California is no stranger to spotlight-seeking politicians.
At the top of the heap these days sits Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose every move is viewed through the lens of a potential bid for the White House in 2028. There’s Representative Maxine Waters, a leftist live wire who in the past has encouraged protesters to “get more confrontational.” Representative Ro Khanna has developed a reputation on Capitol Hill as a man who is unavoidable for comment. Not to mention the longtime former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who attract attention even when they don’t necessarily court it.
And then there’s Senator Alex Padilla, the Democrat appointed in 2021 to fill the seat that Harris left to become Vice President.
On Capitol Hill, Padilla is known for being kind and nerdy. He never seems to raise his voice. He sometimes cries during floor speeches.
His comparatively low profile is underscored by the outsized attention commanded by California’s other, officially more junior, senator, Adam Schiff, one of President Trump’s forever nemeses.
In short, Mr. Padilla was perhaps the least likely member of California’s congressional delegation to stage a showy protest this week against the Trump Administration’s immigration raids and deployment of federal troops.
Then again, he didn’t exactly stage it — which only made it that much more shocking to see. When he stepped into a news conference featuring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday and tried to ask her a question, federal agents shoved him out of the room, told him to drop to his knees in a hallway and handcuffed him.
A son of Mexican immigrants, Mr. Padilla, 52, grew up in the San Fernando Valley as a rule-following overachiever. He was raised by churchgoing parents who worked as a short-order cook and a house cleaner, and made his way to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He told reporters after the incident on Thursday that he had been in the federal building in downtown L.A. awaiting a briefing when he learned that Ms. Noem was speaking to reporters down the hall. He said he had been trying for months to get information from her office about her department’s “increasingly extreme immigration enforcement actions,” so he decided to pop in.
“I didn’t barge into the room,” Mr. Padilla said on MSNBC Thursday night. “I didn’t even open the door. The door was opened for me. And I spent a few minutes in the back of the room, just listening in, until the rhetoric, the political rhetoric, got to be too much to take. So I spoke up.”
Many Democrats have denounced what happened next, calling it a shocking abuse of power reflective of an administration that was getting too comfortable with authoritarian tactics. If federal agents were this rough with a senator in front of television cameras, Mr. Padilla and others pointed out, how much worse must it be for anonymous immigrants being rounded up at carwashes, farms and Home Depot parking lots.
Online, Alex Padilla was trending, maybe for the first time in his political life. And that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for him, or for the Democratic Party.
The moment was reminiscent of two other recent occasions when individual senators dominated a news cycle, though the other two were planned stunts by more media-savvy politicians.
One was the April trip that Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, made to El Salvador after one of his constituents, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was mistakenly deported to a prison there.
A couple of weeks earlier, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, fired up Democrats across the country with a record-breaking 25-hour filibuster, an act of astonishing physical stamina and bladder control.
Mr. Padilla’s moment in the spotlight may have been forced upon him, but it resonated as a call to action among Democrats who may never have even heard of him before.
“This is not normal,” he said Thursday night on CNN. “We cannot treat it as normal.”
Watch video of federal agents removing Padilla from the news conference.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
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