In June, Alex Padilla, the senior senator from California, found himself at the center of a defining moment in President Trump’s second term. Protests against Trump’s immigration policies had broken out on the streets of Los Angeles, and the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, was holding a news conference in the city to address the issue. When Padilla interrupted the conference to try to ask Noem a question, he was grabbed, hustled out of the room, pushed to the ground and handcuffed.
That violent removal of a United States senator made headlines around the world. It also raised Padilla’s profile; before this, he was not a nationally known figure.
The son of Mexican immigrants who worked low-wage jobs (his mother was a housekeeper, his father a short-order cook), Padilla first became politically active in an earlier moment of protest, working against a California ballot measure, Proposition 187, that aimed to restrict undocumented immigrants’ access to social services, including public school. Padilla rose through the ranks of California politics and became the state’s first Latino senator in 2021, when he was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to replace Kamala Harris. Now in his second term, Padilla told me that the lessons of that Prop 187 fight have stayed with him, though I was surprised to learn what those lessons are.
We sat down in his Senate office this week, just before the government shutdown, to talk about that formative political experience, his run-in with Noem, the immigration raids that have roiled California and the country since, California’s outsize role in our national debates, and what he’s weighing as he considers a run for California governor next year.
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California is at the center of so much right now in our current conversation: immigration, state power, redistricting. I’d like to start, though, with a moment that I think surprised a lot of people who know you very well, because you’re not exactly known as a rabble-rouser. On June 12, you were handcuffed after trying to ask a question to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Can you take me back to that moment? What was going on? Never would I have imagined that that would have happened in response to a question, especially to a senator trying to ask a question. The moment in Los Angeles was the militarization of the city of Los Angeles, without a clear mission, defined objective or justification that had been communicated to Congress, let alone the public. And so after numerous attempts to obtain that information here in Congress, I finally had a scheduled briefing, which took place in a federal building. That’s why I was in the building to begin with. That’s important for people to understand.
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