press conference

As Gov. Gavin Newsom prepared to announce that he would take on President Trump’s redistricting plans on behalf of California, scores of federal immigration agents massed outside the venue Thursday.

Newsom was set to speak at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, when Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino, who has been leading the immigration operations in California, arrived in Little Tokyo, flanked by agents in helmets, camouflage, masks and holding guns.

“We’re here making Los Angeles a safer place since we won’t have politicians that’ll do that, we do that ourselves,” Bovino told a Fox 11 reporter in Little Tokyo. “We’re glad to be here, we’re not going anywhere.”

When the reporter noted that Newsom was nearby, Bovino responded, “I don’t know where he’s at.”

Newsom’s office took to X to share that agents were outside, posting: “BORDER PATROL HAS SHOWED UP AT OUR BIG BEAUTIFUL PRESS CONFERENCE! WE WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED!”

The apparent raid Thursday, during which one person was detained, comes amid calls from elected officials for an end to renewed immigration operations across the L.A. area. Federal agents have carried out a string of raids over the past week, arresting several people at car washes and Home Depot stores.

Immigrant advocates and city leaders had hoped such sweeps had stopped with a federal judge’s July order, affirmed by a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Aug. 1. The courts ruled that immigration officials cannot racially profile people or use roving patrols to target immigrants.

In a press conference outside of the museum following the operation, Mayor Karen Bass said, “there’s no way this was a coincidence.”

“This was widely publicized that the governor and many of our other elected officials were having a press conference to talk about redistricting, and they decided they were going to come and thumb their nose in front of the governor’s face. Why would you do that? That is unbelievably disrespectful, it’s a provocative act,” Bass said.

“They’re talking about disorder in Los Angeles,” the mayor said, “and they are the source of the disorder in Los Angeles right now.”

In an emailed response, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Bass, “must be misinformed.”

“Our law enforcement operations are about enforcing the law — not about Gavin Newsom,” she said. McLaughlin added that U.S. Customs and Border Protection “patrols all areas of Los Angeles every day with over 40 teams on the ground to make LA safe.”

Newsom and Democratic allies, including organized labor, were at the Democracy Center at the Japanese American National Museum to announce the launch of a campaign for a ballot measure which, if approved by voters, would redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Democrats before the 2026 midterms.

William T. Fujioka, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Japanese American National Museum, was attending the Newsom press conference when federal agents jumped out of SUVs just feet away from him in front of the museum.

Video captured of the scene showed federal agents on either side of a man, in a red shirt and jeans, whose hands were cuffed behind his back. As a passerby shouted that they were “cowards,” Bovino said “well done.”

Carlos Franco said he works with Angel, the man who was arrested by federal agents, and said Angel was in Little Tokyo delivering strawberries. His delivery van was still parked outside the museum more than an hour after he was arrested, Franco said. Franco came straight to the scene after he received calls that his coworker had been arrested.

Angel is a “father, a family man,” Franco added.

“He was just doing his normal delivery to the courthouse,” Franco said. “It’s pretty sad, because I’ve got to go to work tomorrow, and Angel isn’t going to be there.”

Saying he was shaken by his friend’s apprehension, Franco advised everyone to “be careful in general, whether you’re undocumented or not.”

DHS did not immediately respond to questions about the arrest.

Fujioka said the agents’ appearance in Little Tokyo “is a parallel of what happened in 1942,” and noting that the museum was built on the location where L.A. residents of Japanese descent “were told to come here and put on buses and sent to camps.”

At 73, Fujioka is a third-generation Japanese American. He said about 20 people were arrested during ICE raids two weeks ago at area restaurants and businesses in and near Little Tokyo Village Plaza.

“What’s happening right now is reprehensible,” he said. “One of the fallacies is that this is only targeting Latinos. If you look at the Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Chinese, even Japanese communities, they’re being picked up right in court.”

Speaking with community leaders on L.A.’s Westside early Thursday morning, Bass condemned the continued raids and said she believed they violated the temporary restraining order upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month.

