Alex Padilla U.S. Senator for California

By U.S. Senator Alex Padilla

Growing up in the northeastern San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s, I knew what could happen if you didn’t completely cooperate with law enforcement.

Even so, it was jarring last week when, despite clearly identifying myself as a U.S. senator, I was forcibly removed from a news conference at which Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, promised to “liberate” Los Angeles from our democratically elected mayor and governor. As I was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and taken down a hall while officers refused to tell me why I was being detained, my mind raced with questions.

Where are they taking me? Am I being arrested? What will residents of a city already on edge from being militarized think when they see their senator has just been handcuffed?

What will my wife and our three boys think?

I imagined similar questions were running through the mind of Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, this week when he, too, was handcuffed by federal agents for asking them whether they had a warrant to arrest a migrant he had locked arms with. Like me, Mr. Lander had the audacity to question the legitimacy of federal actions, only to find himself pushed against a wall and detained.

If you watched what happened to me or Mr. Lander these past few days and thought this was about any one politician or altercation, you are missing the point.

If this administration is willing to handcuff a U.S. senator, imagine what it is willing to do to any American who dares to speak up.

If that’s what can happen when the cameras are on, imagine what is already happening in communities across the country when the cameras are off.

Today it’s immigrants on the receiving end of Donald Trump’s outrage machine. Tomorrow it could be anyone.

We have seen this playbook before. In fact, it’s what drew me to politics in the first place, back in 1994. I had just earned my mechanical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with my sights set on a lucrative career in engineering, but life had a different plan for me. I returned home from school to find hateful TV ads and a statewide ballot initiative called Proposition 187, a proposal targeting immigrant families and communities like mine. It was backed by a Republican governor who was up for re-election and who had turned to scapegoating immigrants to try to improve his declining political standing. (Voters passed the initiative, but it was found unconstitutional by a federal district court.)

As the proud son of immigrants from Mexico who came to California to pursue the American dream, I am living proof of the promise this country provides to all of us. Where else can the son of a housekeeper and a short-order cook become a senator? But I also know that America’s promise doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because throughout our history ordinary people have called out our country’s contradictions and called on the government to live up to the principles of equality established at our founding.

And so I got involved. Alongside friends and family, I marched against the vile anti-immigrant talk that was growing in California. Because of the movement that started in the 1990s, a generation of diverse leaders has come of age in California. Today we celebrate immigrants — knowing full well that California has become the fourth-largest economy in the world, not despite our immigrants but because of them.

So when Mr. Trump began to face a groundswell of criticism a few weeks ago for his unpopular Medicaid cuts, failed tariff wars and embarrassing public breakup with a billionaire adviser, I suspected that it wouldn’t be long before he broke out the same tired anti-immigrant tactics to distract the public. Raids intensified, detentions skyrocketed, and Mr. Trump’s narrative of crisis escalated in the hopes of diverting attention from his political failures.

If the administration were primarily targeting dangerous criminals, as some White House officials have claimed, there would be no debate. But new reporting shows that less than 10 percent of immigrants taken into ICE custody since October have serious criminal convictions. They may be undocumented, but who are they? Oftentimes, they’re hardworking cooks, day laborers, car wash employees, farmworkers and construction workers. Many are the same people Mr. Trump declared essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But as we’ve seen in Los Angeles, public safety is not the point; the spectacle is. Americans are living through a historic time of presidential overreach. With a cabinet of yes-men and underqualified attack dogs surrounding him — from the D.H.S. secretary to the F.B.I. director to the secretary of defense — Mr. Trump is testing the boundaries of his power. And he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.

That’s why when Angelenos gathered to protest these injustices, the administration labeled them insurrectionists, deliberately twisting dissent into something dangerous to use as a pretext for repression.

So if you thought any of this administration’s theatrics in Los Angeles these past few weeks were truly about immigrants, it’s time to wake up. If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown. This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.

What’s happening in Los Angeles is a warning shot. But I pray it can also be a wake-up call — not only for my Republican Senate colleagues who have stayed silent in the face of their colleague’s handcuffing but also for Americans of every stripe who think they’re insulated from Mr. Trump’s power grabs because they’re not immigrants or because they’re not in a blue state.

Democracy doesn’t fall from any one decision or any one attack. It falls from a thousand cuts that slowly erode our fundamental freedoms. It falls when good people see our democracy sliding backward but still choose to say nothing.

Even as I’ve seen the authoritarian instincts of this administration up close, I know America is not past saving. True liberation doesn’t come through military occupation. It comes through democratic participation — participation like what we saw this past weekend, when millions of Americans came out to protest this administration’s abuse of power.

To any Americans wondering if democracy is lost or if they can ever make a difference, I’d say this: If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question, imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do. No one is coming to save us but us.

Read the full Op-Ed here.