Crow era to the 1990s war on drugs, which targeted inner cities with the same rhetoric that Trump is recycling now.

The difference between that last attack on minorities — started by President Nixon and lasting through Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, also under the guise of law and order — and our current circumstances is that in this instance, the notion of war isn’t just hyperbole. We are literally talking about soldiers in the streets, targeting Black and brown people. Whether they are car wash employees in California or teenagers on school break in D.C., actual crimes don’t seem to matter. Skin color is enough for law enforcement scrutiny, a sad and dangerous return to an era before civil rights.

“Certainly the language that President Trump is using with regard to D.C. has a message that’s racially based,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Chemerinsky pointed out that just a few days ago, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals called out the Trump administration for immigration raids that were unconstitutional because they were basically racial sweeps. But he is unabashed. His calls for violence against people of color are escalating. It increasingly appears that bringing troops to Los Angeles was a test case for a larger use of the military in civilian settings.

President Trump holds up a chart in front of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during Monday’s news conference announcing the deployment of troops in Washington, D.C.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

“This will go further,” Trump ominously said, making it clear he’d like to see soldiers policing across America.

“We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is,” he went on. “We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore, they’re so, they’re so far gone.”

In reality, crime is dropping across the United States, including in Washington. As the Washington Post pointed out, violent crime rates, including murders, have for the most part been on a downward trend since 2023. But all it takes is a few explosive examples to banish truth from conscientiousness. Trump pointed out some tragic and horrific examples — including the beating of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a former employee of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency who was attacked after attempting to defend a woman during a carjacking recently, not far from the White House.

These are crimes that should be punished, and certainly not tolerated. But the exploitation we are seeing from Trump is a dangerous precedent to justify military force for domestic law enforcement, which until now has been forbidden — or at least assumed forbidden — by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

This week, just how strong that prohibition is will be debated in a San Francisco courtroom, during the three-day trial over the deployment of troops in Los Angeles. While it’s uncertain how that case will resolve, “Los Angeles could provide a bit of a road map for any jurisdiction seeking to push back against the Trump administration when there’s a potential threat of sending in federal troops,” Jessica Levinson, a constitutional legal scholar at Loyola Law School, told me.

Again, California coming out as the biggest foil to a Trump autocracy.

But while we wait in the hopes that the courts will catch up to Trump, we can’t be blind to what is happening on our streets. Race and crime are not linked by anything other than racism.

Allowing our military to terrorize Black and brown people under the guise of law and order is nothing more than a power grab based on the exploitation of our darkest natures.

It’s a tactic Trump has perfected, but one which will fundamentally change, and weaken, American justice if we do not stop it.