“Even though we’ve had two successful court decisions, the administration continues with their unconstitutional behavior. Coming and going to Home Depot stores, continuing to chase people through parking lots, detaining them for no particular reason under the auspices that they could be criminals, [it] comes down to one thing — and that is racial profiling,” Bass said.

The Trump administration last week petitioned the Supreme Court to allow mass deportation efforts across Southern California, seeking to lift a ban on “roving patrols” implemented after a lower court found such tactics likely violate the 4th Amendment.

“We know the next step is to go to the Supreme Court, and we are hoping that we will have a good decision there,” Bass said. “But the question looms before us, even if we do have a positive court decision: ‘Will the administration follow the rule of law?’”

Times staff writer Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.

Lunging men are perceived as dangerous.

In an America that has long weaponized descriptions of how men of color look and move to justify use of force, that is especially true of dark men lunging at white women.

So when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said after Sen. Alex Padilla interrupted her news conference Thursday that “people need to identify themselves before they start lunging” — it’s hard to believe it wasn’t meant to be an intentionally loaded word, with loaded results.

For those of you who don’t watch Fox and other right-wing media, I’ll fill you in on how Noem’s description played out. Padilla, the Trumpian version of the story now goes, got what he deserved: He busted into a press conference uninvited, they say, pushed his way toward the stage and failed to identify himself.

Just ask my inbox.

“Here is what your article should have said,” wrote one fan of my column about the incident. “‘DEI appointee Senator Alex Padilla, dressed like a truck driver and acting like a potential attacker or mental case, burst into a press conference being conducted by a high ranking member of the Cabinet and started shouting and interrupting her.’”

Another reader put that dog-whistle racism more succinctly.

“No Juan above the law,” the reader quipped.

We’ll get to whether Padilla lunged or not and just how dangerous a lunge really is. But the larger issue is the alternate reality the Trump administration is building to cultivate fear and build support for a military crackdown. The ask isn’t that we believe Padilla was a threat, but that we believe that America has devolved into a immigrant-induced chaos that only the military can quell, and that Trump needs the powers of a king to lead the military to our salvation.

So the question isn’t really whether Padilla lunged or not — since, as the video shows, it’s clear he was nowhere close to Noem and had no intent to harm — but rather why Noem chose to call it a lunge.

“It was very disingenuous of Kristi Noem to make the claim that he lunged at her,” Joan Donovan told me. She’s an expert on disinformation and an assistant professor of journalism at Boston University.

“The Trump administration is salivating over a major contestation that would allow them to roll the military out into any old town,” she said. “They are making it seem as if without this kind of major intervention and excessive force, that these people are ungovernable.”

Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, is known to be a level-headed guy. My colleague Gustavo Arellano describes him as a “goody-two-shoes.”

But these aren’t level-headed days. Padilla said that he was in the federal building on Thursday for a briefing with a general, because for weeks he’s been trying unsuccessfully to get answers about how deportations are being handled.

That briefing was delayed by Noem’s news conference, and so — escorted by federal authorities who knew exactly who they were escorting, Padilla said — he went to listen to Noem in the hopes of getting some information.

Padilla said he got fed up listening to her remarks about criminals and invasions and tried to ask a question, while moving forward past the wall of television cameras. In the videos I’ve watched, multiple federal agents — seemingly some from Homeland Security and the FBI — block his way then begin pushing him back. Padilla seems to continue to push forward, but is overpowered and forced into the hallway. It’s here where he’s taken to the ground and cuffed.

It’s hard to see a lunge in there. And if there was one, it was from at least a good 10 feet away from Noem, at a minimum. Use-of-force expert Ed Obayashi told me that in situations such as this, law enforcement officers are expected to use their judgment on what is a danger.

“They were trying to keep him from approaching,” Obayashi said, pointing out it was the officers’ job to protect Noem. “They were trying to do what they could under the circumstances to prevent him from getting closer.”

But, he added, from what we can see in the videos, it doesn’t look like Padilla showed “intent” to cause harm and he was really far away. Distance makes a difference when judging whether a lunge is a threat.

“It doesn’t seem like he was going to rush up,” Obayashi said.

So, to be fair to officers who may or may not have at first realized they were manhandling a U.S. senator, they had a job to do and were doing it, even if a bit zealously.

But Noem knows better. It’s hard to imagine she didn’t recognize Padilla, who served on her confirmation committee and is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Safety.

And if she didn’t, her confidant and close advisor Corey Lewandowski certainly did. Padilla told the New York Times that he was being detained in the hallway “when of all people, Corey Lewandowski … comes running down the hall and he starts yelling, ‘Let him go! Let him go!’”

And of course, Padilla was yelling that he was a senator, and forcefully denies any lunge.

“I wasn’t lunging at her or anybody, and yes, I identified myself,” he said on CNN.

Noem, of course, could have said something in the moment to defuse the situation. She could have asked Padilla back into the room to answer his question. Padilla said the two met after the news conference and spoke for about 15 minutes, which means Noem knew his intentions when she later accused him of “lunging.”

So what could have been handled as an unfortunate encounter was instead purposely upgraded for propaganda purposes. Shortly after Noem’s statement, the White House press secretary posted on X that Padilla “recklessly lunged toward the podium,” cementing that narrative into right-wing conscientiousness.

For weeks, the Trump administration has been ramping up its war on dissent. Weeks before Padilla was handcuffed, U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) was indicted by a grand jury for “forcibly impeding and interfering” with federal law enforcement after a scuffle outside of a New Jersey ICE detention center. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested during the same incident, but charges were later dropped.

In April, Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested inside her own courthouse after being accused of helping an immigrant appearing in her court to evade ICE officers by allowing him to exit through a public door.

And just before the Padilla incident, Noem claimed that federal agents would remain in Los Angeles despite protests, where hundreds have been cited or arrested. By Friday, Marines had been deployed in Los Angeles, with little clarity on whether their guns contained live rounds and under what circumstances they were authorized to fire.

“We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city,” Noem said, right before Padilla interrupted.

Liberate an American city. With troops.

Quash dissent. With fear.

A survey last fall by PRRI found that 26% of Republicans say that “it is necessary for the progress of this country that the president has the power to limit the influence of opposing parties and groups.”

It also found that there is a “strong overlap among Americans who hold Christian nationalist and authoritarian views.”

“If it is the case that Trump and Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth are going to continue arresting Democratic representatives, then that is authoritarianism,” Donovan said. “Those are the people whose job it is to represent the common man, and if they can’t do that because they’re so bogged down with false charges or trumped-up charges, then we don’t live in a democracy.”

Padilla may have lost his trademark cool during that press conference, but Noem did not.

She knew exactly what she was saying, and why. A Padilla asking questions is a threat to Trump.

A Padilla lunging becomes a threat to society, one that only Trump can stop.

A day after federal agents forcibly restrained and handcuffed U.S. Sen Alex Padilla at a Los Angeles news conference, leaders of the country’s two political parties responded in what has become a predictable fashion — with diametrically opposed takes on the incident.

Padilla’s fellow Democrats called for an investigation and perhaps even the resignation of the senator’s nemesis, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, for what they described as the unprecedented manhandling of a U.S. senator who was merely attempting to ask a question of a fellow public official.

Noem and fellow Republicans continued to depict Padilla as a grandstander, whose unexpected appearance at Noem’s news conference seemed to her security detail to represent a threat, as she tried to speak to reporters at the Federal Building in Westwood.

Republicans continued Friday to chastise Padilla, using words like “launch,” “lunge” and “bum rush” to describe Padilla’s behavior as he began to try to pose a question to Noem at Thursday’s news conference.

The Trump administration official was just a few minutes into her meeting with reporters when Padilla moved assertively from the side of the room, pushing past a Times photographer as he moved to more directly address Noem. He did not lunge at Noem and was still paces away from her when her security detail grabbed the senator.

Padilla and his staff described how the veteran lawmaker went through security and was escorted by an FBI employee to the room where the press conference was held, saying it was absurd to suggest he presented a threat.

Padilla spoke out after the secretary asserted that her homeland security agents had come to L.A. to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that the governor and the mayor have placed on this country.”

The former South Dakota governor would have some reason to recognize Padilla, since he questioned her during her Senate confirmation hearing. A spokesperson at the Homeland Security Department did not respond to a question of whether Noem recognized Padilla when he arrived at her press conference.

As has become the norm in the nation’s political discourse, Republicans and Democrats spoke about the confrontation Friday as if they had observed two entirely separate incidents.

Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) said Noem “should step down,” adding: “This is ridiculous. And she continues to lie about this incident. This is wrong.”

Lujan urged his Republican colleagues to support Democrats in asking for “a full investigation.”

“This is bad. This is precedent-setting,” Lujan told MSNBC. “And I certainly hope that the leadership of the Senate, my Republican leaders, my friends, that they just look within. Pray on it. That’s what I told a couple of them last night. Pray on this and do the right thing.”

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus went to Speaker Mike Johnson’s office to protest Padilla’s treatment.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) spoke out on X and on the floor of the Senate. He said the episode fit into “a pattern of behavior by the Trump administration. There is simply no justification for this abuse of authority …. There can be no justification of seeing a senator forced to their knees.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) went on X to repeat the call for an investigation and to say that “Republican leadership is complicit in enabling the growing authoritarianism in this country.”

Speaking publicly only one Republican lawmaker sounded a note of distress about the episode.

“I’ve seen that one clip. It’s horrible,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). ”It is shocking at every level. It’s not the America I know.”

But most Republicans remained silent, or accused Padilla of being a provocateur.

“I think the senator’s actions, my view is, it was wildly inappropriate,” said Johnson, the House speaker. “You don’t charge a sitting Cabinet secretary.”

Johnson added that it was Padilla, who should face some sanction. “At a minimum … [it] rises to the level of a censure. … I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we are going to do, that’s not how we’re going to act.”

Rep. Tom McClintock, (R-Elk Grove) zinged Padilla on X, with some “helpful tips.” “1. Don’t disrupt other people’s press conferences. Hold your own instead. 2. Don’t bum-rush a podium with no visible identification. … 3. Don’t resist or assault the Secret Service. It won’t end well.”

Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake) also sought to reinforce the notion that agents protecting Noem sensed a real threat, having no way of knowing that Padilla was who he said he was.

The congressman said on Fox Business that Padilla had obtained “the outcome that they wanted. Now they have a talking point.”

None of the officials in the room, several of whom know Padilla, intervened to prevent the action by the agents, who eventually pushed the senator, face down, onto the ground, before handcuffing him.

Noem did not back off her earlier statement that Padilla had “burst” into the room.

“Senator Padilla chose disrespectful political theatre and interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself or having his Senate security pin on as he lunged toward Secretary Noem,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant Homeland Security secretary, said in a statement Friday.

McLaughlin also said that Padilla “was told repeatedly to back away and did not comply with officers’ repeated commands,” though video made public by Friday did not show such warnings, in advance of Padilla’s first statement.

The senator’s staff members said he privately had received messages of concern from several Republican colleagues, including Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.)

Padilla told Tommy Vietor of the “Pod Save America” podcast that Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown is an attempt to distract from many other failures — continued instability with the economy, a lack of peace in Ukraine and Gaza and a federal budget plan that is proving unpopular with many Americans.

“He always finds a distraction,” Padilla said, “and, when all else fails, he goes back to demonizing and scapegoating immigrants. … He creates a crisis to get us all talking about something else.”

Padilla said repeatedly that Americans should be concerned about how everyday citizens will be treated, if forces working for the Trump administration are allowed to “tackle” a U.S. senator asking questions in a public building.

On Friday afternoon, he sent a mass email urging his constituents to sign up for the protests planned for Saturday, to counter the military parade Trump is holding in Washington. “PLEASE show up and speak out against what is happening,” Padilla wrote. “We cannot allow the Trump administration to intimidate us into silence.”

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.